Thursday’s Santa Barbara Planning Commission meeting about bicycles began with the city’s mobility coordinator showing a short You Tube video, rich with a commercial-like jingle, sleek typography and a brief interview with a bike rider who’s “afraid” to ride her bike because of “horror stories” she’s heard.
The city created the roughly two-minute Santa Barbara Bicycle Master Plan “promo” to encourage people to take an online survey with questions such as this: What most prohibits you from riding a bike in Santa Barbara?
That survey question includes five choices to select from, such as “too hilly” or “too dangerous.”
The video, the survey and the entire goal of updating the city’s bicycle master plan dominated the commission’s discussion, and infuriated some members of the public. The Planning Commission also criticized the survey, which is part of the city’s outreach campaign for the master plan.
“No hard data is being collected,” said Scott Wenz, president of Cars Are Basic, adding that he’s been riding bikes in this town for 65 years if you count his tricycle. “You saw a film up here that was obviously prejudicial. This has to be stopped.”
Santa Barbara is spending $200,000 to update its bicycle master plan, an effort that has stoked the debate between alternative transportation and automobile advocates. Critics have long argued that the city has pursued a pro-bicycle agenda because of an activist-driven transportation staff attempting to socially engineer how Santa Barbara residents move around town.
The city has created more than 40 miles of bike lanes in the past two decades. City planners say that the goal of updating the Master Plan is to ask people about the future of bicycling in Santa Barbara, and some options include adding more bike lanes, narrowing streets and removing on-street parking. The city will also consider ideas from the consultant and the public.
The promotional video stated that the city has seen a 200-percent increase in bicycling between 2000 and 2012, but vehicle vs. bicycle collisions increased by 44 percent just in the period of 2012 to 2014.
Public speaker Tom Becker accused city staff of presenting misleading information in the presentation and leaving out other data. He said that earlier this year, the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition performed a bicycle ridership count and the numbers were down.
“That count showed a significant decrease in usage from 1998 to 2014,” Becker said. He said staff is “deliberately and intentionally” withholding information.
“We have a right to be heard but we also have a right to be given the truth,” Becker said.
Some of the planning commissioners took issue with the survey questions, saying that the answers to choose from were limited and that not all possible scenarios were presented.
Planning commissioner June Pujo said that the project’s report “glaringly” lacked a basic outline of what the project is going to be. She is supportive of alternative transportation, but wondered whether the survey questions will solicit the best possible data.
“These answers should be open-ended,” Pujo said. “I feel there needs to be more opportunity for open-ended responses on some of these.”
Peter Brown, the city’s mobility coordinator, twice mentioned that he taught a statistical analysis class at UCLA and said “survey design is difficult.” He invited Pujo to “actually take the survey.”
Brown said that bicycle ridership is on the rise, a trend seen throughout the country over the last 15 years. He said downtown areas are becoming revitalized and that biking is “in vogue” again and that Santa Barbara is at the leading end of that trend.
Commissioner Deborah Schwartz also said that the survey answers should be less subjective and more objective in order to derive some conclusions. She said the city and its consultant need to figure out a way to quantify the qualitative questions.
“You have this very admirable, robust public engagement process that is proposed, but if we expend all these public resources, human and financial, to engage the public, and we don’t have a really sound, tight methodology for what we are going to make of the responses, then I am afraid it will have very minimal meaning,” Schwartz said.
Commissioner Michael Jordan told Brown to include Cars Are Basic and other critics in the discussion. The city did not include the longstanding organization in its outreach efforts up until this point.
“My definition of successful outreach includes the two public speakers we heard,” Jordan said. “It’s not just sitting at a campfire singing Kumbaya. It’s also sitting down with people who disagree with you.”
The issue is scheduled to go before the City Council on Tuesday. After that, the city plans an outreach campaign over the next three months, which includes public meetings in English and Spanish, meetings with stakeholders and an advertising campaign to encourage people to take the survey.
Click here to take the survey.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
