Redwood City Residents Call For El Camino Safety Improvements

REDWOOD CITY, CA — Several Redwood City community members issued a joint letter to the city council last week calling for road safety improvements and the installation of a bike lane along a one-mile stretch of El Camino Real, where three pedestrians have been struck and killed by vehicles since 2019.

The section of El Camino from the Target in North Fair Oaks to Sequoia High School is “very scary” to ride through, especially at night, according to Matthew Self, a resident who co-signed the letter and a member of the Redwood City Transportation Advisory Committee. Many people commute to work by biking on El Camino, according to Self.

“It’s also really important to understand that a lot of the people who bike there, they don’t look like your weekend, spandex, white-male riders that you think of when you think of bicycle riders,” Self said in an interview with Patch. “This is transportation. This isn’t recreation.”

The letter was co-signed by 15 people, including local high school students, business owners along El Camino, teachers, healthcare professionals and city commissioners. It calls for a protected bike lane and pedestrian safety improvements along the northbound side of El Camino and for the city council to obtain a permit from Caltrans to expedite the installation of already-approved road safety improvements that have a current timeline of 5-10 years.

“The city has done a good job of making bicycle and pedestrian improvements in a lot of areas, but El Camino has just been very stubborn,” Self said.

In 2017, the city council approved the El Camino Real Corridor Plan, which included plans for pedestrian and bicycle safety improvements. But work on that phase of the project has not yet begun, according to the city's website. The plan called for the removal of more than 260 on-street parking spaces along El Camino Real between the San Carlos and Atherton borders to install safety improvements, which the community members’ letter called “not politically feasible at this moment for either City Hall or Caltrans officials.”

Instead, the group called for the removal of 19 spaces just on the northbound side, where the majority of the curb is already a red zone.

Redwood City Mayor Giselle Hale said in response to the letter that she didn't want to comment ahead of the council's annual retreat on Saturday, where the council plans to evaluate new priorities for community resources.

"I am holding off on supporting any ideas until all ideas are shared at the public meeting," Hale said in a statement to Patch. "Members of the public are welcome to join the meeting."

San Mateo County has “high walking and biking collision rates,” with over 2,300 pedestrian and bike deaths and injuries occurring between 2009 and 2013, according to a report by the San Mateo County Health Department. The report specified the border between North Fair Oaks and Redwood City as a particularly collision-prone area. And though El Camino Real makes up only 1 percent of roadway miles in the county, it accounts for 18 percent of all pedestrian and bike collisions, according to the report.

“The Redwood City community does not have time to wait on these safety improvements in hopes of aligning construction schedules, block by block, with proposed office developments along the corridor,” the letter stated.