What street safety challenges do older adults walking in their neighborhoods, children biking to school, and parents pushing strollers need to navigate when streets are designed to move cars quickly rather than move people safely?
Are Merced residents asking this of their street infrastructure: “Why does this feel so dangerous?”
Residents should not have this level of apprehension
In a healthy, connected city, walking, biking, rolling, and using mobility aids should be safe, practical, and ordinary. Today, however, too many streets feel built for one purpose above all else in this community: moving cars fast.
Streets such as G Street, M Street, Yosemite Avenue, Olive Avenue, W. 11th Street, Childs Avenue, and Gerard Avenue, are traffic corridors that run through neighborhoods that connect residents to schools, parks, stores, bus stops, jobs, appointments, and services.
Families live along these streets.
Merced has a Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC). By the city’s own description, the BPAC is supposed to advise the City Council on active transportation, capital improvement projects, Safe Routes to School planning, General Plan updates, and other decisions related to walking, biking, and street safety.
That is not a minor role. It is central to whether Merced builds safe streets for all.
However, when has this actually happened?
Despite the BPAC existing, it is not positioned to provide informed guidance on bicycle and pedestrian safety. Its guidance is overlooked before major decisions are made. The perception is that the BPAC is a procedural formality, it is a box to check before a grant application moves forward.
The BPAC appears to be a symbolic feature of local government. Despite commissioners giving their time, knowledge, and judgment to street safety issues that affect every neighborhood in this city, their voice is not listened to.
Their meetings should matter, and not be at the whim of Planning; their 12+ recommendations for agenda items should not be sidelined. Their meetings should be moved to monthly and begin at 6 p.m. so residents can actively participate in discussions.
The Commission should be able to review crash data, traffic-calming proposals, road widening proposals, grant applications, active transportation projects, and street design decisions before they are underway.
The BPAC should be able to champion a proactive Vision Zero Policy, that addresses a simple premise: traffic deaths and serious injuries are not inevitable. They are preventable.
Call for Action
Residents who care about safer streets, contact your City Council representative to agendize a July public discussion to strengthen the BPAC’s role; enable it to be the public resource it was created to be.
Rosie Campagna is a Merced resident, project coordinator, community advocate, and Strong Towns Conversation Leader who writes about housing, transportation safety, downtown revitalization, and the long-term future of the city.