IRVINE, Calif. — When school gets out, an onslaught of students from Rancho San Joaquin Middle School fills the otherwise quiet streets. Many of them ride bicycles on the sidewalk.
“When you’re separated by a line of paint, it can feel very unsafe. Parents don’t want their children riding on those kind of streets,” said Melissa Dugan, project manager and supervising transportation planner for the city.
Dugan and her transportation team hope to improve cyclist safety with a new project that would create a cycle track — a landscaped median physically dividing cyclists and drivers. It would run along South Yale between University Drive to the area just past Michelson.
“We have a lot of roadway width that isn’t being used by anything else. We don’t need it for the volume of cars we have on this road, so we have the space. We also have schools on both ends. We have a trail connection, so it was just an easy place to start,” Dugan said.
It’s called the South Yale Corridor Improvements Project. Owen Yancher rides his bike every day to work.
“Haven’t seen any accidents yet, but there’s cars moving fast down here all the time,” Yancher said.
He used to live in Davis, often called the “biking capital of America.”
“As a cyclist, you’re always looking right, left and right to make sure that nobody’s going to come up and clip you, so having that dedicated area is great, not just for the cyclists, but the drivers also don’t have to worry about somebody popping out of nowhere,” Yancher said.
He said because the current streets are so wide, cars travel faster and he’ll even hear drivers drag race.
“It’s usually late at night, but it happens at all times of the day. I can hear it. I live just around the corner,” he said.
Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan hopes the project will encourage more people to use their bikes and leave the sidewalks to pedestrians, especially with e-bikes traveling at speeds up to 28 miles per hour.
“We definitely want to make sure that as more and more people are utilizing e-bikes that they have a place that they can actually ride them,” she said.
The city recently set up a simulated cycle track in that area for a day to give residents a sense of how it would work and get their input. Yancher points to problems at the intersection of Yale Avenue and University where there’s only one crosswalk. The city says it’s still looking at how to best treat intersections along the route, including possibly putting in roundabouts.
“We really only have about 2,000 cars a day driving on this one, but if we could get 10% of those out on the bikes, that would make a huge difference to the environment to the quality of life, to the street itself,” Dugan said.
A sustainable solution, they say, to turn more drivers into cyclists.