Rockridge residents led a traffic study — and designed a plan to slow down their streets

Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood is understood for its walkable purchasing district and chic residential streets shaded by mature airplane timber. It is usually flanked by main arteries, similar to Alcatraz and Claremont avenues, which ship automobiles rushing by way of the neighborhood on their technique to Freeway 24. One resident instructed us he dangers getting side-swiped simply backing out of his driveway.

Residents of the group met with the Oakland Division of Transportation eight instances earlier this 12 months to analysis and develop a plan to sluggish issues down. The method, the primary within the metropolis to function such an intensive collaboration between OakDOT and neighborhood residents, might turn into a mannequin for the way communities throughout Oakland might expedite their site visitors options.

“I favored the experiment,” Josh Rowan, OakDOT’s director, stated. “We are going to be taught from it and take a look at once more.”

A bunch of a dozen residents, representing streets with distinct challenges, fashioned the Gradual Neighborhood Pilot Working Group. They met with metropolis transit and planning workers, hand-gathered native site visitors knowledge, learn transit research, and arrange a listserv to replace their neighbors and area their questions. Finally, in April, they supplied a bundle of suggestions to OakDOT.

However as an alternative of recommending a single pilot undertaking, the residents produced a 29-page plan with 10 potential pilots. It recommends new buildings at entry factors into the neighborhood from Claremont Avenue and Alcatraz Avenue that might make it tougher to hurry by way of — a centerline hardening construction and road-narrowing bulbouts that might make it faster and safer to cross the road. 

Throughout the neighborhood, the plan recommends a wide range of traffic-slowing interventions, together with the putting in new cease indicators at intersections, hardening centerlines with versatile posts, narrowing intersections with versatile posts, utilizing cement planters to create small roundabouts, and putting in further pace bumps, pace humps, or pace tables.

The method was pushed by group members who sought a substitute for diverters, which OakDOT had proposed as a traffic-slowing pilot final 12 months. The diverter plan would have positioned Okay-rails or heavy planters as diagonal obstructions to pressure automobiles to make a flip into different streets, disrupting direct shortcuts from Alcatraz to Claremont. Many locally rejected the diverter pilot, fearing that it will direct harmful automotive site visitors onto aspect streets. 

Rowan despatched the working group’s plan to his engineering workforce for evaluate and delivered his evaluation of the outcomes on July 2. ”Some good concepts have been developed that warrant consideration from the neighborhood,” he wrote to the working group. However “these concepts aren’t actually what I might contemplate a ‘pilot.’”

All the proposals have been too costly, he later defined to The Oaklandside, to implement on a pilot foundation. He stated he really useful a couple of he discovered “fairly good” for everlasting set up, together with centerline hardening and posts on streets that served as a “gateway into the neighborhood.” And he stated he nonetheless wished to maneuver ahead with the diverters, which, he instructed the group within the July e-mail, “have been by no means taken off the desk.”

“I would really like the neighborhood to think about the diverter pilot,” Rowan stated within the e-mail. “I consider will probably be easy, elegant, and efficient.” The diverter pilot, if permitted by the group at forthcoming assembly, could be in place for 90 days and its slowdown impact analyzed, he stated. Then the town would contemplate a extra everlasting diverter system. Cheap infrastructure pilots like these are sometimes utilized by transportation departments to check the effectiveness of designs earlier than incurring vital prices.

“The pilot might be/could be train,” Rowan stated in an e-mail to The Oaklandside that betrayed his frustration with the group course of. “It’s most likely two days to put in. We’re getting into 12 months two of speaking about it.” He stated members of the working group went rogue throughout the course of, reaching out to metropolis officers exterior of his division to stress them so as to add the infrastructure they wished, which he referred to as “an act of dangerous religion.” 

Megan Gaudet, a member of the working group in opposition to diverters, additionally expressed frustration, saying she was upset that not one of the group’s suggestions have been unlikely to be applied earlier than the diverter pilot. “It’s onerous to place into phrases how I really feel about this betrayal of the working group and the group as an entire,” she stated.

Rowan stated he wanted group consensus on a single pilot, however didn’t obtain that.

“My aim was to have the group workforce get up behind a single plan,,” he stated in emailed feedback to The Oaklandside. “We acquired near the end line, however we didn’t meet the aim.”

A working group fashioned from a blow-up

The Rockridge working group emerged out of an intense backlash final 12 months when OakDOT first proposed the diverter plan.

Tensions crescendoed at a gathering on the Faculty Avenue Presbyterian Church in December, when a number of residents angrily pushed again in opposition to the concept. By the point of that assembly, some residents had been talking out for months about harmful shut calls with rushing drivers treating the neighborhood as a mini freeway. One resident, Tegan Hoffman, referred to as it “unmanageable.” 

At that assembly, Rowan stated his division had deliberate a hall research to check potential options, however when the finances for that research didn’t materialize, he needed to make a fast resolution to decelerate automobiles as quick as potential. Many individuals stated they felt missed, saying they’d by no means heard in regards to the plan. 

Rowan responded to the frustration by suggesting at that assembly the formation of a working group that might collaborate with him. 

The plan took off. In January, Hoffman, Gaudet, and different neighbors distributed flyers in regards to the new working group to Rockridge residents. Gaudet stated a whole bunch signed as much as obtain updates, and greater than 40 volunteers joined the group.

Rowan tasked Gaudet and Hoffman, who had been at odds on the contentious December assembly, to every choose residents from a wide range of streets to affix the working group. 

The method kicked off with Rowan offering the small print of what a pilot undertaking would entail. It might price as much as $40,000, and its tenet could be “incremental enchancment,” slightly than “perfection,” he stated. The fee could be lined by a site visitors security earmark District 1 Councilmember Dan Kalb allotted from a discretionary fund. 

