Ellen Fletcher

Ride south on Bryant Street from downtown and you will pass signs naming it the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard. Most riders never think about the name. They should. Fletcher spent close to 40 years on Palo Alto's bike committee, 12 years on the City Council and much of her life arguing that a bicycle was ordinary transportation, not a toy. Many of the things cyclists here take for granted began as her ideas or her fights.

This page tells her story as documented by Palo Alto Online, the League of American Bicyclists, Streetsblog and the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Our page on Ellen Fletcher Middle School covers the school that carries her name today.

From Berlin to London

Ellen Fletcher was born in Berlin in 1928. According to her Palo Alto Online obituary, her parents divorced when she was very young and she spent part of her early childhood in foster homes and a Jewish orphanage. Because her father was a Polish citizen, the Nazi government deported her from Germany. She was slated to be sent to Poland.

Instead, in 1938, she reached London on the Kindertransport, the rescue effort that carried Jewish children from Nazi territory to Britain. She found something else there. In London, she later said, "everyone out there was biking." She learned to ride and never stopped.

A bike at Hunter College

Fletcher came to New York City in 1946. As a 17-year-old student at Hunter College she rode a bike to campus year-round. She later described herself as the "only one in college who had a bike on campus," a detail Palo Alto Online repeated in her obituary.

Soon after college she moved west to the Peninsula, first to Menlo Park and then to Palo Alto. She raised a family here. Her daughter, Terry Fletcher, became one of the main public voices for her memory after her death.

The neighborhood activist

Her civic life started at the street level. Palo Alto Online reports that in the 1960s she joined the grassroots campaign against widening Oregon Expressway. Our page on freeways and expressways gives the background on that road.

In the early 1970s she was safety chair at Fairmeadow Elementary School, where she saw how children got to school and how dangerous the trip could be. In 1974 she became chair of the Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee, known as PABAC. The League of American Bicyclists says she kept that seat for nearly 40 years. In 1975 the Palo Alto Civic League named her Citizen of the Year.

Twelve years on the City Council

Fletcher was elected to the City Council in 1977 and served until 1989, according to both the League and Streetsblog. Her middle school's own history repeats a favorite detail: she campaigned with a sign fixed to the back of her bicycle. Several local accounts also describe her as a former vice mayor. We could not confirm the year from a primary source.

Bikes were her signature issue but not her only one. Palo Alto Online credits her leadership with:

• Household hazardous waste. She helped launch the city program for safe disposal of paint, batteries and chemicals, which still runs. Our household hazardous waste guide explains how it works today.
• Smoking rules. She backed early anti-smoking laws in the city.
• A nuclear-free zone. She helped make Palo Alto a declared "nuclear-free zone."
• Clotheslines. She led a change in the law so apartment owners could not stop tenants from drying clothes outside.

Our page on how city government works explains the council she served on.

The Bryant Street bike boulevard

Fletcher's best-known achievement runs right through the middle of town. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Palo Alto began treating bicycle commuting as part of transportation planning. The League quotes fellow advocate Bob Mack: "When the first bike lanes were proposed Ellen was on the front lines." Those lanes linked schools, parks and neighborhoods.

The bigger idea was a whole street designed around bikes. Bryant Street runs north to south between busier Alma Street and Middlefield Road, so it could carry bikes while cars used the main roads. Naomi Bloom, quoted by the League, said the advocates dubbed the concept a "bicycle boulevard."

Palo Alto Online dates the opening of the Bryant Street bike boulevard to 1982. The city's own project page dates the first bike boulevard to the 1970s, so the start depends on whether you count the planning or the finished route. Either way, the city calls Bryant Street "the first Bicycle Boulevard implemented in the United States." In 2002 the City Council named it the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard. Today it runs from Palo Alto Avenue at the north edge of town to East Meadow Drive.

Today the route is the spine of Palo Alto's network. Our guide to Palo Alto bike boulevards covers the newer routes built on the same model and our biking guide suggests rides that use Bryant Street.

Bikes on the train

Fletcher also pushed beyond city limits. Streetsblog reports that from 1977 she and fellow advocate Daryl Skrabac lobbied Southern Pacific, which then ran Peninsula commuter trains, to let riders bring bikes aboard. A four-month trial in 1982 allowed four bikes in the aisle of a cab car. The railroad ended it.

The idea came back after the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board took over the line. According to Streetsblog, San Francisco then put in $40,000 to make room for eight bikes in each cab car. Leah Shahum of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition later credited Fletcher with "pioneering work opening up access on Caltrain for people with bikes." Our Caltrain guide covers today's bike cars and rules.

Riding into her 80s

Fletcher kept riding to City Hall into her 80s. She refused an electric assist, which she called "cheating," according to Streetsblog. In July 2011, at a council hearing on the new bike plan, she said, "You don't have to be a young athlete to ride a bike. Everyone can do it at any age."

Recognition piled up over the years:

She died of lung cancer on November 7, 2012, at 83. Her daughter noted that it was one day after an election. A memorial followed that month and she asked that gifts go to the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Guests were welcome to come in cycling clothes.

The middle school renaming

Her name reached a new generation in 2018. In March 2017 the Palo Alto Unified School District board voted to drop the names of two middle schools, Jordan and Terman, because David Starr Jordan and Lewis Terman had been leaders of the eugenics movement. On March 27, 2018, the board voted 5 to 0 to rename Terman for Ellen Fletcher. The new name took effect in the 2018 to 2019 school year.

Terry Fletcher told Palo Alto Online that by choosing her mother the board had rejected eugenics, since that movement would have considered a Jewish refugee inferior. The school, on Arastradero Road beside Gunn High School, is reached by a network of bike routes she would have liked. Our page on women in Palo Alto history places her among the city's other civic leaders.

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