In the background, while cyclists were sending angry emails to the city and the lawyers from both sides were going back and forth, another advocate and I contacted the public works director and asked to meet with him. Our goal for that meeting was simply to gain information on what the road configuration would look like after construction - because as I stated in a previous post, our position on the path depended on how much shoulder would remain after construction. So we advocates (both of us engineers) had a peer to peer meeting with the public works director and the city engineer. We stayed away from the issue of the bike ban (after all, we already knew we disagreed on that subject) and strictly talked technical details about the project. Although no decisions were made, this meeting went very well, and I believe they trusted us as knowledgable representatives of the cycling community. Likewise we trusted that they wanted to do what was best for bicyclists.

Yesterday's meeting and site visit was a result of the public works director asking us for input on signage to be used in the area. On the way to PCH, he drove us past some recently installed bike lanes in the city, and we had some good discussions on the pros and cons of the various installations.