District 1 photo
By Meriah Miracle
District 1 information officer
“I ended up getting hit by a car and could have died. I got really, really lucky.”
One minute transportation engineer Steven Hopper was riding his bike on Market Street in San Francisco. The next thing he remembers is waking up in an ambulance with no memory of being struck by a Lexus whose driver fled without even checking to see if he was alive.
Hopper survived that collision in 2016 and is now one of the many District 1 staff tasked with making roadways more accessible to all users, including cyclists like himself, as part of the Complete Streets Branch.
When you talk to other members of this branch — in fact, when you talk to people who regularly travel on state highways or city streets either as pedestrians or cyclists — their stories are much the same. Pedestrians hurriedly seeking refuge on a curb or running through crosswalks to avoid oncoming cars. Drivers honking and yelling at cyclists to get off “their roads” or worse, ignoring their existence, and thus their safety, altogether. The Complete Streets branch is trying to change that.
The branch is made up of four multifaceted professionals responsible for providing input and direction related to walking, biking and transit, but staff in nearly every functional unit are working to implement that input in projects throughout District 1’s service area.
While complete streets may seem like a simple concept, it represents a generational shift in how Caltrans initiates, designs and builds projects on the state highway system. Climate change mandates and the Safe Systems Approach, which seeks to eliminate fatalities on state highways by 2050, are two of the biggest motivators for that shift.
When then-Caltrans Director Toks Omishakin signed Director’s Policy 37 in 2021 outlining the Complete Streets policy, he said, “California must reduce dependence on driving without sacrificing mobility and accessibility.” That, Hopper said, is the challenge the branch is tasked with overcoming.
Hopper said the need for bike, pedestrian and transit access is often greatest in rural areas with little space for such facilities. “It gets tricky because when you build a roadway, things spring up alongside it, and there’s not enough right of way for a sidewalk or a buffered bike lane, for example,” he said. “So, we might have to take away some width from cars, so it’s a balancing act.”
Senior transportation planner and branch lead Alexis Kelso added, “We’ve designed our communities to be so car-dependent that right now many people have no choice but to drive. Complete Streets is about giving people options for how to get around.”
Despite the challenges, branch staff are motivated by the long-term benefits to the communities District 1 serves. Hopper said, “It’s just incredibly gratifying to know that the work that I’m doing every day has the potential to make people’s lives not just better, but also safer, healthier, more accessible and well-rounded in general.”