Kearny Villa Road – After the Fix
Posted By Sam Ollinger on March 25, 2010
We last wrote about how sad Kearny Villa Road was for San Diegan cyclists. Shortly afterward, the city did perform repairs on the hazardous cracks on the road as promised.
One of our twitter followers @juanrcm regularly rides Kearny Villa Road. He informed us of the terrible job that the city had done in fixing Kearny Villa Road and took photos showing those fixes:
Kearny Villa Road after the fix. Photo © Juan Magdaraog
Kearny Villa Road after the fix. Photo © Juan Magdaraog
Kearny Villa Road after the fix. Photo © Juan Magdaraog
SignOnSanDiego.com had an updated story on the patchwork done on Kearny Villa Road.
We contacted the Chief of Staff for City Councilmember Marti Emerald asking that the bike lanes be repaved as they were still dangerous for cyclists.
An entire week has gone by and Marti Emerald’s office has been silent in responding.
While we continue to wait, be careful when riding on Kearny Villa Road.
I sent an open invitation to District 7 this morning. If anyone else wants to meet me on Friday at 3 pm to discuss the issues, I’d be happy to have some company:
Dear Xema:
In response to skeptical commentary following Jeff Ristine’s Just Fix It piece on the southbound bike lane of Kearny Villa Rd. I have invited the public and the media to meet me on the southbound shoulder just north of Miramar Way at 3 pm tomorrow (Friday) afternoon to discuss the issues and inform interested parties about my decade long experience as a bike commuter on this route. Jeff’s article appeared on the Sign On San Diego website this morning. I assume it will appear in print in tomorrow morning’s U-T.
If Councilwoman Emerald or any District 7 staff would like to join me, it would be an opportunity to meet and connect faces with the emails and phone calls.
Hope to see you out there on my ride home from work tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be there at about 3 pm and will wait for 15-20 minutes to see if anyone is interested.
This style of road fixing with simple patches that are not even smoothed to blend with the existing road seems to be the norm in San Diego, even in the car lanes. By my observations over many years, San Diego’s road crews do not achieve a standard of quality that I have observed in other cities.
Very true, Travis. The problem is that in the motor vehicle lanes, the weight of passing cars and trucks quickly rolls the patches flat. When they are in the bike lane or on the shoulder, the humps need to be rolled flat by specialized equipment, since bicycles are not heavy enough to do the job. This is obviously misunderstood or ignored by the goons on the asphalt patching crews. We started with nineteen humps across the bike lane north of Miramar Way in 2008. The more dangerous longitudinal cracks parallel to the direction of travel were left unpatched. One of these is what caught Susan Norman’s front wheel earlier this year leading to serious injury and a hospital stay. Repeated requests to Streets Division to roll the patches flat have been ignored for a year and a half now. Now there is a whole new latticework of randomly spaced humps for them to roll flat. The path of least resistance places cyclists on the right edge of lane 2 on the new pavement directly adjacent to speeding traffic which has been clocked by SDPD radar at over 90 mph.
Xema Jacobsen is as of very recently no longer at District 7 and failed to pass the ball to another staff member before she left. This has happened numerous times since I began contacting District 7 about the problem in September 1999. Each time the district loses its institutional memory and I have to start all over again. We need to contact them again and refresh their memory.
Today I called District 7 to ask who was taking over for Xema Jacobsen on the Kearny Villa Rd. case. Kim returned my call and confirmed my suspicion that Mrs. Jacobsen had taken the pertinent files with her when she left. This seems to be a matter of course for staffers who leave a given council district. Kim did some research and now has some background, but would like us to stay in contact and let District 7 know how things are for us out there. She also said that the cold patch asphalt was temporary and that resurfacing of the bike lane should begin fairly soon. I fear that may be relative to glacial time, but we’ll see.
Jeff Ristine ran yet another Just Fix It column in this morning’s U-T on Kearny Villa Rd. This is an unprecedented fourth time in this column since 2007. The City confirmed plans to resurface the bike lanes from Miramar Rd. to Hwy 163. Thanks, Jeff, for holding their feet to the fire. Next we need to step up pressure on the City and CalTrans for the elimination of the deadly high speed freeway transition ramp to 163 south.
Thanks to Ray and All who have persisted in championing this cause. Monday’s ride north was like a magic carpet, as was this morning’s ride south…. certainly compared to All previous rides I’ve made up and down KV Road!
Thanks Again All! I salute You!
Ride Safe!
Jim