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Menlo Park Slow Streets

About This Map

This map is a transparency tool for Menlo Park’s draft Slow Streets Program. It makes the program’s stated gating criteria concrete by showing, on an actual map, which streets appear to be captured by the program’s speed and injury-history logic.

The goal is make it easier to understand what the program design means in practice. When the City says requests will later be screened using street type, speed, and injury history, residents should be able to see what that screening appears to identify to understand the program design. The draft framework is described in the City’s March 10, 2026 staff report: Slow Streets Program staff report.

What The Map Shows

The map translates the draft program’s stated filters into visible geography. It also adds contextual layers that help residents understand what the program appears to capture and what it leaves out.

Qualified Street + High Speed Street segments that are both eligible by type and have speed_85 > 25 mph. This makes the draft program’s speed gate visible instead of leaving it implicit.
Qualified Street + Injury Crash Injury crash locations that fall on qualified street types. This makes the injury-history gate visible instead of leaving it to an internal review process.
Traffic Calming Requests Locations where the City has received resident requests for safety help.
Demographic Layers Census block-group layers showing Percent Vulnerable, Percent Under 18, Percent Over 75, and Percent Over 85.

How Streets Qualify

A street segment is treated as qualified if either the city street database classifies it as Local, or it appears in the official Menlo Park street classification map as a Neighborhood Connector or Bicycle Boulevard.

This override matters because some streets are classified inconsistently across city datasets. The street-classification map is used to correct those mismatches where appropriate.

Key Takeaways

16.5%
of qualified street length is also high speed
About 20.0 km of 121.3 km
18.5%
of qualified street names have at least one high-speed segment
61 of 329 street names

The most important takeaway is not that these streets should automatically receive treatment. It is that the draft program’s filtering logic can be mapped, reviewed, and questioned in public. There is no need for the gating criteria to remain a mystery after a resident request is submitted.

How To Read The Demographic Layers

The demographic layers are public Census block-group measures, not household-level or parcel-level resident data. They are intended to show where more children and older adults live, and where safer lower-speed streets may provide greater benefit.

Percent Vulnerable is defined here as % under 18 + % age 75+, expressed as a share of each block group’s total population.

Traffic Calming Requests

The traffic-calming request layer shows places where the City has received resident requests for safety help.

These points are approximate placements derived from the street network: intersections where possible, and corridor midpoints where the request refers to a street segment or range.

Data Sources

Proposed Plan

The draft Slow Streets Program framework, process, and staff recommendations are documented in the March 10, 2026 City Council staff report: Slow Streets Program staff report.

This map is meant to be read alongside that report as a public-facing translation of its criteria. The report describes a process; this map shows what the underlying criteria appear to pick out on the ground.