In the good ‘ol Pandemic Days of 2020 we would have called this week’s Lomas Blvd. Safety Improvement public meeting a “COVID Party.” About 100 folks were crammed into the small “Learners’ Chess” board game training center to see some info boards, try to talk/hear some consultants and City folks, and regret somewhat having left their N-95 mask back under a pile of other discarded items back at the house.

Not appearing to have any respiratory problems this morning, I feel healthy enough to briefly recap what was brought up at the meeting. In short: BAT Lanes, baby! “What’s that?” is still a question many folks have about such infrastructure, so let’s steal an excerpt from the consultant’s report tied to the project:

“BUSINESS ACCESS & TRANSIT (BAT) LANES BAT lanes enhance safety and access to local businesses by reducing congestion, improving traffic flow, and making right turns safer through dedicated turning lanes.”

Okay, maybe the consultant’s explanation doesn’t go quite far enough. As is currently being tried out on a section of Central Avenue between Louisana and Juan Tabo, the right lane in both directions is closed to traffic, except for buses and drivers immediately turning right off of Central. City traffic folks are reporting good driver compliance, so far, with the BAT lane on Central.

BAT lanes have political and financial advantages to the City and those advocating for “road diets” as means to provide “traffic calming.” Yes, we traffic safety advocates have too many acronyms and obscure terms one has to put into quotation marks. We’re working to reduce the number of those by 50% by 2030 in our special “Jargon Vision Zero” program.

Politically, removing a through driving lane by calling it a “BAT lane” eliminates the need to call it a “Road Diet,” a term so objectionable to rabid anti-safety folks that you literally can’t even use the term at today’s U.S. Department of Transportation. Financially, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to simply turn a lane into a BAT lane through a bit of stripe and stencil versus putting up the concrete curb and guerilla wire needed to really separate and close a lane of through driving.

Two considerations in a BAT lane conversion for Lomas between San Pedro and Girard would be: 1. There’s a stretch of westbound Lomas between San Mateo and Washington that is only two lanes instead of three. So I guess that stretch would go to only one through driving lane (no complaints here). 2. The average daily driving counts for Lomas between San Pedro and Girard would also be about the highest so far for any Road Diet project (definitely no complaints there).

Yes, we can say Road Diet without quotation marks because we’re all friends here at BB. Here’s a traffic count map from MRCOG with those average daily figures:

So that’s 22,600 drivers a day between San Pedro and San Mateo. If you stare closely, as I have, you’ll notice the numbers on Central with new BAT Lanes are even a bit higher. Back in ye olden times of the 2010s, much government opposition was encountered when advocating for road diets on streets with more than 12,000 or so drivers a day (e.g., Zuni Blvd.) Upper limits well below 20,000 were argued for and against, and much teeth were gnashed.

But now, we’re not calling it a “road diet.” We’re calling ’em “BAT Lanes.” That’s right, just like Gale and Evelle Snoats robbing that bank in “Raising Arizona” we’re using code names.

And your humble blogger has absolutely zero problem if we can achieve road diets on stroads whether we call things “BAT Lanes” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Makes no difference to me.

And yes, BAT lanes do provide buses with potentially quicker run times (a big problem with that milk run #11 bus on Lomas) and safer right turns for drivers. There’s also the potential in closing off lanes thus to de facto turn them into “bus and bike lanes” for cyclists willing to co-exist with the occasional (and occasionally pissed off) bus driver. I’m told that some braver cyclists are already using the BAT lanes on Central for this purpose. That’s word on the street, so to speak.

There were more project ideas expressed above the crowded din at the public meeting this past Wednesday, but the BAT lane is what stuck with me. If you missed the meeting, or couldn’t hear a damn thing and/or were crowded out from seeing any of the info boards, here’s a link to the consultant’s almost finished webpage with report/recommendations.

And here’s a feedback form to pass along your thoughts on the project. Remember: We’re using code names.