LA JOLLA PLANNERS GIVE GREEN LIGHT TO BIKEWAY PLAN
Coastal Rail Trail project aims to let riders, cars share
After the city of San Diego made changes to the Coastal Rail Trail project intended to provide better visibility and safety for bicyclists around the Gilman Drive/Interstate 5 on-ramp and off-ramp, the La Jolla Community Planning Association gave it a stamp of approval Feb. 4.
The project, which seeks to connect Oceanside with downtown San Diego through a multi-use trail, would create a Class IV bicycle lane with raised separated medians providing an additional buffer between vehicles and cyclists along the Gilman Drive corridor between La Jolla Village Drive and I-5. Construction is expected to begin in spring 2022.
The plan was heard at the La Jolla Traffic & Transportation advisory group's meeting in November, but the board did not vote. It was then heard by the Community Planning Association in December but was sent back, with LJCPA asking the city to consider “other options.”
When T&T heard it again in January, the board voted unanimously to support the project but added that sharrows (markings indicating a road is to be shared by motor vehicles and bicycles) should be painted on the southbound side.
With the T&T approval, Alejandra Gonzalez, a project manager in the San Diego Engineering & Capital Projects Department, presented during the Feb. 4 LJCPA meeting online.
She said the project proposes a Class IV one-way cycle track along both sides of Gilman Drive (the bike lane
currently is a Class II, which is delineated with paint). There would be a continuous sidewalk along the west side, street parking would be retained and new street lighting would be installed, along with a new traffic signal at La Jolla Village Drive and modifications at existing signals.
Gonzalez said the project has improved striping for
visibility and a dedicated base for cyclists where only bikes and pedestrians could get across the southbound on-ramp/off-ramp on Gilman Drive. “If the base is activated for pedestrians and bicycles, vehicles trying to turn right onto the onramp will not be able to” because of a red arrow and/or signage, she said.
Further, signs would instruct motorists coming off the off-ramp to yield to bicyclists. There also are plans for signage to give cyclists an indicator of changing conditions.
“One of the major issues that T&T had was safety of bicyclists in these intersections, in this track, making right-hand turns or going across the intersections as cars are trying to make turns,” said LJCPA President Diane Kane. The revised project is “an improvement,” she said.
Though T&T suggested painting sharrows on one side of the street, LJCPA advocated painting them on both sides.
“In that cycle track, some bicyclists are going to be faster than others, so there are two populations of users that will use these roads, and sharrows are supposed to encourage bike visibility [for those who use the full street],” Kane said.
A motion to accept and ratify the T&T recommendation but add sharrows on the northbound and southbound lanes passed 11-5.
Because Gilman Drive involves La Jolla and University City planning groups, Kane said a working group should come together to “engage all the stakeholders on this road, plan the right-of-way space we are going to end up with, look at the traffic mix of vehicles [and] median enhancements to slow traffic.”
“The Rail Trail is changing the features on this road; that is going to affect a number of other things,” she said.
A follow-up motion passed 14-2 to support having San Diego work with LJCPA, T&T, UC San Diego, University Community Planning Group and other community stakeholders to create a comprehensive plan for Gilman Drive by 2026.
While San Diego County remains in the purple tier due to widespread COVID-19 infection cases, the state and county have issued guidance placing a hold on further reopening schools. This is understandably frustrating for many students and families, who have made major sacrifices by forgoing in-person instruction, but the guidance is meant to prevent worsening the pandemic.
Our scientific understanding of COVID-19 has exponentially increased since March, when the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic and most public schools in the U.S. first closed to in-person education. Our growing scientific knowledge should inform the safe reopening of in-person instruction at our schools, even as we need to acknowledge that some aspects of COVID-19 disease in children and adolescents are only partially understood, including their risk to become infected and to transmit the disease to others.
Data available from the U.S. and other countries show children younger than 10 years of age are less susceptible to COVID-19 infection, but those between 10 to 19 years old have the same rates of infection and transmission potential as adults, although their disease is usually milder or without symptoms. To date, county of San Diego COVID-19 reports show that 5.3 percent of the county’s nearly 250,000 cases have been in children 9 or younger, and that 10.9 percent of the cases have been in those 10 to 19 years old.
Reports from schools offering in-person instruction offer insights.
In Israel, two high school students with COVID-19 infections triggered a large school outbreak of 153 students and 25 school staff-members — at a time students had been briefly exempted from wearing masks due to a heat wave.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control published surveys from 17 countries that reported from one to 400 school-based clusters of COVID-19 infection; the clusters tended to be smaller than 10 cases each.
In the U.S., there are few reports from schools offering hybrid or full-time in-person instruction. Eleven school districts in North Carolina offering hybrid or in-person attendance reported 32 infections acquired in schools and 773 acquired in the community. This report was based on symptomatic cases and contact tracing — thus underreporting asymptomatic cases. Another recent study covering 17 rural K-12 Wisconsin schools for three months found 191 COVID-19 cases among 5,530 students and staff; interviewers concluded that only seven cases (3.7 percent) were inschool transmissions. This study’s conclusions are not reliable, though, since there was no test surveillance for students or staff and thus the number of asymptomatic cases and their forward transmission are unknown.
Our schools need to thoroughly prepare to mitigate the risk for COVID-19 transmission as they plan to reopen for in-person instruction.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasizes the need to first reduce levels of transmissions in surrounding communities to prevent school transmission. Given up to 50 percent of infected children or more may be asymptomatic, it’s important to ensure lower infection rates in the community to avoid the risk of unknowingly carrying infection into schools.
There are basic key mitigation strategies for safer reopening of in-person instruction when infection is brought into the school. The dominant route for COVID-19 transmission is respiratory, via viruses suspended on large droplets or aerosols from the respiratory tract. Thus, physical distancing, the use of masks, conducting most activities in open air or in spaces with good ventilation, and appropriate filters have all shown to decrease the risk of infection. Washing hands and frequently disinfecting surfaces also help mitigate risk.
The COVID-19 vaccines are now offering light at the end of the tunnel. Teachers have been included among priority groups for vaccination and some counties in California have been able to start vaccinating their teachers already. At this time, only one of the available vaccines is approved for adolescents 16 years or older, but studies are underway to study their safety in younger children.
New COVID-19 variants have emerged that are more contagious and may partially limit the efficacy of the vaccines, though, and the mitigating strategies described above are still extremely important in the efforts to decrease the risk of infection for all. The CDC is expected to publish updated guidelines to help in the decision of when and how to safely reopen schools to in-person learning, which hopefully will add to the existing knowledge and support the ongoing efforts that schools should be implementing in their campuses to ensure a safe return to in-person school instruction.