40th Street in Oakland is your classic road-diet candidate. It is a wide 4-lane arterial with minimal traffic — and it serves as an important connector between the Macarthur BART station and the big shopping center in Emeryville.
So why is Oakland planning Green-Stripe sharrows instead? Instead of standard bike lanes, Oakland Public Works wants to submit an application for non-standard green stripe sharrows. Here is what the application states:
The experiment is proposed for 40th Street between Adeline Street and Webster Street in proximity of the MacArthur BART Transit Station and Transit Village development. In California, the use of non-standard traffic control devices must be reviewed and approved by the California Traffic Control Devices Committee and by the Federal Highway Administration. The City will request
permission to experiment in 2012. If approved, the experiment would be conducted in 2012 and 2013.Problem Statement
The California Vehicle Code requires bicyclists to “ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway” (CVC 21202(a)). Exceptions to this requirement include roadways with “a substandard width lane” defined as “a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane” (CVC 21202(a)(3)). In the City of Oakland, the majority of urban arterials and collectors have lane widths that are too narrow for a bicycle and vehicle to operate side by side in a safe manner.
Hopefully the application will be rejected because the “Problem Statement” is erroneous. The real “problem statement” is the lack of political will to implement a simple road-diet. 40th Street traffic volumes are relatively low, thus a road-diet is the correct engineering solution for bike accommodation (and the dangerous speeding).
Even more distressing is the rationale used by Oakland planners to oppose bike lanes. The problem, they say, isn’t traffic volumes today, but future traffic volumes — partly due to a “transit-oriented” development in the works at the Macarthur BART station.
What are the traffic counts on this stretch of road? If the projected AADT is under about 12K then I agree with you. Excessive road size is one of the most under-appreciated sources of danger in the U.S.
Of course Oakland is also insisting that the “transit-oriented” development at Macarthur Bart provide plenty of (expensive to provide) parking, so it seems likely that it will get used.
And of course there’s a good reason that the street is so wide in the first place: it needed the room for the train tracks that used to be in the center, which served transbay trains long before BART was built.
Given that the Transbay Tube is getting packed, restoring streetcars over the Bay Bridge would probably take a lot of the pressure off….
…but that would REDUCE SPACE FOR CARS. OH NOES!
Too bad they’re replacing the train-compatible old east span with a new one that is specifically designed to be too weak to accommodate a future rail line.
You would have to be insane to ride on 40th Street with sharrows when 42nd Street has reasonably safe traffic speeds and volumes. Nobody is going to use this as proposed.
The real death trap is the block of 40th between Adeline and San Pablo, which already has sharrows, and which you can’t avoid because the other streets don’t go through. That’s also unfortunately the block where car traffic is going to back up for the light at San Pablo, so it’s the least likely to ever get its road diet.
I’m all for road diets – where appropriate, and I’m not sure this is the place for it.
When BART was doing seismic retrofit work on 40th, the road was shrunk to 1 lane in each direction and traffic through there was a mess. The diet might work if it was extended further, but I’m not sure.
And as Eric Fischer points out, there are adjacent streets that provide safer places to ride.
There are plenty of streets in Oakland that would work great on a diet – Park Blvd. has been on one due to another seismic retrofit project for close to a year with little or no impact on traffic. Previously cars drove down this stretch at 50 mph or greater; now they need to travel the speed limit. There are many other 4 lane roads in Oakland that could easily be reduced to 2 lanes.
Lane closures from road construction is not a good predictor of road-diets (though it is amazing how often that argument is made).
For one thing, a road-diet is more than just lane removal. Traffic engineers will adjust signal timing. And at busy intersections, they would probably opt for removing parking instead. And 40th has a wide median space, unlike most road-diets.
I would also suspect that the BART construction was along a the section of 40th under the freeway where no lane reduction is required anyway. Thus, whatever traffic backup you were seeing is not at all predictive.
I agree that lane closures due to construction are not a good predictor of any effect a road diet might have. However, I think it should also be made clear that the City of Oakland bike planners are highly in favor of road diets and implement them whenever they have an opportunity. 14th St in West Oakland is an example of this from just the past few months, and in 2013 road diets will also be implemented on sections of Broadway, E 12th St, Adeline, and W MacArthur.
As for 40th St, however, there is a lot more history there than you are presenting. I was one of those people out there years ago with the city bike planners, canvassing the neighborhood door to door trying to raise support and awareness for bike lanes on that stretch, but it still didn’t happen. I’m just as upset as anyone about this, but I don’t blame the city for lack of trying. The existing plan is a compromise, which is what people have to accept sometimes in order to get stuff done.
As someone who has bicycled in both directions on 40th, I certainly concur with your analysis. Given the proximity of the station to the shopping centers in Emeryville, it shows the total lack of imagination on the part of traffic planners who fail to think about the volume of people who could ride Bart with the bicycles and then quickly ride down 40th to the shopping centers.
Also, don’t forget how close this station is to the Emeryville waterfront, Berkley marina, and shoreline bikepath. It certainly would be a draw for all those SF city folk who dont’ drive, but would like to spent some time in the East Bay.
The city of Oakland did try to implement bike lanes on this stretch of 40th, and spent years trying to convince the neighbors and AC Transit that it would work but to no avail. The fact that they would have to remove the median with the plantings that the neighbors had kept for years made it a non-starter for some.
The current green-backed sharrows are the city’s “plan B”, and I applaud them for being creative in trying to still find some way to accommodate bikes on this stretch. It is already a signed bike route and people already bike here with no markings on the pavement, so the sharrows can only be an improvement.
If you don’t like the sharrows then you can use the bike lanes that the city will be installing just to the south on West MacArthur Blvd, in conjunction with a road diet.