The Collector
October 14, 2025
Dangerous Downtown Streets: Access for People With Disabilities
As part of our series of point-of-view videos from Eureka’s 4th and 5th Streets, our friends at Tri-County Independent Living toured the intersection outside their office to highlight some of the difficulties faced by their clients and staff. Click here to watch the short video. Afterwards, you can also click here to watch all the other point-of-view videos we’ve produced documenting the experiences of pedestrians and bicyclists in the 4th & 5th Street corridor.
After you watch, you can read our full 4th and 5th Street safety report. And if you’d like to report a safety concern in the corridor to Caltrans, click here and scroll down to “Safety Concern” in the “Situation Type” menu. We also encourage everyone to continue making Street Story reports, so that concerns are publicly documented.
There’s Still Time to Vote for CRTP!
Voting ends Sunday in the North Coast Co-op’s annual contest to choose recipients of the Seeds for Change register round-up program. Organizations selected for the program will receive donations next year from Co-op customers who “round up” their purchases at the register. This is a really important opportunity to support CRTP’s work! If you’re a Co-op member and you haven’t voted yet, please click here to vote for CRTP, or vote in person at one of the Co-op stores. We also encourage voting for our friends and allies at EPIC, Humboldt Waterkeeper, Friends of the Eel River, and Affordable Homeless Housing Alternatives.
HCAOG Tackles Transportation and Housing Plans, Plus Road Project Funding
The Board of Directors for the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG) meets next Thursday, and they have a lot of big topics to discuss, including:
- Regional Housing Plans: The state has directed our region to plan for 5,962 new homes in the next 8 years, and HCAOG decides how many of those homes will be in cities like Eureka and Arcata, and how many in lower-density areas like the unincorporated county. This decision will help determine whether we see sprawl or walkable development, and it has big implications for affordability, public health, economic development, and the climate. CRTP and other local environmental groups have been advocating for a policy that encourages walkable development, but HCAOG is poised to adopt an allocation methodology that fails that test. You can read our full comments here.
- Regional Transportation Plan: Every four years, HCAOG updates the official 20-year transportation plan for the Humboldt County region. The existing plan has strong safety, climate, and equity goals that CRTP helped develop four years ago, and we’re grateful that HCAOG is proposing to keep most of them. However, some of the changes that are proposed are totally unacceptable, like eliminating the words “climate crisis” from the document and watering down targets for development of walkable housing.
- Project Funding Decision: Every two years, HCAOG gets some new transportation dollars from the state and decides which local projects to fund. For years, the agency has inexplicably been refusing to apply its own goals and policies (like those in the Regional Transportation Plan) to its decisions about project funding, instead relying on informal negotiations between the county and the cities with no consistent decision-making standards. They are poised to do it again next week, including providing significant funding for a roundabout project in Fortuna that, as designed, will result in increased driving and unsafe conditions for people walking and biking, contrary to HCAOG’s own goals and policies.
CRTP will be at the HCAOG Board meeting next Thursday to keep up the fight for safe, sustainable, and equitable transportation and walkable infill housing. You can join the meeting as well, either online or in person, or email your comments ahead of time.
Family-Friendly Bike Ride This Sunday Using New McKinleyville Protected Bike Lanes!
Join CRTP this Sunday for a slow-paced, family-friendly bike ride celebrating the new protected bike lanes and beautiful murals on Hiller Road! You can choose either a short ride starting at Hiller Park, or a slightly longer ride starting at the Mad River Trailhead. The current forecast calls for rain on Sunday, but we’ll only be canceling for heavy rain or major stormy conditions. Light rain won’t stop us!
We’ll depart from the Mad River Trailhead at 11:00 am and head toward Hiller Park, using the Hammond Trail. We’ll stop at Hiller Park at around 11:20 am to pick up folks who are starting their ride there, and then head up Hiller toward Central Avenue. After using the new eastbound protected bike lane on Hiller, we’ll stop near Central to check out the new murals, then head back using the westbound protected bike lane. The ride will end around noon at Seagoat Farm Stand with free hot tea and the opportunity to buy some snacks at the farm stand. People of all ages and abilities are welcome.
Whether you can join us for the ride or not, we also encourage all community members to take this county survey to provide feedback about the project.
Humboldt County Surpasses 1,500 Reports on Street Story!
Humboldt County residents have used the Street Story platform to make more than 1,500 reports of hazards, near-misses, crashes, and safe places on local streets, roads and highways since CRTP introduced it to the region in 2019 in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC).
If you’ve never used Street Story, it’s an online platform that allows anybody to report where they feel safe or unsafe on the street, or where they’ve had a crash or a near-miss. It’s free and easy to use, and it only takes a couple of minutes to make a report. Click here to make a report on Street Story.
Data from Street Story are publicly available and can be used by members of the public as well as agencies, community groups, and the media. CRTP uses Street Story reports to help advocate for safety improvements for people walking and biking on the streets. Many other local agencies refer to Street Story reports too, including Caltrans District 1, the City of Arcata, and the County of Humboldt.
An analysis of the first five years of Street Story reports in Humboldt County was conducted last year by CRTP and can be found here. To review all existing Humboldt County reports on Street Story, click here.
Report Your Unmet Transit Needs
Every year, HCAOG is required by state law to solicit public comments on unmet transit needs. The agency then decides whether requests made by the public meet the definition of “unmet needs” and whether they are reasonable to meet. If so, the Humboldt Transit Authority is required to plan to meet the needs.
In addition to the other items on its packed agenda next week, the HCAOG Board will hold its annual hearing on unmet transit needs. If you’re a bus rider with needs to report, we encourage you to let the Board know. If you miss that meeting, the City of Eureka is also holding its unmet transit needs hearing next week, as is the City of Arcata. You can also email your comments to HCAOG. No matter how you submit your comments, they all end up with HCAOG in the end.
News from Beyond the North Coast
World Day of Remembrance
Sunday is the annual World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. More than 50 million people have been killed and hundreds of millions injured by drivers of cars and trucks since automobiles were introduced over a century ago, and the numbers keep rising. The World Day of Remembrance encourages us to reflect on this raging global pandemic, and take action to stop it.
States Should Be Held Accountable for Road Safety Results
The federal government requires states to adopt targets for road safety, but there are no consequences for failing to meet those targets. In fact, the targets themselves can be anything the states want, and many states have official safety targets of increasing the number of people killed and injured on their roads and highways! Advocates are asking the federal government to actually hold states accountable for improving road safety, which could result in revolutionary changes in transportation planning nationwide. However, with the Trump administration actively defunding many safety plans and projects, we aren’t holding our breath for a positive reaction.
What’s More Important: Fares or Reliability?
Public transit should be both affordable and reliable. But if there’s not enough money to reduce or eliminate fares while also increasing frequency and reliability, which should be the priority? Given the chronic underfunding of US transit agencies, this is a dilemma most of them confront every time they develop a budget.
The Collector is CRTP’s weekly transportation news roundup, published every Friday. We focus on North Coast news, but we also include relevant state, national and international transportation news – plus other items that we just find kind of interesting! To submit items for consideration, email colin@transportationpriorities.org.