What's at stake:
One of America's most deadly cities for bikes and residents just got a little bit safer.
Here's how other cities have made rapid progress using tools like Measure C and Fresno Unified.
Fresno’s recent efforts to make more room for bikes on city streets is paying off, at least according to some experts. The city experienced the biggest jump in America, amongst large cities, for bike and pedestrian safety scores in 2024.
Fresno’s bike safety score jumped 7 points out of 100 on the People for Bikes rating system, a national benchmark that tracks cycling infrastructure. The advocacy group credited last year’s upgrades to McKinley, Gettysburg and Maple Avenues for the dramatic improvement.
“It was great to see that Fresno stood out among cities over 300,000 for improving so much,” said Laura Gromis, the current chair of the city’s Active Transportation Advisory Committee.
“But we still have a lot to go to make our city streets safe for bicycles and pedestrians.”
Despite the city’s gains, Fresno still sits near the top of the heap for America’s most dangerous cities to walk or bike.
Continuing Fresno’s bike safety progress in making its streets more bike-friendly can happen in a few years without huge amounts of money, according to People For Bikes. Minneapolis, Minnesota made a jump from the equivalent spot of Fresno (safety score 30), in the span of five years, to becoming like San Franciscso (safety score 70) according to People for Bikes.
A new report from UCLA’s Transportation Institute lays out how Fresno can continue last year’s progress.
Besides planning for high density neighborhoods, cities need to pay attention to dedicated bike paths, protected bike lanes, and choosing streets where traffic can be slowed down so cyclists can use them more.
This summer, the city of Fresno is working on two major bike safety improvement plans which will lay out the bike infrastructure for the rest of this decade.
The two plans – the Active Transportation Plan and the Vision Zero plan – are being led by a veteran city engineer Jill Gormley, who, over the last two years, has pushed the city’s rapid improvement in bike scores.
Gormley will be updating the city’s plan from 2016 which called for 170 miles of bike paths to be added to the city’s footprint, with a total cost of $1.3 billion.
In previous years – 2011-2016 – the city has spent only $1.6 million a year on improving bike infrastructure.
Gormley did not respond to multiple requests for how much the city has spent in the last few years, with city officials previously estimating the Palm and Belmont upgrades at about $1.5 million.
But in an interview, she said that the city’s new bike vision will aim to change behaviors of cyclists and drivers alike.
City working to continue early results from planning changes
After a decade of pushing from bike advocates, the City of Fresno plugged in a few massive upgrades to its street system in 2021: protected bike lanes.
Over the last few years, the city altered its 2016 bike safety plan to carry out so-called “road diets.”
The city overbuilt some of its roads, Fresno’s Gormley said, which gave too much space for cars relative to daily traffic flows. This allowed the city to convert that space for cyclist protections. It’s a huge change in mindset that she said is part of the city’s vision for reassessing the relationships between cars and people.
“We are focused on changing the mindset of people in Fresno,” Gormley said. “We need to systematically work to change behaviors, attitudes, thoughts and infrastructure to accommodate everybody.”
Converting this relatively unused space in strategic areas into protected bike lanes is what caused some of Fresno’s big boosts in the national rating system.
The new bike lane additions on Dakota, Teague and Gettysburg were given credit by People for Bikes. And the city is planning on using these so-called road diets to revolutionize its bike infrastructure.
In April, the city announced the next three city areas that will get more bike protections: First Street, and new Downtown Loop of Olive, Belmont, H Street and Cesar Chavez Boulevard (formerly known as Kings Canyon Boulevard) and Clinton Avenue.
And ultimately, the city wants Palm Avenue to become a protected bike lane from Tower District to the River Bluff, which is opposed by the Old Fig County Island.
Adam Millard-Ball, director of the UCLA Transportation Institute, said the city’s natural heat shouldn’t dissuade anyone that people can’t bike here like in coastal cities with cooler weather. It’s just a matter of making more space for cyclists.
“I think it is relevant to Fresno that oftentimes people blame the weather for why people don’t walk or bike. But our analysis shows that’s not been a barrier in other cities.”
Millard-Ball’s report, based on a bike usage and road network analysis of 12,000 cities across the world, shows that follow-through with the blueprints laid out by the city this spring can work.
Less-dense cities like Fresno can increase bike ridership massively, Millard-Ball’s report says, by making roads more narrow. Since 2020, Fresno seems to be following this approach, finishing road diets which reduce speed limits along selected streets like Palm.
According to the Department of Transportation, the pedestrian fatality rate for a car collision at 40 MPH is 85%. At 30 MPH it’s 45% and goes down significantly to 5% at 20 MPH.
But a more complete transition from cars to bikes is a political task, and Palo Alto’s success in building bike ridership offers a possible roadmap for Fresno.
Sylvia Star-Lack, Transportation Planning Manager at the City of Palo Alto, has overseen an approach following what’s known as the “6E model.” The model helps translate upfront infrastructure investment into community trust and political power.
“It’s not just any infrastructure that really matters,” Star-Lack said. “If people don’t use it, and they don’t trust it, and they don’t know how to use it safely, it’s hard to make the change that you really want to see. You have to get the people, the cultural elements around it.”
Under Star-Lack’s leadership, Palo Alto now educates nearly half of all school children every year in bicycle and pedestrian safety training. Kindergarten through second grade students receive pedestrian safety education, while third, fifth and sixth graders get bicycle training. The city’s third-grade bike rodeo has become a beloved community event that builds both skills and culture around cycling.
Programs like these are real consensus builders, said Star-Lack.
“It’s really hard for councils to say no to children walking and biking to school,” Star-Lack noted. “If you have a strong Safe Routes to School program, that tends to help [city] councils say yes.”
Another lesson from Palo Alto: Get specific bike projects written into local transportation tax measures, like Fresno County’s Measure C.
Palo Alto’s bike network is funded Measure B, Santa Clara County’s version of Measure C, setting aside money for specific bicycle and pedestrian projects.
Fresno’s highway boosters have used this same strategy with Measure C for decades to get Highway 180 and 168 to the finish line. But so far, generations of bike advocates in Fresno haven’t followed suit with a bike-focused Measure C project list of their own.
Talks about what Measure C should fund are ongoing until spring 2026.
Gromis, Fresno’s Bike Advisory Chair, said that the city is preparing its analysis of where bike and pedestrian injuries are concentrated across Fresno’s street network, which will help dictate which new bike lanes need to be added soonest in the next few years.
The analysis is expected to be released later this summer. The city council is expected to adopt the new bike infrastructure plan, called the Active Transportation Plan, this fall.
