Oakland DOT Survey on Foothill Blvd. Project Excludes Protected Bike Lanes
The Oakland Department of Transportation is planning to repave Foothill Boulevard in 2028 from Fruitvale Ave to 23rd Ave as part of a safety project called “Calm Fruitvale Streets.” But before that gets underway, the city wants people to take a survey about what kind of arrangement they’d like to see on this high-injury street.
Unfortunately, the city only offers two possible configurations, and they both include only paint for cyclists. Although there is a place to make comments on the survey, protected bike lanes are just excluded.
Bike East Bay’s Robert Prinz posted about this on social media. He included a diagram of how protected bike lanes would look on the street:
Apparently, staff considered this option “…but decided it wasn’t well suited for this section of Foothill due to the many driveways that would require the bike lane protection to be frequently dropped to allow access to the driveways,” OakDOT spokesperson Kent Bravo wrote in an email to Streetsblog.
However, if properly designed, driveways can work fine with protected bike lanes, as the BicycleDutch blog explained in this video:
But it does require removing more parking spaces to ensure sightlines on driveway approaches.
“Removing half of the car parking would make both curbside protected bikeways and AC Transit / Oakland Fire Department-friendly lane widths possible,” wrote Prinz, in an email to Streetsblog. “But in this instance I think it will be an uphill push to even get just painted bike lanes on Foothill.”
Some background about this deadly section of street from the survey:
Foothill Boulevard between 23rd Ave and Fruitvale Ave is a High-Injury Corridor for people walking, biking, and driving. Since 2019, there have been 87 crashes reported on this section of Foothill, and five people have been killed, including a six-year-old and his mother in 2019.
Foothill is also the street where an AC Transit bus operator was caught on video driving in the bike lane and terrorizing a cyclist, albeit on a different section than this project. But it illustrates again why paint is not protection.
More from the city:
This paving project will include important safety improvements. These may include:
- high visibility crosswalks and upgraded curb ramps
- safer crossings for pedestrians, including safety islands and flashing lights
- traffic calming features to slow cars, such as speed cushions
- biking safety improvements
In Streetsblog’s view, it’s not true to call anything that’s only paint “biking safety improvements.”
“During OakDOT in-person outreach for the project over the past month, the main feedback we received has been to maximize pedestrian safety features. With over a month of outreach remaining, staff are committed to hearing all community perspectives on the future of this important corridor,” added Bravo.
But of course, as Streetsblog has reported many times, “maximizing pedestrian safety” doesn’t entail ignoring bicycle safety. In fact, protected bike lanes make streets safer for pedestrians too by reducing crossing distances.
As mentioned, the survey has a comment section where advocates can write what they like and don’t like about each option. Streetsblog strongly suggests everyone write the same thing for both options: it’s time to put protected bike lanes on the table.
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