Hutton Marshall | Editor
Hillcrest’s three largest community organizations recently formed an informal coalition to support an alternative to the forthcoming SANDAG bicycle corridor through the neighborhood. Although SANDAG has not released a preliminary layout of their bicycle corridor design, community groups have quickly rallied behind the plan envisioned by Bankers Hill architect Jim Frost as a community-friendly alternative.
Since Frost’s plan was unveiled in August, the Hillcrest Business Association (HBA), the Hillcrest Town Council (HTC) and the Uptown Community Parking District (UPCD) have each passed motions supporting the plan. The three organizations will now convene regularly in hopes of rallying more community support. HBA Interim Executive Director Benjamin Nicholls said the coalition drafted a joint letter it will soon send to SANDAG.
“I think the tone of the letter is going to be more demanding than previous letters that typically come out of these community organizations,” Nicholls said. “We’ve got consensus, so we don’t have to ask people to study things, we are going to ask people to do things.”
The plan, known as “Transforming Hillcrest,” proposes condensing street traffic to just one lane in each direction in order to provide more parking and pedestrian space. Both SANDAG and Frost include protected bikeways in their plans, which differ from commonly seen bike lanes in San Diego by creating a physical buffer between cyclists and automotive traffic.
Supporters of the alternative point to Frost’s inclusion of over 40 additional parking spaces, compared to the SANDAG plan, which many fear will remove University Avenue parking. A SANDAG spokesman stated earlier this month that the planning agency did not have an estimate on the impact its design will have on parking.
The coalition will host a meeting in September — details pending — where Jim Frost will give a presentation outlining his plan. The Uptown Planners will also hear Frost’s plan as an action item at their Sept. 2 meeting, which means they’ll vote to make a recommendation to city planners on the design.
“The community is clearly speaking with one voice, and when you boil it down, the community is saying we would like parking more than we would like University Avenue to be basically a highway into North Park,” Nicholls said. “That’s what [Frost’s] plan ultimately is.”
Samantha Ollinger, executive director of Bike San Diego, a bicycle-advocacy nonprofit, said she’s “neutral to supportive” of Frost’s plan. She is primarily concerned with the possibility that the bike lanes would have to be narrowed to allow for the design’s other amenities. Frost previously stated that the bike lanes in his plan will be the same as those in SANDAG’s: five feet wide with a three-foot buffer.
“I’m waiting to see how it would be laid out on the ground, but conceptually I don’t have any issues with it at all,” Ollinger said.
Similar to what Frost’s plan proposes, Ollinger asked a SANDAG planner to study the feasibility of reducing University Avenue to one lane in each direction through portions of Hillcrest. She said no such feasibility study has been completed to her knowledge.
PowerPoint presentations outlining Frost’s Transforming Hillcrest plan can be downloaded by clicking on the links below:
