WALNUT CREEK — There’s an inherent peril looming behind the estimated 150,000 cyclists who make the climb up Mount Diablo’s steep 3,849-feet summit each year: motorists speeding past them along the same narrow, winding roads and blind curves. A decade ago, Alan Kalin, of Danville, rallied a working group within the Mount Diablo Cyclists club to craft a solution that could help ease tensions between people traveling on both two and four wheels but, more important, to also find a safer way to alleviate traffic backups and reduce the number of dangerous collisions. Their first blueprints for bike turnouts were drafted in 2014, featuring a pioneering design that allowed bicyclists, who pedal uphill at slower speeds, to pull into their own paved lane so that vehicles can pass safely — engineered to mimic turnoff lanes that have for years aided vehicular traffic.
Mount Diablo State Park’s roads are the only documented location that has implemented bike turnout infrastructure on a significant scale. “They don’t exist anywhere else in the world,” Kalin said in an interview. “Motorists love them, cyclists love them — bike turnouts keep everybody safe and lowers the animosity between both groups.
It’s not going to eliminate a collision, but we have saved the lives of people that we’ll never know.” Ten years and 1.5 million cyclists later, 67 total bike turnoffs — also known as auxiliary bike lanes — are now open across Mount Diablo State Park.
On Saturday .