Safety Story with Pedro Naranjo and Mike King

For this installment of Stories from the Field, UC Berkeley SafeTREC’s Karen Nguyen Vo spoke with Pedro Naranjo, human services manager with the City of San Leandro's Human Services Department, and Mike King, co-founder of Pear Street Consulting. In this conversation, they talk to us about the City’s new Age-Friendly initiative and one of its goals to improve safety for adults aged 50 and over, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable road users who walk, bike, and roll in San Leandro.

The City of San Leandro has partnered with this year's Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training (CPBST) program, a joint project with California Walks and funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety. Read their Safety Story below!

What is your current role within the City of San Leandro?

• Pedro: I currently serve as the City of San Leandro's human services manager. The City made a very important decision in early 2022 to establish a new Human Services Department as part of efforts to be more intentional about addressing the social services needs in our community. My role in the department is to oversee several of our services, including the Age-Friendly initiative. I staff the Senior Commission, which has been a very integral component of the initiative, and work with our age-friendly consultant, Mike King.
• Mike: I am the co-founder of Pear Street Consulting, and we've been honored to work with Pedro and San Leandro's Human Services Department to develop the Age-Friendly San Leandro initiative and the City’s Age-Friendly Action Plan. We are continuing to support implementation of the priority areas and projects that came out of the Action Plan.

The City currently has an Age-Friendly Action Plan in place from July 2024 to June 2029 — what is the plan and how has it developed over time?

• Pedro: The Action Plan is a road map that will help make our city more livable for older adults. The idea is that if our city is more livable for vulnerable populations such as older adults and people with disabilities, it's more livable for everyone. We have been engaging our community, as well as nonprofit and public partners to develop a guide that showcases where we are presently and where we are going in the future.

  As cities, we want to support our elderly population. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also smart to have a plan that informs decisions about how we invest our resources. Funders want to know that you understand the issues that your city is facing and that you have a good plan to address them.

  This has been a community effort since 2018 through the City of San Leandro’s Senior Commission, which is composed of San Leandro residents over the age of 50 who have training, lived experience, and/or a commitment to the well-being of older adults. This commission raised awareness and advocated for age-friendly initiatives in the city. We brought our consultant Mike King on board in late 2023 through a competitive-bid process, which is when the plan's development was able to take form.

• Mike: We are working with the Public Works Department’s Transportation and Engineering Division, which historically has not engaged with Human Services at this level until now. We are also working with Emergency Services, the Community Development Department’s Housing Division, and the City’s Information Technology Department for initiatives such as providing cybersecurity training at the San Leandro Senior Community Center. We've also worked with a number of nonprofit and service organizations, such as the Rotary Club, Tech Exchange, and San Leandro’s Resilience Hubs. We have also had good responses from local businesses who are very helpful and eager to make this initiative accessible to their patrons.

What drew the City to apply for this year's Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program (CPBST)?

• Mike: When we engaged with community members in 2024, the top priority among respondents to our community-wide surveys and focus groups was pedestrian safety. This was even more of a priority than affordable housing, which is really saying something considering that we live in California.

  San Leandro is a very urban city and is an attractive place for older adults to retire. They're still active, healthy, and want to be engaged in their community, so being able to traverse the city by walking and biking is really important to them.

  There is more the city can do to ensure that folks can move safely, especially when paying attention to the unique experiences of older adults and people with disabilities. For example, we can adjust the time to walk on a long crosswalk, as well as place new crosswalks so folks don't have to go long distances to reach a storefront across the street. This is relatively new ground for communities who are engaged in age-friendly planning. How does an agency like the Human Services Department, which has a very different role than a city transportation or engineering department, think about the implementation and maintenance of pedestrian and safety infrastructure?

  Pedro, myself, and others recognized that we need to build partnerships with community partners and our own colleagues, such as the City's Transportation and Engineering Division. It was through the Transportation and Engineering Division that we learned about the CPBST.

  We found the opportunity attractive because it could help us create a foundation of how to achieve pedestrian safety with an age-friendly lens, as well as build the capacity of the Human Services Department and our partners to obtain funding and support for these initiatives. The CPBST has helped us speak to those challenges in a more nuanced way and bring more partners into the process, which will help us achieve tangible benefits from safety projects we're looking to implement down the road.

