Eyes on the Street: Oakland’s New ‘Ride Up Bulb-Out’
With little fanfare, Oakland DOT has built a “bulb-out” at Brush and 17th that really is a protected corner. Or it’s a protected corner that’s really a bulb-out. Or call it a “Ride Up Bulb-out,” as Oakland DOT does.
Whatever one chooses to call it, this is the right way to do a corner, because it slows turning drivers and gives both pedestrians and cyclists a safe, visible place to wait. “This design feature came out of a recommendation from the Oakland Bicyclist & Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC) infrastructure committee, which staff were then able to incorporate into the design,” explained Bike East Bay’s Robert Prinz.
It’s nice to see this kind of design incorporated into city plans. In years past, Oakland DOT—or at least the consultants they hired—seemed to think adding a bulb-out to facilitate safer pedestrian crossings somehow means one can’t also accommodate protections for cyclists at the intersection.
Likewise, San Francisco regularly designs protected bike lanes that bend left and go around at bulb-outs instead of through or over them. Squeezing cyclists into drivers’ blind spots is exactly the wrong thing to do at an intersection. See the photo above of a bulb-out on Upper Market. Contrast that with the new “ride up” bulb-out in Oakland or, two images below, in Paris.
Occasionally, DOT’s say “well, we don’t have the money for the curb cuts to do a ride-up-and-over-the-bulb-out.” Okay, then, in Streetsblog’s view, they don’t have the money to do the project. Of course, if a DOT listens to Dutch planning experts as they do in Paris (or the smart folks at the Oakland BPAC apparently) the money materializes sometimes.
The simple fact is, a bulb-out with a bike path across it or over it is, for all intents and purposes, the same as a protected corner on a protected intersection. It should all be part of a system to slow traffic, reduce crossing distances, and give everybody better sight lines and more time to avoid conflicts.
Unfortunately, Oakland DOT used plastic posts and paint on the rest of the project on 17th (see below). But we’ll grouse about that in another post.
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