Oakland’s 7th/8th Street Protected Bike Lane has a Deadly Flaw
Oakland DOT is putting the finishing touches on a concrete-curb-and-parking protected bike lane on a section of 7th/8th Street in Oakland from Fallon Street to 5th Avenue. The new infrastructure is generally good, with proper sight lines and well-designed driveway openings.
However, the city included a disturbingly dangerous element at the eastern end of the project—an overly wide and gentle slip lane allowing eastbound motorists turning right onto 5th to speed unexpectedly through the bike lane, as seen in the lead image.
“I was so looking forward to using this new bike lane to ride with my friends who only ride on protected areas, but after riding there yesterday, I would only take experienced riders through that slip turn,” wrote Oakland advocate Bryan Culbertson, in an email to Streetsblog.
“E7th/E8th is also a designated through-route for large trucks heading to Embarcadero West and the 880,” was the unsigned reply from the Oakland DOT public information officer (PIO) email, in response to an inquiry from Streetsblog. “With the acute angle of this right-turn and the need to facilitate this heavy truck movement, this location would have required intensive civil design and construction beyond the scope of this paving coordination project.”
Or, it should be noted, they could just close the slip lane. Trucks could be less “facilitated” in the pursuit of safety.
“The dangerous slip lane running through the protected bike lane on 8th & 5th is further evidence that OakDOT prioritizes the convenience of drivers over the safety of cyclists,” wrote San Antonio neighborhood advocate Michael Tandemeskel.
Bike East Bay’s Robert Prinz was kind enough to look up a meeting of Oakland’s Bicyclist & Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC) from 2023. Apparently, the BPAC brought the issue up, and was also told that it was too expensive to close the slip lane. The BPAC suggested looking at cost sharing with the Brooklyn Basin developer, since this could be part of a bike route to and from the housing complex. Staff apparently responded that they “will look into it.”
“This bike lane was designed in-house, working within the constraints of our paving-coordination program which means we cannot make major modifications to traffic signals or curb lines/drainage infrastructure, both of which would have been required to modify this existing slip lane,” continued Oakland’s PIO.
The PIO added that “OakDOT’s Complete Streets Infrastructure Division was able to design and deliver this project expediently and efficiently along with repaving. This project installed over 4000 linear feet of fully separated bike lanes and narrowed the roadway to calm and slow vehicle traffic on this critical link in the City’s bikeway network.”
“OakDOT is already batting well above average with the amount of other traffic calming and concrete work they are managing to fit into these budgets,” wrote Prinz in defense of Oakland DOT.
Streetsblog agrees. But it doesn’t change the fact that this slip lane is extremely dangerous. Imagine a truck driver going east in the right-hand vehicle lane of 7th at the same time a mother and child on a cargo bike are in the ‘protected’ bike lane heading in the parallel direction to their home in San Antonio. The truck driver is heading for 880, so he’s already transitioning into “freeway mode” and driving too fast. The driver isn’t even aware there’s a cyclist on his right behind the row of parked cars. Even if he checks his right-hand mirror before entering the slip lane, there’d be nothing to see but a row of parked cars and empty space. The mother realizes too late that the truck is merging into the “protected” bike lane at a point still far from the intersection (I know when I rode it the first time I certainly didn’t anticipate that the car next to me on the other side of a protective curb would suddenly be flying at an oblique angle across my path in the “protected” bike lane). The mother riding the cargo bike screams, slams on the brakes, and tries to swerve away, but it all happens too fast and there isn’t anywhere to go—she ends up under the truck’s wheels.
Anybody who thinks such a scenario is unlikely hasn’t been paying attention for the past half-century.
Andemeskel, meanwhile, was outraged by the disconnect between Oakland claiming it doesn’t have funds to close the slip lane, when it somehow had the funds to remove citizen-installed speed bumps in his neighborhood last May.
“A month later OakDOT builds a speedway through a bike lane and is actively directing cars into the path of cyclists,” he wrote in his email to Streetsblog. “But it is permitted because it follows all city, state, and federal guidelines despite the clear and present danger to cyclists … Are deaths and accidents tolerable when done by design?”
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