How has partnering with the CPBST helped advance the goals of the Age-Friendly Action Plan and initiative, particularly those pertaining to making the city more accessible to older adults?

• Mike: The CPBST has helped create a foundation for building partnerships, assessments, and a knowledge base for how to create age-friendly infrastructure that allows our community to continue being active, physically healthy, and feeling a sense of belonging as they age. Pedro and his team will continue to coordinate walk assessments throughout the city to gather technical data. With the help of the CPBST, we are now entering a phase where we can discuss how to prioritize and obtain funding for age-friendly pedestrian and bicyclist safety projects.
• Pedro: The City has conducted similar assessments in the past, but a distinction is that this assessment is now being done with an age-friendly lens and led by the Human Services Department. This has allowed us to bring our expertise forward, especially considering our work with vulnerable, marginalized communities and leveraging non-traditional partners in the process.

What lessons or valuable takeaways did you gain from developing the Age-Friendly Action Plan and initiative? What were the challenges and successes that came from it?

• Pedro: The Age-Friendly initiative is ongoing and builds upon the outline that the Action Plan has provided. We continue to keep the Senior Commission involved throughout this process, and we have been very intentional and thoughtful about engaging our colleagues within the City of San Leandro. Developing a healthy and livable community includes aspects like transportation, housing, and public safety, so it is critical that we engage with our colleagues within city government in these areas.

• Mike: A lot of work has to do with changing the culture. For over 50 years, we've been designing communities with motor vehicle travel as the main mode of transportation. We're learning that to have a truly accessible and age-friendly community, we need to consider a different vantage point. Just as with anything, this will take many, many years to make new habits.

  People understand the concept of accessibility, but it has not been internalized in the way we do things. The older adult population will grow over the next few decades, and the overlap between older adults and people with disabilities is significant. Hopefully, through this program and the initiative as a whole, the message to prioritize accessibility is getting out loud and clear.

What are your active transportation visions, either short or long-term, for San Leandro?

• Pedro: Short-term, I would like to increase awareness and utilization of the existing services we have in San Leandro. We provide a FLEX RIDES program that runs shuttles for older adults to various destinations in the city, as well as a subsidized Uber component that provides door-to-door transportation services. I also want to take action towards improving the safety of the specific sites assessed in the upcoming CPBST report.
  
  Long-term, we need to help our residents plan for the future. We found that when people think about older adults, they often think about people over the age of 70 or 80. We also need to consider the current and future needs of people in their 50s and 60s. A single approach won’t work, so we need to create multiple transportation options that are effective and safe for all.

  I also want to be creative about how to leverage the existing resources. For example, as a result of this work, we're now partnering with emergency preparedness and other key partners to design and pilot a senior evacuation program during an emergency when the city activates a shelter. As part of this work, we are working with our local transportation partners to explore ways to utilize their vehicles to evacuate seniors and people with disabilities during an emergency evacuation.

• Mike: We need to fundamentally change the conceptions that we have of what it means to be an older adult. For so long, we've internalized the idea that it's common and reasonable for older folks to stay home, but we really need to eradicate that picture. We do not have to accept a future where being a certain age or having certain abilities means that you don't get to participate in parts of your community. There is no doubt that we can change the way our communities and active transportation systems work.

If you had a superpower and could change anything, what would the future of active transportation safety look like?

• Mike: I like the idea of having a "menu of options" for transportation, whether it be public transit, motor vehicles, walking, or biking. Folks should be able to choose how to traverse their community in a way that resonates with them. This comes, in part, from the individualism and democratic values we have in this country and community. It presents challenges to meet people where they're at when we're all so different, but they are challenges we should be excited to take on.

• Pedro: We have heard from older adults that they don't feel safe at multiple levels, so I envision a community where our older adults feel safe traversing through their community. Also, there are other places in the world that have effective transportation systems that serve older adults and people with disabilities, so I would also like to visit those places and bring those practices and systems to our city.

This Stories From the Field interview was conducted in collaboration with UC Berkeley SafeTREC. The opinions and perspectives expressed are those of the interviewee and not necessarily those of SafeTREC or the Office of Traffic Safety.

Funding is provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).