What is San Luis Obispo doing to its streets?

March 22, 2023
T. Keith Gurnee

T. Keith Gurnee

Opinion by T. Keith Gurnee

In recent years, the City of San Luis Obispo has spent millions of dollars reconfiguring many of its streets to accommodate protected bike lanes. In the process, the city is essentially “tagging” its streets with garish and unsightly “road graffiti” that is impairing the functionality of our circulation system while diminishing the livability of our neighborhoods.

Driven by the all-powerful bike lobby that dominates the Alternative Transportation Commission, the city has been making a joke of its streets. With their exclusive bike lanes and the veritable pantheon of visual clutter that adorns them, it’s a bad joke at that.

With swaths of bright green paint bounded by bright white lines, these bike lanes beg the question: has the city cornered the market on green paint? Throw in some bristling, shiny white plastic pylons and black and white striped lumps bolted to the street, the city has been transforming its roadways into an embarrassing mess that is an insult to our senses.

How are these so-called “improvements” negatively affecting the safety and convenience of our road network? For example, take the following:

1. Installing protected bike lanes along downtown Higuera and Marsh streets required reducing the number of travel lanes from three to two lanes, thereby constraining the loading zones for truck deliveries. On Higuera Street, delivery trucks often park in one of the remaining travel lanes to load and unload, requiring cars to use only the leftmost lane to get by.

When that loading and unloading takes place, it has essentially turned Higuera Street into a congested one lane road. For cars trying to park on the left side of Higuera creates further congestion and passengers can’t open and exit their right-side doors in the face of oncoming traffic.

2. The new tortured entrance to the post office on Madonna Road won’t allow left turns out onto Madonna Road. Instead, cars must turn to the right out of the post office, drive to a traffic circle a quarter-mile away, and then drive back to make a left turn on Madonna Road. Crazy!

3. Then there’s a bike path in the sidewalk along the north side of Madonna Rd. that puts bikes and pedestrians in conflict with each other. Isn’t riding bikes on a sidewalk illegal?

4. And then there’s the “lovely” entrance to Costco with its painted raised concrete islands which force abnormally wide turning movements into and out of the complex.

5. As for those bike lanes protected by concrete curbs, they’ll probably eventually require special equipment to sweep the lanes free of debris. As of now, they will have to be swept by hand, placing another burden on the city’s maintenance personnel.

What’s inexplicable is the outrageous expenditure of taxpayer’s funds to accommodate the surprisingly few cyclists who actually use these pricey facilities. Yet the city is so proud of itself that it’s sponsoring a celebration of the Higuera/Marsh mess sometime next month. Go figure.

But more has yet to come. The Alternative Transportation Commission has plans to ram exclusive bike paths to wipe out on street parking in a number of San Luis Obispo’s residential neighborhoods. The first one of these is the so-called North Chorro Street Greenway through the historic Anholm tract.

On March 7, our City Council approved $6.3 million – nearly six times the original budget for the project – to build an utterly unnecessary set of exclusive bikeways along the inherently and historically safe Chorro and Broad Street corridors that will eliminate over 90 heavily used on- street parking spaces in the neighborhood. Where will those cars park when this is done?

When this idea came up back in 2016, 74% of the neighborhood overwhelmingly opposed it. Vice Mayor Jan Marx was the only council member who supported the neighborhood. The other four were giddy in approving it.

Part II of this piece will examine the absurdity of this project which amounts to little more than a city sponsored act of vandalism against a peaceful neighborhood.

After all, neighborhoods used to matter in San Luis Obispo. Previous City Councils respected our neighborhoods, but this one doesn’t. Driven by a selfish, single-minded, and powerful special interest group of ideologues determined to impose their will upon the residents of a peaceful neighborhood, this City Council has bought into this zany and fiscally irresponsible idea lock, stock, and barrel.

If this can happen to the Anholm neighborhood, your neighborhood could be next.

T. Keith Gurnee is a former San Luis Obispo councilman who has been involved in local politics for more than 40 years.


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What people are failing to take into account is that within 10 to 15 years most of the cars on our roads are will be self driving and little irritations like having to maneuver around a bike lane will be pretty much irrelevant.

Back in the day, when horses were the main modes of distance travel, people complained when miss apologies started building paved roads suitable for automobiles. People complained then pretty much the way people are complaining now about bike lanes

Change is not easy for some people.


Back in the day: “Dadgummit!, I hate that these dirty, dusty and at times miserable mud bog streets are gett’n paved with cobblestones or this newfangled asphalt macadam!” – said no one ever.


