A Resident Data Brief · Fremont, California
We checked the city's own records, state data, and federal road-safety research before making a single claim. Here is the honest case for re-evaluation — and we left out everything we couldn't prove.
The strongest evidence the design hurt drivers isn't ours. It's Fremont's own project to restore the right-turn lane it removed.
In 2016 Fremont spent $1,296,450 in federal HSIP grant money to build "protected intersections" at Fremont Blvd & Mowry and Stevenson — a redesign that removed the dedicated right-turn lanes. Now the city is adding a dedicated right-turn pocket back at Mowry — in its own words:
"The project will address an existing deficiency at the Fremont Boulevard/Mowry Avenue intersection and will provide a dedicated right turn pocket for the southbound Fremont Blvd approach to address the delay and queuing currently experienced by motorists … up to a 49.4% reduction in average delay during the morning peak period." — City of Fremont, official "Fremont Boulevard (Country Drive to Grimmer Boulevard)" project page. Estimated project cost: $14 million.[1]
And the fix is thinner than it sounds. By the city's own impact table the 49.4% cut applies to just one of four approaches (southbound) — the other three see 0% change — and even that "improvement" is measured against the delay the city's own ~2021 turn-lane removal created. It's clawing back its own mess, not beating the original intersection.[1]
Worse, the same $14M project builds three more slip-lane removals — Beacon, Sundale, Bidwell — that the city's analysis says will increase delay (Beacon's AM peak: 10.2 → 16.1 sec). Undoing the design at one intersection while repeating it at three. And it's a pattern — the Council rejected the Paseo Padre road diet 5–2 (2021) and kept four lanes there again in 2026. When a city keeps declining and undoing its own designs, "is it working?" answers itself.[1][2]
Here's the precise gap. The city does run before-and-after traffic-operations analysis for its proposed work — that's exactly how it justified restoring the Mowry turn lane (the 49.4% delay cut). What it has never published is a before-and-after CRASH/SAFETY evaluation of the bike-lane corridors it already built — Fremont Blvd, Mowry, Grimmer — showing the redesigns actually reduced collisions on those streets. For safety, it cites only program-wide totals, years apart.
In other words: the one before-and-after the city publishes is about fixing the delay its own design created — not proving the safety projects worked. And it isn't only Fremont — across Boise, Spokane, Fort Collins, Cary, and Chula Vista, none published a corridor-level safety before/after either. The one clean measurement we found, Spokane's Monroe corridor, came back flat: 29 crashes before, 29 after.[3][4]
If these safety projects worked, the crash data exists to prove it. Publish the before-and-after collision results for the Fremont Blvd, Mowry, and Grimmer corridors before approving another dollar of redesign. Modeling the delay on the next project isn't the same as proving the last one made anyone safer.
Fremont's redesigns were sold as a safety investment. Yet across the years its protected-lane network was built out (2020–2024), traffic deaths did not fall — they climbed to 12 in 2024, the city's worst year in over a decade.
Fatal crashes on Fremont city streets, 2014–2025. 2024 = worst recent year (12). 2025* preliminary. Source: City of Fremont, Safety Data & Trends.[5]
We state this carefully, by design. The rise began in 2021, California's pedestrian and cyclist deaths climbed statewide over the same window, and the city attributes its toll to reckless driving and night-time pedestrian crashes rather than lane design — so we do not claim the lanes caused these deaths. But a program sold on safety must be judged on results, and across its rollout Fremont's death toll rose to a multi-year high. At minimum, these redesigns cannot demonstrate they made our corridors safer — and the burden of proof rests with the city, using the corridor-level data it has never published.
Two numbers the program can't get around: cyclists are a sliver of the people dying on Fremont's roads — and a sliver of the people using them.
Share of Fremont traffic fatalities by mode. Source: City of Fremont.[5]
Pedestrians are 45% of deaths; cyclists are 9% — Fremont reports 39 pedestrian fatal crashes, 27 motor-vehicle driver/occupant fatal crashes, 13 motorcyclist fatal crashes, and 8 bicyclist fatal crashes in the 2014–2025 period. Yet the arterial lane-space and grant money went heavily to the smallest fatality group, while the people actually dying most often (pedestrians, often at night) got the least targeted help.
Bike-to-work share — a real cycling city vs Fremont. Sources: U.S. Census ACS / League of American Bicyclists.[15]
Fremont barely bikes, and it's not close: 54% drive alone, 7% carpool, and 32% now work from home — leaving cycling a fraction of one percent. Davis, California — "Bike City USA" — bikes at 17–23% and built its network for that real, large demand. Fremont ran the same disruptive playbook — removed car lanes, 13+ protected intersections, millions of dollars — for a cycling share that rounds to zero.
And demand is shrinking, not growing: U.S. bike commuting peaked in 2014 and fell five straight years, and the share of kids who walk or bike to school collapsed from 48% (1969) to 13% — which is why the bike racks came off the schools. The lanes expanded as the riders vanished.[16]
Proportionality: you don't tear out travel lanes and rebuild intersections for riders who appear a fraction of a percent of the time. And the demand is structural, not a paint problem — Fremont is a large, low-density, spread-out suburb where most trips are simply too far to bike, which is why even transit carries only a small, non-growing share. The city's "build it and they'll come" answer just raises the next question: after years of buildout, where are the ridership counts proving they came? Same as everywhere else here — never published.
