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One week after a 32-year-old female pedestrian was hit and killed, and a preteen bicyclist was injured, both within a week in separate Redwood City incidents involving motorists, the City Council held a study session on transportation strategy. The session took place Sept. 29, just before the end of Pedestrian Safety Month.
The city’s Transportation and Engineering Department and the Police Department opened the session at the council’s special meeting with a presentation about Vision Zero, the city’s initiative to improve local transportation, where council members discussed and envisioned safety, health, and mobility improvements for the city’s roadways.
The study session became a window on how the city is rethinking its streets, with council members weighing in on everything from lower school limits to major road designs as part of the city’s Vision Zero goal to eliminate severe traffic injuries and deaths.
Nick Mathiowdis, the city’s communications manager, said the Vision Zero progress report had been scheduled at the beginning of the year before the September collisions as part of the city’s annual policy calendar. This would be the first Vision Zero presentation in two years, he said.
Malahat Owrang, the city’s principal transportation planner, hosted the presentation. She highlighted that of the 100-plus cities in California of its size, Redwood City has the third most collisions, and compared the city’s score to that of Palo Alto, which has the second to fewest number of collisions in the state, according to the California Office of Traffic Safety. California is in the top 10 percentile for most deadly states for pedestrians.
Between 2019 and 2024, Redwood City saw more than 3,000 collisions, with 3% either fatal or severe, said Owrang. Most of these accidents, she said, took place on wider streets, which have a higher volume of cars that move faster.
The top three causes for those collisions, she said, were speeding, driving under the influence and red light running. Over half of Redwood City’s population of nearly 83,000, according to the department’s presentation, commutes by car.
At 10 locations identified as high risk, the organization has or will implement a Walk Bike Thrive Plan to increase their safety, Owrang said. Smaller safety projects include “leading pedestrian intervals,” which are a several second head start for pedestrians crossing the street so they’re more visible to cars, as well as road restriping to help with lane visibility and red curb painting to mitigate blind spots.
The council members then offered their remarks and spitballed pedestrian safety solutions. Council member Diane Howard spoke first.
She favored calming measures, such as painting the corners of every intersection in the city red and wondered if civic volunteers would be willing to carry out the project, like “in days yore.”
School safety was of paramount concern to Council member Marcella Padilla, who asked why the 15-mile-per-hour speed limit hasn’t been implemented at every school.
“Consistency builds fairness,” she said, “which makes the rules easier to follow” and “protects all children equally.”
Owrang said that the plan is to implement the 15-per-hour speed limit by next summer at the remaining schools in the district over which Redwood City has jurisdiction that do not have the limit yet: Sandpiper School, Redwood Shores Elementary School, Taft Elementary School, Orion Alternative School, North Star Academy, McKinley Institute of Technology and Sequoia High School.
The wait is because a speed limit change is “a lot of work,” requiring the city to pass resolutions and conduct studies.
Council member Jeff Gee promoted the resurrection of driver education at schools, which he thought was effective in instilling in him and other teen drivers decades ago the axiom that “there are no such thing as accidents, only consequences because someone made a decision to do something.” He believes that such a program could “make a difference for a nominal investment.”
Upon sharing numerous statistics about pedestrian and driver safety, Council member Isabella Chu disagreed with Gee. She said education is futile in the face of the auto industry’s billion-dollar ad campaigns, which regularly promote unsafe driving.
Enforcement as well, she said, has limited effectiveness in yielding road safety, and only succeeds if it is “certain, ubiquitous and consistent.” While underscoring the necessity that the city takes transportation safety “incredibly seriously,” she pointed to engineering as a priority solution that the city can have the most control over — “to design our streets in a way that you can’t speed.”
She said she’d like to see the city approach road engineering in Redwood City the way the nation attacked sewage and sanitation safety during the 19th century.
In paying homage to the history of Redwood City’s roads, Vice Mayor Kaia Eakin noted how some of the city’s roads were created for horse-drawn carriages in the 1800s, instead of for the high-speed cars and dense traffic of today. This meant Woodside Road, among others, “got jerry-rigged into being a highway,” and that Redwood City needed a serious funding jump from its $200 million annually for major engineering projects to retrofit its roads.
She’s also bothered by the fact that nearly 60% of all driving in Redwood City is “one person driving in one car,” she said. In line with the nostalgic tone of the council’s floated solutions, Eakin mentioned “ubiquitous school buses” to curb the long lines of cars in residential zones for school drop offs and pickups.
The caveat to that idea is a federal law that blocks public transportation districts (like San Mateo County) from providing a dedicated school bus service that would be in competition with private bus operators.
While SamTrans provides free passes to school children, Chu said some parents don’t feel comfortable with letting their children ride the bus with adult strangers. One work-around, she said, could be to assign adult chaperones to come with school children on these public buses.
In terms of speeding and red light running, Police Chief Kristina Bell noted that the city no longer uses red light cameras and might begin to implement speed cameras, following the six-city, five-year, speed-camera pilot program in California.
Redwood City Mayor Elmer Martínez Saballos said that it “doesn’t surprise me at all to see heat maps and where collisions are.” El Camino Real and Woodside Road, he said, are “great ways to get around town,” but for those who aren’t in a vehicle, “it can feel challenging to feel safe.”
Protected bike lanes with delineators were supported by the mayor and Council member Chris Sturken as important bike infrastructure changes to guard against accidents.
“A lot of protected bike lanes have been piecemeal funded,” Saballos said. He said he’d love it if the engineering team could conduct an internal audit and share with the council the tools they’re missing so the council can provide better service.
Sturken called for a “modernization” of the city’s traffic calming process, which can be time-intensive and bureaucratic. Owrang said that changing this process will take over a year, but that the wheels are in motion to implement this change.
While the presentation and discussion were limited to a study session and did not involve a vote or explicit action, Owrang thanked the council members for their insights and plans to consider them in her department’s work.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated with the correct list of schools at which a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit will be implemented.
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