Avid cyclist here folks. I almost never agree with anything that T. Keith Gurnee says, but I am in partial agreement with him on some of the bike path design and implementation going on in SLO. Specifically, I find the protected bike lanes along Higuera and Marsh as poor implementation of active transportation. For as long as I can remember, I have supported reducing the number of travel lanes on Higuera and Marsh streets from three to two. But I would have supported wider sidewalks and permanent parklets instead. Downtown needs to be more pedestrian friendly. I never felt that downtown was an issue for bicycle riders. Vehicular traffic already moves slowly through downtown, so sharrows would have been sufficient. But, with the protected bike lanes on streets with existing slow traffic, I feel that conflict between parked cars, turning movements, and pedestrians are created unnecessarily.


I generally support bicycle infrastructure, but many times, less is more. I wish there was more of an effort to educate both drivers and cyclist to coexist as opposed to the approach of painting a lot of the streets green and not addressing the animosity between the two.


You make way too much sense. Much appreciated


Come on folks, it only takes 5 seconds to figure out why you can’t take a left out of the post office onto Dalidio. In a few years that road will be connected to the Prado interchange and overpass. There will be direct connection to the 101 and South Higuera and there will be significantly more traffic, so much that gunning it across Dalidio/Prado would be unsafe and create disruptions to that intersection. Is it a tad annoying, having to go the long way? Sure, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Not crazy!!


The new lights, signs, striping are confusing. Streets that had no congestion now have lines. The weird red light on Broad is confusing for drivers. I’ve had friends visit me, are mind boggled by the streets. Saying they are illogical.

Bikes cater to a small group. In an article I read from the city, they stated 8% of traffic is from bikes. No way! Has anyone checked what % of Cal Poly ride bikes?? My guess it relatively low. One reason, is the campus is not flat. In fact the City is not flat. Having to climb hills, go up hills makes the rides difficult for people who are not mountain bikers or Armstrong types. They are pushing a square peg in a round hole. I lived in China, first city I lived, there were millions of bikes, literally everyone owned bikes. Then I moved to another city. First thing I noticed bikes were gone 90%, the difference Shijiazhuang was flat… Qingdao was not. For elder people it’s an issue. Even if there were paths dedicated to bikes, from every part of SLO, because of the elevation differences from the south to north , east to west, it’s never going to appeal to average person, who the bike lobby is catering too…


I would be a little more understanding if I could have a bike. My last bike, $2,100, had the lock cut and was stolen in the middle of the day as I was out shopping in my car between bicycle rides. I live on the homeless highway around the corner from the UPRR rail-side chop shop. I called the police, “Tell us what we don’t know…”. Also, the UPRR right-of-way is under the jurisdiction of the UPRR Police, not security guards, they have full police powers. SLOPD only deals with mutual aid requests from UPRR Police in the RR right-of-way. I think they have one officer who covers Salinas to Ventura, who did respond once when I called dispatch, in Omaha, to report that their newly deposited ballast rock was being loaded up and removed by wheelbarrow. So now, only the car. I used to bicycle probably in excess of 75% of my in town miles, even most grocery shopping. As well, the homeless preclude bike and pedestrian-friendly destinations. I’ll park my car in a big commercial lot, ef downtown.


You had a $2,100 bike chain locked in plain sight? Hard to believe that you would be that trusting. When I was 12, I had the same thing happen. Of course, it was only a cheap stingray.


No cars is the plan. Eliminate a few lanes here and a few lanes there then more lanes. Then no lanes at all, cars will be eliminated on certain blocks. Eventually no cars on any downtown streets. All bikes all the time. Easy Peasy.

It will be great! You’ll See


All of the misdirected bicycle-inspired roadway usage divisions, color delineations, confusion and clutter make the streets less safe for all traffic and pedestrians. San Luis Obispo’s cluttered conveyance corridors are becoming visually ugly and psychologically confusing. Safety is diminished while transportation dysfunction increases. Some cities pride themselves on municipal beautification programs. San Luis Obispo is insanely embracing a program of Bicycle Blight on the city landscape. Clearly, there are no real cyclists serving on the Alternative Transportation Commission because no real cyclists would recommend adopting some of the insane changes already implemented or the idiotic projects proposed for the future.


What is San Luis Obispo doing to its streets?


Making it harder and harder to drive and park…. and shop and eat…. and please reduce the 15 min red light time…. SLO has the longest red lights I have ever seen…


Just closed my long time P.O. Box at the USPO on Higuera! Now will never have to

go to Downtown SLO! Understand ‘lots’ of taxpayer dollars were spent on the SLO

bike lanes. And now the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments (SLOCOG) is looking at a possible increase in sales tax and a Vehicle Miles Traveled tax (VMT)!

Stop the insanity!


Marsh, maybe? Did you really have a P.O. box there or are you making it up to vent? I know what street the downtown Post Office is on.


The main post office is on Higuera…


893 Marsh St, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401