The Broadway-Brommer Bike Path
The City of Santa Cruz has approved construction of a bike path to connect Broadway and Brommer Streets. The result would be a great new way to bike the length of our Santa Cruz-Live Oak-Capitola urbanized area—the most direct, the safest, and the fastest. And it would be an important action by our community to help solve global warming—a bike route this attractive would entice a lot of people to leave the car at home for a short errand and take the bike instead. Bike path opponents and their lawyers have caused some delay, but so far the courts have completely rejected their arguments. We can hope that this great new cross-town bike route will be available soon, improving local transportation and the environment.
The Broadway-Brommer Bike Path is one of the most important things the Santa Cruz community can do about climate change. We've all heard the phrase "Think Globally. Act Locally." The ultimate global environmental crisis is climate change. But how can we in our local community help solve a problem that is global?
Follow the carbon. The biggest cause of climate change is the combustion of hydro-carbons. The biggest source of hydrocarbons is petroleum. The biggest combuster of petroleum is transportation. And transportation gets surprisingly local. The USDOT estimates that over 40% of all car trips are just 3 miles or less. And those short trips burn more fuel per mile and emit more carbon and more air pollution per mile than longer trips do. Most importantly, those short trips are the ones that people would be most willing convert from cars to zero-carbon alternatives, like bikes or walking, if we would just make it reasonably attractive for them to do so.
So where in Santa Cruz County are the 3-miles-or-less car trips? The vast disproportion of them are in our biggest urbanized area, which is the City of Santa Cruz, the City of Capitola, and the Live Oak area in between. Running the length of that urbanized area, right through its middle, is a street we might call Laurel-Broadway-Brommer-Jade-Topaz. It runs straight from the west side of Santa Cruz to the middle of Capitola, and it is perfect for helping solve climate change for 3 reasons: its central location, its relatively straight alignment, and the fact that it is missing a half mile right in the middle. That missing bit in the middle means that if you fill that half mile gap with a bike path and not a street, bikes will have a new through route the length of the urbanized area but cars will not. That means bikes will not have to endure the cars and congestion that would be attracted to that route if it were available to cars all the way through.
Call that bike path the Broadway-Brommer Bike Path, or the Broadway-Brommer Bike Connector, or the Broadway-Brommer Multi-Use Path, by any name it would be perfect for inducing all kinds of people to convert all kinds of short car trips—to the grocery store, to work, to entertainment, to shopping—to bike trips or other zero-carbon alternatives. By cutting into a significant portion of those 3-miles-or-less car trips, we could make a big difference. By showing other communities how big a difference, we could have even more effect. We would be showing people how to really Think Globally and Act Locally.
The City Council overwhelmingly approved this project way back in 2006. It's been delayed since by lawsuits brought by bike path opponents. The judge decided the case overwhelmingly against the opponents and in favor of the bike path, but now they are appealing that ruling, causing further delay.
Let's take a look at the key issues the opponents are raising. First, they don't want the bike path to go across the City's Arana Gulch property. But that property sits squarely astride the gap between Broadway and Brommer. There's no getting around the fact that the shortest connection between Broadway and Brommer goes right across Arana Gulch. Of course other, less direct routes for the connection can be drawn on paper, but they are all longer by at least a third of a mile, often more. On average they would be double the length of the proposed bike path. In addition, all the other routes have serious problems of their own: Murray Street Bridge/East Cliff raises major safety concerns, Frederick Street Park has a serious drop-off at the back of the park, and Soquel Ave has an intimidating amount of car traffic. Put all those things together, and most non-serious bikers, and most non-bikers, are not going to replace car trips with bike trips. And that knocks down the main environmental purpose—the climate change purpose -- for the Bike Path. Picture the parent with the small child in the carrier on the back of the bike and a few groceries in the front basket. The environmental benefit comes from that parent with the small child, the groceries, and the car not taken. And for that person, the directness, convenience, and safety factors will be the deciders.
Of course the Lance Armstrongs of Santa Cruz will love the bike path too. They'll be able to race the length of the urbanized area in under 15 minutes. But that's not where the main environmental benefit of this bike path comes from. After all, the serious bike riders are going to be out there riding, no matter what.
Opponents also raise the issue of the tarplant. The Santa Cruz tarplant (there are many other kinds of tarplant) is a threatened species that grows in a few places on the Arana Gulch property, as well as in least a dozen other places in Santa Cruz County and northern Monterey County, including the UCSC campus and the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. The bike path has been designed by the City to avoid any existing tarplant areas. Not a single existing tarplant would be harmed in the building of the bike path, and in fact the bike path would not even come close to any tarplant. The only tarplant issue is the possibility that someday some seed from a tarplant might get to a spot where the bike path would be, and it might someday after that sprout into a tarplant (if the bike path weren't there). In that sense, the bike path goes through what might someday be tarplant habitat. But the fact is that the tarplant areas today are not expanding in Arana Gulch, they are shrinking, and they have been shrinking for at least the last 20 years (the period for which we have recorded observations).
The reasons are twofold. First, in the absence of any planned trails and bike paths, unplanned paths are created by the considerable number of people who use the area today, and some of those paths go right through tarplant areas. And second, healthy tarplant historically required grazing—today it would require a carefully prescribed mowing program to imitate the effects of grazing. The City has legally committed, in the EIR of this project, to provide planned trails that avoid the tarplant, to close existing trails that impact the tarplant, to enforce that closing, and to provide the kind of careful mowing and management of the tarplant that give it the chance to expand rather than shrink in area. If the bike path is not built, none of those things are a legal obligation of the City and those good purposes just can't compete for funding, as the last 20 years have proven beyond a doubt. If the bike path is built, all those pro-tarplant actions become legal obligations of the City and get funded first. Even though the funding is relatively small, in this case it can make a big difference. Bottom line, if the bike path is built the tarplant will be better off. If the bike path is not built the tarplant will continue its slow decline.
Another issue that has been raised more recently is that the City is in a serious budget crunch. How can we be talking about taking on a big new expense like building this bike path, even if it is for a good purpose?
The City does have a serious budget problem in its General Fund. But none of the capital funds to build the Broadway-Brommer Bike Connector would come from the General Fund. 100% of those funds would come from funding sources that are dedicated to a particular purpose, in this case mostly transportation, much of it ultimately from federal sources. If any of those funds were not spent on this project, they would not be available to our General Fund, and some would end up being spent elsewhere.
There's one more important issue about this project: what it would mean for the handicapped. The City of Santa Cruz has 4 greenbelt properties: Pogonip, Moore Creek, DeLaveaga, and Arana Gulch. All of them have open space trails available to most of us. None of those trails are available to people in wheelchairs. It is no less important to the handicapped than it is to the rest of us to have the opportunity to get out in open space from time to time. The City has proposed in this project for the first time to make a small portion of the trails in one of its greenbelt properties (Arana Gulch, the smallest of the four) accessible to those in wheelchairs. The bike path and a short connector from the bike path to the north entrance to Arana would be paved and therefore wheelchair accessible (the rest of the trails at Arana Gulch would not be paved and would not be wheelchair accessible). When completed this would be the only chance a person in a wheelchair would have to get out into any of the City's open spaces. It's the least we can do.
Bottom line: build the Broadway-Brommer Bike Path and do something positive about climate change, make things better for the tarplant, and provide a little access for the handicapped. Or don't build the Bike Connector, miss a big opportunity to do something about climate change, leave the tarplant in its sorry decline, and continue to shut the handicapped out of our greenbelt spaces. The choice seems pretty clear.