Street Wars on Hollenbeck
- Sharlene Liu
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Last Tuesday's Council Study Session on Hollenbeck bike lanes was well-attended. The pro-bike lane contingent outnumbered the pro-street parking contingent by about 2-to-1. Many students and some parents spoke passionately and eloquently about their experience biking on Hollenbeck and the need for safe bike passage. Community leaders said that on-road transportation emits 40% of green house gases in Sunnyvale so making biking possible needs to be top priority. Everybody who supported safe bike passage advocated for buffered bike lanes with the removal of parking (Alternative 1).
Alternative 2 Puts Cyclists Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Nobody who was interested in bike safety asked for Alternative 2, which locates the bike lane to the left of a parking lane and provides no buffers on either side of the bike lane. To the uninitiated, Alternative 2 may seem like a good compromise between street parking and bike lanes, but in reality it severely compromises bike safety to save street parking. Some argued that Alternative 2 is even more dangerous than current conditions.
Like Wolfe Rd's bike lane, Alternative 2 places an unbuffered bike lane between parked cars on the right and fast moving cars on the left. When opened, the parked car's door spans much of the bike lane. The opened door could crash into a passing cyclist, causing severe injury and death. [See this video of someone getting doored.] To avoid the door zone, cyclists would have to bike on the left edge of the bike lane next to fast moving cars on the left, rendering the bike lane practically useless. Children and other inexperienced cyclists are especially vulnerable as they will unknowingly ride in the door zone. Door zone crashes happen at alarming rates. Of the reported collisions involving bicycles and cars, 16% are due to dooring in San Francisco, 20% in Cambridge, MA, 20% in Chicago, and 16% in Boston [Ref: Dutch Reach Project, Active Transportation Alliance]. Sunnyvale too should keep track of crashes due to dooring. The number of deaths and severe injuries in Sunnyvale will no doubt increase as door zone bike lanes continue to be implemented.
In an effort to retain some parking, Councilmember Mehlinger and Mayor Klein asked Staff to investigate other alternatives. They suggested consistently keeping parking on one side instead of zigzagging, and having the parking lane transition only at intersections. However, just like Alternative 2, these variations still feature door zone bike lanes, unbuffered on both sides, and do not satisfy the Caltrans Complete Streets Guidance. Councilmember Mehlinger suggested a 2-way cycletrack on one side and parking on the other side. However, this idea would be much more expensive to implement than Alternative 1, therefore would substantially delay the bike lanes, and would have a new safety hazard of drivers not looking both ways when backing out of the many driveways. When there are already city policies in place that prioritize safe bikeways over street parking, the City should not be spending so much time and money to retain street parking, especially when Alternative 1's buffered bike lanes does the job quickly and relatively inexpensively, and is safer than the 2-way cycletrack.
Nevertheless, we commend Councilmember Mehlinger for upholding city policies prioritizing safe bikeways over street parking. He stated that he does not support door zone bike lanes and other unsafe configurations. Thank you, Councilmember Mehlinger.
Further analysis of Alternative 2 shows that it has more serious defects than just the aforementioned door zone.
Alternative 2's Parking Zone Transitions are Hazardous to Cyclists
At parking zone transitions, drivers routinely and illegally park in the bike lane, causing cyclists to swerve into car traffic to get around them. Examples of illegally parked cars can be frequently seen on Mary Ave, Wolfe Rd, and everywhere else that parking zones have transitions. The zigzag design of the parking lane, which switches sides from one side of the street to the other, uses cyclists as the barrier between the car lane and the parking lane. Inattentive drivers and cyclists will crash into each other and into parked cars at zigs and zags in the road.
Alternative 2 Fails to Meet Caltrans Guidance
Comparison to other Sunnyvale streets
Alternative 2 Blatantly Disregards City Goals and Policies
Cyclists Called Special Interest Group
A few members of the public, who want to keep street parking, called cyclists a "special interest group". They claimed that there aren't enough cyclists to warrant providing safe passage for them. Councilmember Le countered by saying her son cycles to school, and she does not consider him to be a special interest. Furthermore, the City is working toward a future when cycling will be a common way to get around, so whether some people consider cyclists to be a special interest group is moot.
Traffic Calming and Pedestrian Safety Out-of-Scope
Traffic calming was a popular request among the residents of Hollenbeck and some councilmembers. However, Staff was clear that traffic calming is out of scope of the bike lane study. Traffic calming, which reduces car speeds and volumes, requires a separate study. Since lower car speed improves cyclist safety, this is an effort that both sides agree on. Staff said there are currently 10 traffic calming requests being handled, and each request is handled in the order it was received. After a ruling by Council in December 2024, calming of residential collectors like Hollenbeck will be available starting July 1 this year and can be used to reduce car speed but not to reduce car volume.
Some members of the public claimed that parked cars have a traffic calming effect, therefore should be allowed. However, parked cars are not a calming measure in the Sunnyvale Traffic Calming toolbox, so their rationale for keeping parking is invalid. There are more effective ways to calm traffic in the toolbox than using parked cars. Furthermore, Hollenbeck doesn't demarcate the car lane from the parking lane, so, with relatively few parked cars on Hollenbeck, cars effectively have a 20' car lane along most of the road. With Alternative 1, the car lane will be demarcated to 11'. Narrowing car lanes, in this case from 20' to 11', will slow car speeds [Ref: Nacto Design Guide: Lane Width].
There were multiple requests to look into pedestrian safety, both from the public and Councilmembers Le and Srinivasan. To solve the problem of residents needing to cross the street to get to their parked car, Staff offered to install safe pedestrian crossings at key locations. Other than pedestrian crossings to access parked cars that have been displaced due to bike lanes, however, pedestrian safety is out of scope of the bike lane study.
The final BPAC vote and Council vote are scheduled for later this year. Stay tuned so you can support safe bike passage on Hollenbeck.
About the Author
Sharlene Liu is Founder and Chair of Sunnyvale Safe Streets. She completed her term on BPAC last year and continues to advocate for biking and walking facilities in Sunnyvale and California.
