Edhat Staff
Source: City of Santa Barbara
Last Friday, February 16, Santa Barbara Mayor, Cathy Murillo, hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Ortega Park to introduce the completion of the City of Santa Barbara’s first physically protected bike lane along Cota Street.
The Cota bike lane is the first implementation of the City of Santa Barbara Bicycle Master Plan (BMP), adopted by City Council in July 2016 after extensive community input and public process. The BMP includes 35 bike facility projects including the Cota Street bike lane. Located on the north side of Cota Street between Milpas Street and Chapala Street, this new westbound facility connects the Eastside Neighborhood and Downtown, and complements the existing eastbound bike lane on Haley Street. This facility is the first protected on-street bike lane in the City (buffered from vehicular traffic area with delineators). The Cota buffered bike lane was the easiest and cheapest project to install within the BMP ($30,000) because it simply involved paint striping and vertical delineators. The project also required parking removal, which was a key consideration during the community process leading to the approval of the BMP.
I don’t have a car and someone ripped off my garage.
In the pic, I can see almost to State, and not a single bike.
A smart city council would have paid 100 homeless people to ride bikes for the photo op…. just to try and convince us what a great idea it was to remove parking.
That is really nice less vehicles…:)
Queue bicycle hatred comments and parking gripes…
5864 – Read them while you can before they get deleted.
How funny. I just so happened to see these “delineators” yesterday, by merest chance. Hooray. I ride my bike, although now I stick mostly to Cabrillo Blvd and Goleta Bike Paths, and this lane for bikes is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I hope all drivers respect the barriers and that the riders stay safe. Good job, City of Santa Barbara.
I want to add that The City should now inforce the use of garages, home owner and tenant, for parking. If people would knock it off using their garages as storage space and use the space to park their vehicles, street parking wouldn’t be such a mess.
Sure a lot of vehicle vs bicyclist accidents lately like maybe the motorists are mad about the new bike lanes.
Great to see this open up. It’s a slow process, but the more connectivity across town for bikes, the more the usage of the lanes will continue to go up as riders can seamlessly and efficiently (and most importantly, safely) navigate to anywhere they need to go. Anyone who has been to Portland can attest to the success of dedicated bike transportation infrastructure, and the benefits it brings to the community and growth of small businesses that are intertwined with that infrastructure.