Not "do nothing" — match the treatment to the demand: keep standard striped bike lanes, and put the money into shared-use paths and better sidewalks. A fraction of the cost and disruption of removing car lanes and rebuilding intersections. Fremont already does this elsewhere — it striped bike lanes on Paseo Padre Pkwy in 2023 with all four car lanes kept, and its $5.2M Grimmer Blvd Trail puts a separated path in vacant right-of-way without touching a travel lane. The disruptive lane-removals on Fremont Blvd were a choice, not a necessity.
Lane-reduction "road diets" aren't a free lunch. The Federal Highway Administration's own guidance says they belong on roads under about 20,000 vehicles per day — above that, congestion risk is real and a feasibility study is required.
So publish it: what is Fremont Blvd's actual average daily traffic against that line? If it's over, the congestion residents feel isn't imagination — it's exactly what FHWA warns about. The city has the count. Show the public.[6]
Set aside how the lanes started. Here's where they are today: a private company's autonomous robots are approved for the same Fremont corridors residents were told were built for safety.
The bike lanes residents were told were about safety are now part of a private company's delivery corridor. Fremont's own DoorDash Dot page lists Mowry Avenue and Paseo Padre Parkway among proposed primary corridors, says Dot may use bike lanes, and says speeds can reach 16 mph in bike lanes and 20 mph on neighborhood streets. A Feb. 17, 2026 council presentation described a permit request covering bike lanes, sidewalks, and local streets, with primary routes including Walnut Ave, Fremont Blvd, Mowry Ave, Stevenson Blvd, and Paseo Padre Pkwy.[7]
Important caveat: the city page and council presentation do not phrase the speed limits identically, so the clean public ask is simple: publish the final permit, operating plan, crash/incident log, and resident complaint process before expanding beyond the initial pilot.
The loudest gripe — buses and big rigs riding up over the new curbs — isn't just a feeling. It's an engineering mismatch with a paper trail.
National design standards (AASHTO) call for 11–12-ft travel lanes on arterials that carry trucks, and the standard design semi (WB-67) needs roughly 24–41 ft of width to turn. Fremont narrowed its lanes to 10 ft and tightened the intersection corners — on a road the city itself calls "one of AC Transit's busiest transit corridors in south Alameda County."
And it runs backwards as vehicles keep getting bigger — SUVs and pickups are now about 75% of new U.S. vehicle sales. Shrinking lanes while vehicles grow, on a bus-and-truck route, is the opposite of the standard. The city should publish proof its designs meet AASHTO design-vehicle turning standards for the buses and trucks that use Fremont Blvd.[17]
"The Fire Department is not against bike lanes. We're against the protected bike lanes… [fire trucks are] nine-feet-plus [wide while bike lanes are] about eight feet." — FDNY Chief of Fire Operations Kevin Woods, NYC Council testimony, Feb 2026. A Queens judge ordered a protected bike lane removed in Dec 2025 (on consultation-process grounds).[8]
And the mechanism is concrete: where an open lane lets drivers pull right to clear a path for an ambulance or fire truck, a vertical-separated bike lane takes that room away — and blocks the responder from using it to pass. LA's firefighters' union warned of exactly this: with these designs, "vehicles won't be able to pull over to the right, which would block first responder vehicles."[9]
Honest note: most of this is qualitative — even the FDNY chief admitted "we don't have hard data." That's the point: Fremont should publish fire/EMS response times for its redesigned corridors so the question is answered with numbers, not assumed away.
Asking the city to take a second look isn't anti-bike or radical. Other places have paused, scaled back, or reversed these projects when residents pushed.
Installed downtown bike lanes in 2014 and removed them ~5 weeks later after resident backlash (bus delays, confusion).[12]
Passed a 2025 law restricting lane-narrowing road diets.[12]
Council voted 3–2 in 2023 to scale back its protected bike/bus lane program after 58% of residents opposed it.[13]
A court ordered a protected bike lane removed (Dec 2025) over inadequate agency consultation.[8]
We note honestly: most of these reversals were driven by congestion, process, and resident sentiment — not by proof the lanes were statistically deadly. That's the same, fair standard we're asking Fremont to apply.
Piece together the public grant records and the bikeway / protected-intersection program runs into the tens of millions. The visible frame is already roughly $31M+: $17M+ in identified funded projects, plus the city's $14M Country-to-Grimmer corridor now in design. Fremont still publishes no single Vision Zero total, and the lane-removal redesigns themselves never went to a resident vote.
Add it up: over $17 million in the funded projects above — plus the $14 million Country-to-Grimmer corridor now in design — gives residents a $31M+ minimum frame. That is before the Safe & Smart Corridor, Centerville work, and the city's own much larger build-out estimate.
It's public money — local Measure BB taxes plus state and federal grants — and the city won't roll it into one honest number. Itemize the bikeway spend and publish it, especially now that pieces are being rebuilt.[14]
Nothing extreme. Just measurement, transparency, and a voice — the things a "safety" program should welcome.
Re-Evaluate Fremont's Bike Path Implementation