In collaboration with SimpleCityDesign, MoveSM has launched a petition to encourage the City of San Marcos to create a "healthy, slow street" program during the Covid-19 pandemic.
People are largely still staying home as the future of the pandemic remains unknown and more and more of us are turning to active transportation to get outdoors. Yet as cyclists and pedestrians we have little space on our streets with small or nonexistent sidewalks or bike lanes. We often struggle to practice appropriate physical distance while avoiding traffic lanes. Add to that speeding cars and the street can become a hostile and unsafe place for kids and adults alike. Parks have been closed, but we all need to get outside and designating safe open space in neighborhoods is an easy solution.
Across the country, cities small and large are creating “slow streets,” "healthy streets," or “open streets” programs that give some of the public space given to cars back to people by closing vehicular lanes to thru-traffic and limiting non-resident access to emergency, service, and delivery vehicles traveling at very slow speeds (e.g. 10mph). San Marcos should do the same! The city, should they adopt this program, should take input from neighborhoods about where these slow streets would be most useful but as a starting place, we have assembled ideas for a first phase of street closures, as shown in the map below:
This petition asks the San Marcos City Council to immediately create a limited number of Slow Streets in neighborhoods across San Marcos through at least August 1, 2020 to allow residents to more safely physically distance.
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