Promoting Safe Bicycle Travel Opportunities
for Bicycle Tourism and Economic Development
Tuolumne County Transportation Council (TCTC), Calaveras COG, San Joaquin COG, Stanislaus COG, and Alpine LTC, in collaboration with the California Bicycle Coalition, will partner with each other and with Caltrans to promote safe multimodal travel in our region, and to advance bicycle tourism for economic development. We will identify and analyze priority routes for enhancing bicycle tourism, with an eye to improving travel conditions for all modes, and for residents’ travel needs as well as those of visitors. We will make an annotated map and list of recommendations for priority improvements, basing these recommendations on expert analysis as well as on extensive community outreach to diverse area residents, including business and property owners, travel bureaus, local policy makers, bike shops and bicycle clubs, and other stakeholders. We will also identify strategies for promoting the region’s bicycle tourism opportunities and encouraging economic development around tourism.
​
This project will cover the counties of Tuolumne, Calaveras, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Alpine. The total combined population of these counties is 1,364,141. With the exception of parts of San Joaquin county, all these counties are rural. These counties have a range of racial and ethnic diversity, with San Joaquin County having the most ethnically and racially diverse population, with about 32% of its population being people of color. These five counties have rates of obesity and overweight significantly higher than California’s overall rate of 30%, with 35% to 37.7% of adults overweight or obese in these counties. The rates of driving alone to work are significantly higher (ranging from 76-80%) than the average for California (73%). A low proportion of residents are within half a mile of public transit, even in San Joaquin county, the most urban of these counties (where the rate is 17%).
As made clear on the attached map from the California Health Disadvantage Index, these counties range from 25th to 99th HDI percentile. The great majority of census tracts in these five counties have more than 30% of their residents living under twice the federal poverty line. On average, the unemployment rate in these counties is nearly 5 percentage points higher than in the rest of California.
These counties have active transportation plans, but these plans do not take full advantage of the opportunities for bicycle tourism to enhance the economies of these communities, nor of improved inter-city bicycle routes to improve the health of residents.
These counties cover a range of terrain ranging from the flatlands up into the Sierras, with a large cultural and economic range from farmlands and wine country to mountain towns that rely heavily upon tourism. All five counties, however, have great possibilities for improvement of existing bicycle tourism infrastructure, and an increased understanding of the opportunities for boosting local economies and health through more opportunities for people, whether locals or tourists, to ride bicycles.
This proposal would create a comprehensive bike tourism plan with an eye to taking advantage of these opportunities for better health and more economic growth, as detailed in the Overall Project Objectives and Scope of Work, below.
This Scope of Work reflects the anticipated process and deliverables for this project.