Eyes on the Street: OakDOT Adds Bicycle Cut-Through to Harrison/Grand Intersection

Oakland is in the process of building a bicycle path across a patch of grass and trees at the northwest corner of Lake Merritt, where Grand and Harrison meet. Bike East Bay’s Robert Prinz first reported the news on social media:

As reported in “Grand/Harrison Protected Intersection Plans Have a Dark Secret” last March, as part of this project Oakland had planned to force northbound cyclists to continue on the protected bike lane around the lake to the east. They’d then have to make a u-turn and head west before turning north again at Harrison. Obviously, this would have been less than ideal, to put it mildly.

The stated reason: building a direct route would have required damaging the roots of the trees in the photos above. Instead, they found a way to have the bike path go over the roots. In the updated plans, it even specifies workers have to use hand tools to minimize damage to the trees.

However it’s getting done, it goes to show, as Prinz put it, the importance of being “respectful, but also never accept ‘it’s impossible’ as a solid answer from a traffic engineer.”

Streetsblog would add the same applies to politicians and planners who say bike and pedestrian safety on a project can’t be accommodated because of budgets or whatever reason they give. Yes they can.

This is also a great example of why advocates do what they do—here’s a project that would have been left with an extremely awkward turnaround for cyclists. Now it will be top-notch infrastructure. As to this publication’s role, “you should definitely take credit for bringing more attention to the issue,” wrote Prinz in an email to Streetsblog.

Fair enough. And if you want to support this kind of work by Streetsblog, consider making a donation here. And donate to Bike East Bay too for the excellent work they do!