Re-Evaluate Fremont's Bike Lanes: What the Data Actually Says

A sourced, honest resident data brief on Fremont, California's bike-lane and road-diet program. We checked the city's own records, state data, and federal road-safety research before making a single claim — and we left out everything we couldn't prove. Records over spin.

📊 The full interactive study — with charts and 17 sources — lives here: neighbordoors.com/fremont-bike-lanes

The real case for re-evaluation

1. The city is already undoing it. In 2016 Fremont spent $1,296,450 in federal HSIP grant money on the Mowry & Stevenson "protected intersections" that removed the dedicated right-turn lanes — and is now paying to add a right-turn lane back at Mowry, citing "delay and queuing experienced by motorists" and projecting a 49.4% cut in morning-peak delay. It's a pattern — the Council also rejected the Paseo Padre Pkwy road diet 5–2 in 2021. A city repeatedly walking back its own designs is the clearest answer to "is it working?"

1. They measure the delay, never the safety. The city does run before-and-after traffic-operations analysis for proposed projects (it's how it justified restoring the Mowry turn lane), but it has never published a before-and-after crash/safety evaluation of the bike-lane corridors it already built — Fremont Blvd, Mowry, Grimmer — proving they reduced collisions; for safety it cites only program-wide totals. (No comparison city published corridor safety results either; Spokane's Monroe came back flat, 29→29.)

1. Deaths rose as the lanes expanded. Across the years Fremont built out its protected-lane network (2020–2024), traffic deaths didn't fall — they rose to 12 in 2024, the worst year in over a decade. Stated carefully: the rise began in 2021 and California's pedestrian/cyclist deaths climbed statewide too, so we don't claim the lanes caused it — but a safety program that coincides with a record toll cannot claim it worked, and the city has never published the corridor data to prove otherwise.

1. Built for the fewest — by deaths and by riders. Cyclists are 9% of traffic deaths and a fraction of one percent of commuters (Fremont: ~54% drive alone, ~32% work from home). Davis, CA — a real bike city — rides at 17–23%; Fremont ran the same disruptive playbook (removed car lanes, 13+ protected intersections, millions) for almost no riders. And demand is shrinking, not growing: U.S. bike commuting peaked in 2014, and kids walking/biking to school fell from 48% (1969) to 13% — the missing school bike racks. The city says "build it and they'll come"; it has never published counts showing they did.

1. Federal guidance has a line. FHWA says lane-reduction road diets belong on roads under ~20,000 vehicles/day. Publish Fremont Blvd's actual count against it.

1. Delivery robots are now approved for Fremont corridors. Fremont's DoorDash Dot page says Dot may use bike lanes, lists Mowry and Paseo Padre among proposed primary corridors, and states speeds can reach 16 mph in bike lanes and 20 mph on neighborhood streets. The city should publish the final permit, operating plan, and incident log.

1. Firefighters keep fighting these designs (NYC court-ordered removal Dec 2025; LA union's $155K against Measure HLA; Oakland FD; a 2025 California bill, AB 612, to expand fire control over bikeways — which failed) — so Fremont should publish its fire/EMS response times.

1. Cities re-evaluate all the time — Boise removed its lanes in ~5 weeks; Idaho restricted road diets statewide; Culver City rolled its program back 3–2.

1. About $31M+ visible, no single published total — over $17M in identified funded projects plus the $14M Country-to-Grimmer corridor now in design, before Safe & Smart, Centerville, and the city-stated ~$200M more to finish. Fremont still publishes no itemized Vision Zero total.

The ask

Measure it. Show the money. Show the traffic volume. Show response times. Re-evaluate the designs that choke turns (as the city is already doing at Mowry). And give residents a vote on major changes to the roads they use every day.

👉 Read the full study with charts and sources: neighbordoors.com/fremont-bike-lanes · Sign the petition

NU original — resident commentary on the public record. Claims we couldn't source (bike lanes raising fatalities, insurance, or cut-through) were deliberately excluded. Some City of Fremont pages block automated access; figures from them were corroborated via search records and third-party coverage and should be confirmed against the live city pages. Records over spin.