Eyes on the Street: Lake Merritt Bike Lane Ends Abruptly

Lakeside Drive along Lake Merritt, Oakland. Photo: Walk Oakland Bike Oakland

A recently-striped bike lane is causing confusion along Lakeside Drive in Oakland. Brian Smith posted the above photo to Livable City’s car-free living mail list, and Walk Oakland Bike Oakland blogged about the issue earlier this month. It still hasn’t been corrected, but Jason Patton, Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager for the City of Oakland, said in an email that the city is aware of the issue and is working to correct it:

This is a known issue and I’m working on it diligently. We also discussed the matter at the City of Oakland’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting last Thursday. The bike lane should end at the point where there is insufficient width for the bike lane. To mark the transition, the last 100′ of bike lane stripe will be a skip stripe (Detail 39A) and then two sharrows will follow the end of the bike lane to establish bicyclists’ positioning in the travel lane.

I don’t have a date for when these modifications will be completed, but my goal is as soon as possible.

The more important point, as Roger Miller of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland points out, may be be that the bike lanes have gone in with virtually no impact to traffic. “The city reduced auto lanes from 4 to 2. And there’s no traffic. None,” Miller wrote in an email to Streetsblog. “The City could easily stripe that bike lane on Oak St all the way to I-880. Tomorrow. And for that matter most of the bike plan’s downtown routes with ease.”