The California Complete Streets Bill AB1358 (Leno) has passed its Assembly Vote and is now making its way through the Senate. This bill is the highest legislative priority for the California Bicycle Coalition. Your local coalition, SVBC, has endorsed this bill. Now would be an excellent time for you to contact your State Senator and express your support for AB1358. More information and sample letters are available at the CBC website (http://www.calbike.org/).

Consider joining the Multiple Sclerosis Society for the Waves To Wine Bicycling Tour on September 29th and 30th, 2007. These folks provided tireless volunteers for the bike parking at our Bike Away from Work Bash last May at Gordon Biersch. This is a fully supported two day event so all you have to worry about is riding from the start to the finish each day and we’ll take care of the rest.

Day 1 we will ride from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge to Petaluma for an overnight filled with good music, food along with beer and wine from our sponsors. Day 2 we will wind our way through the wine country ending in Healdsburg where another party awaits your arrival. Shuttles will be provided to take you back to the start for you and your bikes.

Website: http://www.wavestowine.org

Our youth bicycle education program touched 7,000 middle school students across Santa Clara County this year spring. This program was made possible by a generous grant from Kids’ Plate. Please consider purchasing a license plate from Kids’ Plate (http://kidsplate.org) Proceeds from your purchase fund programs that benefit California’s child injury prevention efforts.

Our great volunteers parked a record of 1,112 bikes at October 13th’s Stanford football game, the most ever! This season there are only three more games left of the eight Stanford football home games, so please volunteer to help with bike parking at as many games as you can, and enlist friends, coworkers and family members to do likewise.

We have four bike parking corrals around the Stadium, each staffed by two volunteers. The volunteers at each corral get one free Stadium pass to share, and each volunteer gets a free deli sandwich and cold drink.

Three games left! It’s especially hard to find volunteers willing to staff the evening games, so our greatest need right now is for the November games. Won’t you please help out?

Here’s the schedule:

• November 3, WA, 12:30 pm
• November 24, Notre Dame, 12:30 pm
• December 1, CAL, 4 pm

Volunteers are to be at Stanford Stadium one hour and 15 minutes prior to game time.

Please contact Ellen Fletcher at [email protected] or 650/494-8943.

Construction plans for our soon to be famous Mary Avenue Bicycle Footbridge will be presented to Cupertino’s City Council next Tuesday evening (8/21), together with a request to move forward on the installation of this signature structure. The Footbridge will cross over Hwy 280 at Mary Avenue, and utilize a cable-stayed suspension technique to span the gap. This alternative transportation route will provide cyclists and pedestrians more direct access to both De Anza College and the heart of Silicon Valley.

If you can’t attend this informative and important meeting, we encourage that you email your support for the completion of the bridge to our City Council. Emails may be directed to [email protected]. Council meetings get underway at 6:45 pm in the Community Center located between City Hall and the Library at 10300 Torre Avenue.

Have you ridden in San Jose lately? Have you noticed the new Sharrows on Park and San Fernando? Sharrows have not yet been approved by San Jose for citywide use, and this is only a Pilot Project. If you like Sharrows, consider contacting your city council member and requesting that Sharrows be adopted for citywide use by the City of San Jose. Before doing so, read the following paragraph to better understand how the state (Caltrans) has approved them for use. Most people don’t know what Sharrows are, so you should provide a brief description. City council contacts are available at the following address: http://www.sanjoseca.gov/council.html.

A “Sharrow” or Shared Roadway Bicycle Marking is a symbol of a bike with two chevrons above it. The state (Caltrans) approved these for use on streets that have on-street parallel parking, and that are too narrow to accommodate full Bike Lanes. Sharrows remind motorists and bicyclists that bicyclists should ride outside the door zone (where a parking motorist’s door opens into the street). Sharrows also help close Bike Lane bottlenecks, which are gaps in Bike Lane corridors due to narrow outside lanes.