Archives

Summer vacation is coming to an end and the back to school blitz is officially here. With kids getting set to resume their daily commute, and some younger…

MTC’s Restrictive Ford GoBike Contract Impeding Expansion of Shared E-Bikes Overshadowed by the expansion of scooters, shared pedal-assist e-bikes have quietly grown in popularity this year. Across the…

Several highly-anticipated pedestrian safety improvements recently opened along Oakland’s Grand Avenue. One of the City’s high injury corridors, Grand has long served as a regional relief valve to…

Just about everyone agrees that the Bay Area’s congested transportation system is in dire need of reinvestment.

Biking on most urban streets may not always be a stress-free experience, but an individual with basic bicycle safety knowledge can usually navigate through streets without incident if…

Bus pads play a critical role in connecting Marin’s communities via transit. However, their hazardous conditions put bus riders in danger.

The series will discuss insurance topics that every driver ought to know in clear and simple terms, using up-to-date information.

Many motorcyclists (and automobile) drivers ask whether or not lane splitting in California is legal. In our state, lane splitting is a highly contentious issue that is subject to many misperceptions. Unlike in the majority of U.S. states, lane splitting is legal in California and it has been for a long time. Still, lane splitting is highly misunderstood, by both drivers and bikers.

When you are involved in an automobile accident in the state of California, whoever is at fault for the accident is responsible for paying for it. This means that if a distracted, drunk, or otherwise negligent driver crashes into you, you have the right to file a claim with that driver’s insurance company to recover compensation for your injuries. In fact, the state of California requires that every driver and vehicle owner have either insurance or “proof of financial responsibility” so that in the event they do cause a crash, they can pay for property damage and injuries sustained by others. Unfortunately, not everyone follows this law.

After last year’s momentous Bike to Work Day that saw the unveiling of new high-profile protected bikeways in Berkeley and Oakland, this year’s event on Thursday, May 11th was a little quieter.

Compared to other population centers in California, the San Jose area appears to be doing well at limiting alcohol-involved injuries, according to the California Highway Patrol’s latest report on statewide traffic collisions. If alcohol-involved injuries were distributed evenly across the state, you’d expect Santa Clara County to have 787 of them. For 2013, the latest year on record, CHP reports 609 alcohol-involved injuries in the county.

The Merced extension will serve very few riders and makes little sense in the context of California’s high speed rail priorities…

On Feb 23, a 9-year-old girl riding a bicycle in San Jose was injured in an auto collision. A few weeks later, the same thing happened to an…

The project has decreased collisions for all modes by 40 percent, increased yield rates, and reduced speeding. However, not everyone is happy…

Numbers don’t lie. But unless you have experience analyzing data, it can sometimes seem difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from the stories they tell.

While the Bay Area is known for its ride-hailing transportation startups, a low-tech casual carpool system has continued to thrive into its fourth decade.

Half a century ago, Caltrans plowed through Redwood City to build Woodside Road… Woodside Road was built according to the era’s abysmal design highway standards, creating a barrier between the eastern and western neighborhoods of Redwood City.

The City of Oakland released a progress report for the Telegraph Avenue Complete Streets Project to assess the project’s performance over its first six months.

Buried in the EIR/EIS is an astonishing revelation of how cost-ineffective the BART extension will be in attracting new transit riders.

As Bay Area Bike Share inches toward a tenfold expansion by 2018, a new Chinese bike share company, Bluegogo, may try to beat it to the streets.

Commuters working between Christmas and New Years were surprised to encounter sudden cuts in BART service this week.

The controversial Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) is losing money and struggling to meet ridership projections…

Parking can be a sensitive issue in most cities, and Oakland is no different…

Oakland has several skewed intersections that could be candidates for peanutabout designs. In particular, two intersections exhibit potential for such a design…

Facing crush-load BART trains, packed buses and ferries, and congested freeways, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission recently approved $40 million in near-term capacity relief. The “Bay Bridge Forward” program seeks to enhance a range of bus, carpool, and ferry solutions to maximize Transbay capacity, including:

This summer marked the fourth year our firm has hosted local high school students for a one week program offering an introduction to careers in law. Once again,…

Transportation funding keeps flowing into Oakland – last week, the Go Uptown project received $6.3 million via an extremely competitive federal TIGER grant. A joint effort between BART…

As Oakland remakes key Downtown corridors such as Telegraph, Harrison, and 20th, big changes are also in store for 27th Street. Oakland recently submitted a grant application to…

As BART’s ridership has surged over the past five years, the system has developed a shortage of station parking. On a typical weekday, many of BART’s lots fill…

Seven years ago in the midst of the Great Recession, BART significantly cut evening and Sunday service in an effort to balance its budget. Prior to cutting service,…

Following the first fatal accident involving a self-driving vehicle, the debate has been renewed over whether autonomous cars are ready to share the road with traditional vehicles. The…

Oakland’s Department of Transportation is finally taking shape, and it can’t come soon enough. In the latest example of poor attention to detail in street design, the City has neglected to reinstall parking meters on a busy stretch of Grand Avenue in the middle of one of the City’s densest neighborhoods.

