Oakland cyclists are watching with delight as the city makes steady progress with its Lakeside Family Streets project, which is adding concrete-protected bike lanes on Harrison and Grand, plus safer pedestrian crossings. Another short but sweet feature of the project just opened: a cut-through ramp for cyclists going north-south on Harrison (see lead image).
Bike East Bay's Robert Prinz recently "took the liberty of biking through it ... I don't know if it is officially open yet or not, or if someone moved the barriers, but it seemed to work for me."
Streetsblog last covered the progress on this major intersection in July, when the construction on the cut-through started. Before that, Streetsblog revealed that Oakland DOT hadn't planned on providing a route for cyclists to go directly north/south on Harrison across Grand.
The argument was that it was impossible to do because of the roots of the trees in the pictures. Instead, northbound cyclists would be expected to turn east, make a U-turn, backtrack to the corner, and then turn north again to continue.
Oakland made this an issue only because they insisted on having six lanes for cars on Harrison (two for drivers going north, two for drivers going south, a parking lane, and a new right turn pocket for northbound drivers on Harrison to turn east onto Grand). Why the new turning lane? When they closed the dangerous slip lane that used to exist here, they converted the existing northbound bike lane into a turning lane for cars. So yes, even on a bike safety project, avoiding even a minute of driver delays was still the highest priority.
To their credit, however, and thanks to the hard work of advocates, Oakland's engineers did a little more thinking and figured out a workable solution that doesn't force cyclists into a Rube Goldberg route to go north-south on Harrison.
"The short ramp from the former slip turn lane to the cut-through path is a not-insignificant 16 percent grade, because the path was designed to sit on top of the median island instead of cutting through it, to protect the tree roots," said Prinz. But, as Streetsblog confirmed firsthand, it is totally rideable and a great improvement over the deadly zipper-across-the-slip-lane that existed before.
It's also a lesson for advocates: when an official tells you something for bicycle safety is "impossible," don't believe them. Just push harder.
Meanwhile, Prinz cautions cyclists riding through the area that construction is far from finished. "There is definitely more work left to complete at the Grand/Harrison intersection to separate out the bike and pedestrian waiting spaces. So in the meantime, I encourage bike riders to take it slow while riding through there, and keep a lookout for other bike riders and pedestrians to reduce conflicts."
Are you aware of other examples where engineers or other officials declared a bike lane impossible? Post your comments below.