“The security and high quality of lifetime of PEOPLE who reside in Oakland’s neighborhoods ought to take precedence over these in CARS who’re utilizing the streets to chop by way of the neighborhoods to shorten journey distances or time,” Rowan wrote in a memo for the group. Rowan has prioritized pedestrian security for years, relationship again to his time because the director of transportation for Atlanta. 

He laid out some constraints. No a part of the neighborhood may very well be minimize off, and site visitors move must be maintained; no a part of the arterial avenues of Telegraph, Alcatraz, Faculty, and Claremont may very well be modified, as that might require capital funds and approval by companions similar to AC Transit and Caltrans. Any adjustments would must be of a “tactical” nature, that means “short-term, detachable, transportable.”

Ultimately, the group group by no means settled on a single proposed pilot undertaking, and most of the proposals fell exterior the bounds of the constraints Rowan had set out.

On a cold day final February, the group gathered for a “site visitors counting get together” to assemble knowledge on automotive, bike owner and pedestrian site visitors within the neighborhood, following steerage from OakDOT. Volunteers hand-counted site visitors at 34 intersections within the morning and 43 intersections within the night, together with the variety of individuals touring in automobiles, the quantity getting into intersections throughout commute instances, and the place these individuals tended to show. 

In accordance with working group emails, “barely over half” of the automobiles volunteers noticed entered Hillegass by turning left from Alcatraz, then exited Hillegass by turning proper onto Claremont. That sample suggests Hillegass is getting used as a pass-through. 

“It might imply that actions to take away left turns on the intersection could be unlikely to have a significant impression on whole quantity,” Megan Weir, an OakDOT staffer, stated in an e-mail to her workers. 

They discovered that the intersection of Hillegass and 63rd is particularly busy with automobiles and a candidate for a site visitors circle, whereas the intersection of Hillegass and 62nd is closely utilized by pedestrians, making it a candidate for bulbouts — which lengthen the sidewalk into site visitors lanes close to an intersection to slender a roadway. 

Throughout the February pattern, Hillegass and Colby acquired almost a 3rd extra site visitors than different native streets. Martin Avenue, the brief road close to the doorway to Freeway 24, was the subsequent most trafficked, offering validation to residents who had been complaining for years about drivers hitting harmful speeds and interesting in dangerous conduct to attempt to attain the freeway shortly. 

Zack Walton, an lawyer who sits on the board of the Rockridge Neighborhood Planning Council and attended the group’s conferences as an observer, stated the information gathering could have been crucial a part of the undertaking.

“In my expertise in disputes, when issues are within the summary and arguments can get actually heated, actual data generated helps,” he stated. 

Utilizing the information, the working group created detailed maps exhibiting the quantity of automobiles transferring by way of the neighborhood throughout commuting instances. It’s the identical kind of information that the transportation division collects within the lead-up to different tasks. However the company doesn’t have the assets to assemble site visitors knowledge for each single one of many metropolis’s almost 900 intersections. 

Utilizing the Rockridge experiment to learn the remainder of the town

Over the past three years, Oakland has been in one thing of a stalemate over how one can repair harmful site visitors issues, and OakDOT has been sluggish to place pilot applications in place. Advocates similar to Bike East Bay and Site visitors Violence Speedy Response have pushed to put in everlasting traffic-slowing gear on their very own. When some residents within the San Antonio neighborhood took it upon themselves so as to add their very own piles of tires to cease sideshows within the final 12 months, OakDOT pushed again, with Rowan, the transportation director, expressing concern that the town may very well be financially accountable for collisions ensuing from such community-installed interventions.

To keep away from these points and expedite protected options, the town has been growing a group traffic-calming program that each includes neighbors and faucets the oversight and engineering experience of OakDOT. Councilmember Carroll Fife and her workers have led that program for a few years, and it’s the place the concept for 90-day pilots first emerged. 

If different communities need to replicate the work from the Rockridge group, contributors stated, they need to realize it requires a ton of time and a spotlight, from writing up assembly notes to posting common updates to the listserve. 

The method was additionally time-consuming for OakDOT.

“Rowan participated in most if not all of these conferences,” Zack Walton, an lawyer who sits on the board of the Rockridge Neighborhood Planning Council, stated. “I don’t assume we will count on that degree of effort to be repeatable repeatedly.”

One factor that ought to be replicated, he stated, is the  cost-effective strategy of group knowledge assortment underneath the steerage of the transportation division to information traffic-safety pilot tasks. 

OakDOT workers have typically stated it might probably take months to schedule neighborhood visits and carry out knowledge assortment. At instances, the division has collaborated with group organizations. Evaluation by Site visitors Violence Speedy Response, which measured rushing on Worldwide Boulevard, helped push AC Transit and the town so as to add new bollards to the highway final 12 months and to establish funding to put in pace humps sooner or later. 

Bike East Bay advocate Robert Prinz instructed The Oaklandside that he’d hardly ever seen the extent of OakDOT coordination that passed off in Rockridge “exterior multi-million greenback grant-funded tasks.” Nonetheless, he stated, the Rockridge experiment is a optimistic improvement if it helps get different tasks off the bottom in underserved areas. 

“I’d wish to see extra of this throughout the East Bay, with the acknowledgement that most individuals don’t have the assets to get that concerned,” Prinz stated. “I want to see a dedication from OakDOT to maneuver the prevailing community-based site visitors calming program ahead with an identical degree of help.”

In an e-mail assertion to the working group in January, Rowan, the transportation director, indicated that he noticed the experiment in that gentle. 

“We search to ship advantages to our metropolis, particularly to those that have higher issues and fewer assets,” he wrote.