Last week’s Bike to Work day was one of the most significant in the event’s 22 year history in the East Bay. Four ribbon cuttings occurred in the…

Without a doubt the greatest challenges facing BART are expanding core capacity and maintaining a good state of repair. At the same time, however, the Bay Area’s regional…

As San Francisco’s Vision Zero campaign struggles to reduce traffic deaths, a sobering video posted last week of a bicycle crash along Valencia Street provides yet another reminder…

Over the past few weeks, BART and Los Angeles’ Metro have each made big headlines, albeit for very different reasons. In the Bay Area, BART’s ongoing mechanical problems…

About every seven years, BART commissions a survey of its stations to learn more about who is riding and where he/she is going. BART’s last survey was done…

Alameda’s Central Avenue Complete Streets Project passed a key milestone in receiving city council approval to move forward into final design. As we’ve previously covered, safety improvements are…

On February 2nd, Megan Schwarzman was run over by a car while bicycling along Fulton Street near Bancroft Way. Meghan was hit by Berwick Haynes, who was arrested…

The Bay Area is in desperate need of housing, especially affordable housing in walkable and bikeable neighborhoods located near transit. Downtown Oakland presents a tremendous opportunity to achieve…

What kinds of open spaces does Oakland need? The City recently posed this question via Twitter as a part of its ongoing Downtown Specific Plan efforts. The Downtown…

Transit riders across the country received a big boost in commuter benefits thanks to Congress’ new spending bill. The bill increased pre-tax transit benefits to $255 per month,…

Oakland continues to have tremendous success in winning grant money for complete streets projects. Following nine million in grant awards from the Active Transportation Program (ATP) for redesigns…

Grand Avenue is broken. Like countless other streets in Oakland, the design of Grand Avenue no longer serves the people and communities that use the street. However, while…

Several weeks ago we wrote about a proposed bill that would make San Francisco the largest U.S. city to adopt a stop-as-yield law for cyclists. Earlier this week…

  Today is “Giving Tuesday.” It might not generate the same amount of fanfare as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but for the past three years, Giving Tuesday…

Should Downtown Oakland be a great place to drive, or a great place to walk and bike? As Downtown lies on the cusp of rebirth and growth, these…

As of yesterday, pedestrian safety banners are now flying in SoMa. The banners, proclaiming “Slow Down!” and followed with either “We live here” or “I live here” are…

BART’s recent weekend closures of the Transbay Tube were happily uneventful: thanks to advanced warning and frequent replacement “bus bridge” service, the closure did not appear to significantly…

A recent study conducted by the University of Bath, Department of Psychology, has concluded that, improving street safety for cyclists is more effective than information campaigns when it…

For the past three summers GJEL has hosted high school students for a week long “Introduction to Careers in Law.” Over the course of the week students are…

Oakland has a lot of strange, poorly-designed pedestrian signals, but we think we’ve found the worst example in the City at the intersection of Grand Avenue and Euclid…

The City of Oakland, in partnership with UC Berkeley, recently conducted a survey of shoppers in Temescal along a controversial segment of Telegraph Avenue to better understand the…

Over the past few months, a proposal to build a contraflow bus lane on the Bay Bridge has gained momentum among key transportation agencies such as the Metropolitan…

Streetsblog California recently proclaimed a new bike lane in Orinda “The Worst Bike Lane in the World.” The bike lane sits outside of our office on Camino Pablo,…

Stanley Roberts’ People Behaving Badly recently highlighted CHP efforts to ticket Alameda drivers on Webster Street who failed to yield to pedestrians at marked crosswalks. In just 3.5…

The City of Alameda recently published a presentation from a June 4th community workshop on the Central Avenue Complete Streets project. We examined the project last month and…

As long as bikes and cars share the same roads there’s inevitably going to be conflict. As much as we’d love to see protected bike lanes become more…

Big news from Oakland’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee last night: Walk Oakland Bike Oakland tweeted that the City is planning to install parking-protected bicycle lanes (cycle tracks)…

Good news out of Sacramento: S.B. 192, Senator Liu’s disastrous law mandating helmets and reflective gear for bicyclists, was gutted thanks to strong backlash from bicycle advocates across…

For decades, California regions built freeways to enable the growth of new suburbs farther and farther afield. In response to the negative environmental effects of suburban sprawl, California…

A striking video was posted to the Bike East Bay Facebook page on Tuesday depicting illegally parked cars clogging Oakland’s new buffered bike lane along Broadway. The video,…

It should come as no surprise that the holidays are one of the most dangerous times to head out on the road. Not only are more people driving–some estimates…

Lane widths might seem like a boring, esoteric aspect of traffic engineering, but they really matter for creating safe, livable streets. Noted city planner and urban designer Jeff…

    Oakland recently hosted Oaklavia, an open streets event that invites people to walk, bike, dance, play, and socialize in the streets. It’s a terrific, if underappreciated…

Last Friday, Governor Brown vetoed SB 1151, a bill that would have increased traffic fines in school zones and used these funds for active transportation investments. The bill…

By now you’ve probably already heard that the Three Feet for Safety Act went into effect on Tuesday. The bill, which was finally signed by Governor Brown last…

The California Transportation Commission (CTC) recently announced a list of recommended projects to receive funding from the state’s Active Transportation Program (ATP). A new statewide program, the ATP…

Starting Monday, August 18th, we’re partnering with five local bike shops to promote safety and provide free helmets with every kid’s bike sold. Bike safety is a cause…

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: street safety is about equity. Streets designed for speeding cars are inherently designed dangerously, leaving people who do not…

In discussions of traffic safety, it’s all too common to desensitize ourselves from the striking numbers of roadway crashes that occur: 32,999 fatalities, 3.9 million non-fatal injuries, and…

Proposals for Cycle Tracks are emerging throughout the Bay Area, and that is generally good news for bicycle safety. But as the saying goes, the devil is in…

A key challenge in planning, funding, and implementing bicycle and pedestrian projects is the lack of good data to guide policymaking. As Janie Nham notes on the NRDC…

LADOT GM nominee Seleta Reynolds (right) with former New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan (left) In case there was any doubt, Los Angeles has officially joined the…

San Francisco ambitiously seeks to expand bicycling to 20 percent of all trips by 2020. Yet, real concerns over safety remain the single greatest obstacle to expanding bicycling…