Outdoor café dining in downtown is on the menu when it comes to making Manteca a more inviting and safer place for pedestrians.

The city’s blueprint for growth — the municipal general plan — lists sidewalk café seating as a key component of making Manteca a place where people are enticed to walk. An overall strategy aimed at deemphasizing automobile use to reduce congestion and enhance air quality also involves aggressive expansion of separated bicycle paths.

The circulation portion of the general plan when it comes to downtown pedestrians also includes:

• encouraging more bulb-outs extending into intersections and at crosswalks to reduce walking distance and provide a safe peninsula for pedestrians.

• adding more benches along sidewalks as well as public art.

• constructing wider sidewalks were feasible.

• enhancing pedestrian lighting.

New neighborhoods also will see:

• bulb-outs at select intersections to reduce crossing distance and calm traffic.

• providing marked - and possible signalized - mid-block crossing near schools, parks, and other neighborhood attractions.

• landscaped median refuge islands with a raised or textured sidewalk where appropriate at crosswalks.

• provide sidewalks separated from streets by landscaping or grass strips wherever feasible.



Manteca plans on adding more separated bicycle paths

The city intends to create a bicycle path loop of Manteca using the existing 3.4-mile Tidewater segment as the backbone. Bike paths are planned to run along Airport Way, Lathrop Road, Austin Road and Atherton Drive.

Long-range plans call for connecting the off-street bicycle path system from near the intersection with Moffat Boulevard and Industrial Park Drive with a proposed regional route between Manteca and Ripon. That route will be part of the 1,049-acre Austin Road Business Park.

The city also plans to extend the Tidewater Bikeway north of Lathrop Road to connect with a route already in place through the Union Ranch and Del Webb neighborhoods. That northern extension could also one day reach toward French Camp Road.

Almost all of the bicycle path additions will be a condition for developers to fulfill. The city plans to include all future bicycle path additions within landscape maintenance districts to avoid impacting the general fund for ongoing upkeep.

Streets would be designed to accommodate bicycle lanes or space for bicycles. Lane markings at signalized intersections will allow bicyclists to navigate between through traffic on the left and traffic turning right. Also street grates and such in bicycle lanes will be bicycle friendly. That means bicycle tires will be able to pass over them without getting caught and that the surface will be even with pavement.