A year after Castro Valley middle school student Lana Carlos was killed in a hit-and-run on Crow Canyon Road, we’re contemplating what progress has been made regarding walking and biking safety in our Place. Essential infrastructure investments in sidewalks and bike lanes have historically been an afterthought in our community.
Progress towards a safer and more livable Castro Valley has been painfully slow. Updates to the 1993 Castro Valley Downtown Specific Plan, which were supposed to be started in 2013 and the County indicated would be finally addressed in late 2015, are still not complete. While some progress was made during the partial rebuild of Castro Valley Boulevard about a decade ago, a renewed Downtown Specific Plan would be an opportunity to prioritize people over cars in the heart of our community.
Our population in 2010, 61,388, far exceeded the County’s 1993 projection of what would be our 2010 population: 53,600. The need to address concerns around crosswalk safety, missing sidewalks, speed limits, and driver/cyclist/pedestrian education are more urgent than ever as our population has grown faster than anticipated. Not only do our children face increased danger walking to and from school but everyday errands for all community members have become more hazardous.
As Castro Valley Matters and BikeWalkCV both know, only sustained engagement and thoughtful pressure from our community move the needle in a meaningful way. With BikeWalkCV’s efforts since 2014, we’ve finally begun to see missing sidewalks addressed near some of our schools. But there is more work to do and, as an unincorporated community, Castro Valley residents must engage and work even harder to continually collaborate around the changes we want to see.
Castro Valley Matters, with the endorsement of BikeWalkCV, is calling on you to participate in Walk & Roll Safely Castro Valley!, a campaign where we want you to chronicle your personal experiences and observations while walking, biking, or otherwise rolling in Castro Valley.
We want to better understand how we interact with our built environment and document the changes that need to be made to make our shared Place more livable and safe. Improvements can be incremental, seeking simpler solutions that can be implemented quickly while also continuing the work on larger initiatives that require more time and heavy lifting.
As we get to the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, with your assistance we’d like to conduct Walking Audits of Castro Valley neighborhoods with the intent to map and document the less obvious safety issues affecting pedestrians, bicyclists, and others trying to navigate our streets every day.
In the meantime, we’ve been using a very cool community mapping platform called Plan Together that allows community members to add their own pins to a shared planning map to document praise, criticisms, suggestions, and news. By tagging related pins we’re able to see all items that call out a specific issue or concern such as pedestrian, ADA and bicycling safety. We encourage our Castro Valley community to “like” and comment on pins in order to further focus areas of shared concern.
Here’s a Plan Together pin documenting the recent near fatal pedestrian accident one of our Board Members endured while trying to cross Redwood Road near Peet’s Coffee.
Please join Plan Together using the “Login/Sign-up” button at the top of the link and start adding your own pins regarding your experiences walking and/or biking in Castro Valley. We ask that you keep the following in mind when adding pins:
- For pins related to the Walk & Roll Safely Castro Valley! campaign, use the #WalkRollCV tag.
- On your pins, try to include a photo of the location/obstruction/issue as this will help better illustrate/document your concern.
- Engage on the pins others have posted, add a “Like” and comment where appropriate. Doing so adds color to our local story and aids in thoughtfully prioritizing the inventory of the walking/bicycling safety issues the County must address.
- Be sure to also add “praise” pins where appropriate so we can see where changes to the biking/walking/rolling environment in Castro Valley have led to safer conditions and more enjoyment while navigating our shared Place.
- Plan Together has user guidelines/policies to keep the platform focused and inclusive, please read them here.
If you don’t want to use the PlanTogether app directly but would like to chronicle your experiences/observations around biking/walking safety in our shared Place, please complete this Walk & Roll Safely Castro Valley! Intake form.
Have a walking/biking story you’d like to share in detail? We welcome you to submit your story for our ongoing blog series. Please write to us at cvmatters2020@gmail.com.
Thank you for your engagement! Together, we can make a difference.
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