Sunnyvale Win: You Made it Happen!
After over a year of organizing, planning, researching and advocating, the City of Sunnyvale adopted its Active Transportation Plan Tuesday night August 25. It’s important to celebrate wins. It’s also important to reflect on how we accomplished that win so that we can keep doing it. In this case, the win in Sunnyvale illustrates exactly how a community can and should come together to accomplish positive change.
First, you’ll remember that last week we wrote about SVBC’s method – to seed and support teams of local residents to push their cities to prioritize safe streets for bikes and other non-auto-oriented methods of transportation.
This is precisely what we set out to do in Sunnyvale. A little over a year ago, with financial support from Google, SVBC was able to hire a staff person to create a new Local Team in Sunnyvale. This team met regularly and has worked with many other individuals and organizations in Sunnyvale to influence the development of Sunnyvale’s Active Transportation Plan, (ATP).
Organizations that came together included the SVBC Sunnyvale team, Livable Sunnyvale, the Sunnyvale Democratic Club and the Sunnyvale Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory commission. Dedicated members from these groups met regularly to coordinate requests to City staff from after the draft plan was released in April until the final Council vote on August 25. Those included:
Increase the mode share goal from 5% to 10% by 2030. Mode share is the percentage of trips using by a particular way of moving be it bicycling, walking, driving or transit.
Create a way to amend the ATP going forward.
Include more streets and better infrastructure on some of the streets in the plan.
A subset of the team met with six out of seven council members in June & July long before the vote in August to stress the changes we want. Representatives also met with staff, spoke about the desired changes, asked for support at online community meetings, sent letters to council and businesses in Sunnyvale, and got people to sign an online petition, all of which culminated in last Tuesday’s hearing before the City Council.
Seventeen people attentively watched the meeting and after two hours were finally able to speak during public comments. This included a strong contingent of Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action students. It was clear the speakers were asking for specific improvements to the plan as outlined in the letters sent and the talking points shared within the community.
As a result, the City Council approved the 2020 Active Transportation Plan unanimously with some of the recommendations this coalition requested.
Notable wins were:
The 2030 mode share goal was doubled from 5% to 10%, meaning, the City’s goal is to get 10% share of trips to be by bicycle vs 1% today.
Better and more infrastructure on seven roads.
Stronger policies in favor of bicycling based on Sunnyvale’s Land Use and Transportation Element of its 2035 General Plan than originally included. A key examples were
Action 1.4: Change from “Reconfigure roadways with excess vehicular capacity to accommodate bicycle facilities” to match LUTE Policy LT- 3.22 “Provide safe access to city streets for all modes of transportation. Safety considerations of all transport modes shall take priority over capacity considerations of any one transport mode.”
Action 1.6: Change from “Evaluate opportunity to remove underutilized on-street parking to create or expand bicycle facilities.” to match LUTE Policy LT-3.10 “Prioritize street space allocated for transportation over parking when determining the appropriate future use of street space.”
Please take a moment to thank the Sunnyvale City Council for their support of a progressive Active Transportation Plan. They can be reached here; council@sunnyvale.ca.gov
And, thank you to all of you who responded to SVBC’s repeated calls for action. We were proud to be part of an effective coalition of organizations all working together to create a better active transportation system for Sunnyvale.
If you would like to join the Sunnyvale Team, you can do so here Meetings occur the third Monday of each month. Join the online discussion about Sunnyvale bike topics, and stay up-to-date on meeting times, locations, and agendas, by signing up to our group email list.
The adoption of a strong plan is just the first step. Next, Sunnyvale residents must make sure the City implements the Plan. That starts in November and December when people who want better bicycling in Sunnyvale start asking the city council members to budget $5M per year out of an annual budget of over $550M per year to implement the plan in Sunnyvale’s Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) starting in July 2021.
