Everything we love about Albany is a short trip from our front doors: schools, the library, Memorial Park, dinner on Solano. That closeness is this town's quiet superpower, and our streets are what make it work. Which is why they aren't just pavement; they're shared living space, and they have to work for everyone at once: the parent pushing a stroller to Ocean View Elementary, the senior crossing to the pharmacy, the kid biking to the middle school, the neighbor in a wheelchair, the driver just trying to get home, and the small businesses whose customers arrive every way there is.
The city has a plan for this: the Active Transportation Plan, first adopted in 2012, amended over the years, and now being updated through a community process that began in 2024. Most of it is work everyone agrees on: safer crossings, calmer neighborhood streets, better routes to school. One piece has divided the town: whether Solano Avenue should get a protected uphill bike lane. People who care deeply about Solano land in different places: safety backbone to some, a parking and merchant-access worry to others.
So let me tell you where I stand, plainly. I wasn't on the council when this plan was shaped, and I'm not going to re-litigate it from a campaign flyer. Once the council settles the plan, my job is implementation done right. Before each phase: real due diligence on traffic, parking, deliveries, and merchant impact, with success measures set in advance, in public. After: honest evaluation against those measures, with the humility to adjust what the data says isn't working. I will not treat a concept drawing as a final design. I'll tell you it should be decided the way Albany decides things well: with evidence, with genuine listening, and without treating either the loudest yes or the loudest no as the whole town.
And here's the part I care about most, because it's the part most likely to get lost: Solano must not swallow the whole plan. While the town debates one street, funded and broadly supported work waits everywhere else: traffic calming in West Albany, safer routes near the middle school and the high school, crossing improvements across the city, and the sidewalk repairs voters funded in 2024. A small city builds by chasing grant dollars and keeping projects moving. I'll push to keep the citywide work on schedule no matter how long the Solano conversation runs, and to coordinate it with the regional safety projects coming to San Pablo Avenue, so streets get dug up once, not three times.
My test for every street decision fits in one question: does it work for everyone? That includes drivers; most of us drive too. It includes people on bikes: the kids riding to school, the neighbors commuting, and everyone who would ride more if it felt safer. It includes the merchants who make Solano worth walking to, the eight-year-old on a scooter, and the eighty-year-old at the crosswalk. Meeting that test is hard, which is exactly why process, evidence, and follow-through matter more than slogans. That's what I'll bring.