Piedmont Receives 119 Letters for Bike/Ped Grant Application

In support of a grant application to develop Piedmont's first bicycle and pedestrian master plan, the City of Piedmont collected 119 individually written letters, including 55 from Piedmont Middle School students, according to a city announcement.

"All 119 letters were individually written with intelligent, heartfelt comments and ideas," the notice says.

"A special and welcome surprise was 55 letters written by Piedmont Middle School students," the city said. "Their letters show the students have a strong knowledge of their city and were able to identify specific problems in need of solutions. A number of them offered novel and creative ways to address each problem."

The letters and the grant application were submitted by city staff to the Alameda County Transportation Commission on March 14, the city said.

A cover letter on the application from the chair of the Piedmont Planning Commission, Philip Chase, notes that the letters came in after a city appeal was published in local news outlets, including Piedmont Patch.

The $120,000 project – officially called the Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan with a Safe Routes to School Component (Ped/Bike/SR2S Plan) – "will allow the City its first opportunity to assess walking and bicycling needs and opportunities comprehensively, to identify and prioritize a broad range of improvements and to create a roadmap for implementation," according to the grant application. The grant would be for planning only, not construction.

In the years 2008 through 2012, Piedmont police recorded nine vehicle collisions involving bicycles and 14 involving pedestrians, the application notes. In the same period, police issued 960 speeding tickets, an average of 16 a month, the according to the application.

"These are not insignificant numbers for a city as small as Piedmont," the application says.

The application offers the following description of the project need and benefits:

The City of Piedmont was largely developed prior to 1940, with many narrow, steep and winding streets set in a mostly irregular street grid. At the time of development, few provisions were made for pedestrians and especially bicyclists. Moreover, the city's built-out nature means that there have been few or no significant opportunities to redevelop streets and sidewalks and incorporate bicycle routes. Fortunately, nowadays there is strong support locally for non-motorized transportation. The City's General Plan has as one of its goals to "Encourage walking and bicycling as viable modes of transportation for traveling within Piedmont" and includes a number of more specific policies and actions to promote these modes.

Until now, the City of Piedmont has planned for pedestrians and bicyclists on a piecemeal basis, as locationspecific needs arose and funding became available. Not surprisingly, this approach has not yielded a cohesive vision for walking and bicycling in Piedmont, let alone a comprehensive planning framework to improve nonmotorized transportation locally and connections to surrounding neighborhoods in Oakland and beyond.

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