city streets

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…

Whether an all-way stop is appropriate depends on a range of considerations, but the City needs to seriously consider all-way stops as a potential solution.

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

Searching for the most dangerous roads in San Jose isn’t easy. You can focus on roads with the highest numbers of collisions and wind up overlooking the roads where the most serious injuries have occurred. Or you could just as easily do the opposite.

Any way you slice it, the danger on San Jose streets is alarming.

Highway 17, connecting San Jose and Santa Cruz, has among the highest number of collisions.

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

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.

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

Tennyson Road is one of Hayward’s major backbones for people walking and biking, but it is also one of the City’s most dangerous.

What a difference a year makes…

OakDot has completely reinvented its plans for Harrison Street to include state-of-the-art protected bikeway and protected intersection designs while adding pedestrian and transit enhancements.

Santa Cruz County is in the midst of a debate over how to relieve gridlock along Highway 1. Traffic congestion has continued to worsen in recent years along the four lane freeway, to the point that an 18 mile one-way commute to or from Watsonville can take in excess of an hour each way.

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…

According to the Washington Post of July 11, 2016, although Pokemon Go (the latest summertime craze made by Niantic, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company) was released just five…

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 parking enforcement officers have been criticized recently for their lack of enforcement of illegal and unsafe parking behavior along Telegraph’s new protected bike lanes. Yesterday, parking enforcement…

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…

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…

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…

Oakland’s new buffered bike lanes continue to experience frequent blockages due to illegal double parking. Robert Prinz of Bike East Bay recently posted a video of Webster Street…

The Oakland Police Department issued a press release on Wednesday announcing a pedestrian safety enforcement operation on Monday, February 1st. The press release notes increasing rates of pedestrian…

Tonight (Thursday January 14th) at 7:00 PM, the Lafayette Circulation Commission will review a dangerous double-wide roundabout proposal at the intersection of Pleasant Hill Road and Olympic Boulevard,…

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…

Saying that motorists and bicyclists don’t always get along is not only a massive understatement, but at this point it feels like beating a dead horse. Now, as…

More good news for Oakland: MTC has announced the awarding of a $4.5 million grant from the State’s Active Transportation Program for a road diet and protected bike…

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…

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…

Last week, we examined the I-80 Smart Corridor project and its highway-like approach to San Pablo Avenue. To recap, Caltrans has exercized its jurisdiction over San Pablo Avenue…

If you’ve recently traveled along I-80 in the East Bay, you may have noticed new electronic signage and metering lights. Caltrans is currently putting the finishing touches on…

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…

As protected bike lanes become more common across the U.S., the way in which we design intersections is also evolving. American cities are on the cusp of implementing…

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…

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)…

A new driver advocacy group in Alameda has mobilized to preserve the status quo on one of the City’s most dangerous corridors. “I Drive Alameda” has distributed flyers…

Crossing the street in Oakland’s Rockridge District just got a lot more difficult due to “improvements” by the City’s traffic engineers. Along College Avenue, one of Oakland’s most…

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…

The practical answer is whether you’re on the proper side of the road or the improper side of the road, if you are riding safely and a vehicle…

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,…

The City of Berkeley has taken a step toward improving pedestrian safety at a deadly intersection, but continues to mishandle its broader approach to street safety. Last April,…

During the height of California’s highway boom from the 1950s through the 1970s, Caltrans bulldozed through hundreds of neighborhoods to construct freeways. The economic and environmental toll on…

For the vast majority of people, signal timing is not an exciting subject. Apart from traffic engineers and a select group of superwonks, few people pay attention to…

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…

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…

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…

Mobile transportation apps are reshaping the data available to transportation planners and policymakers when it comes to active transportation. We’ve previously looked at Strava, an app which tracks…

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…

As Bay Area cities redesign their streets to better accommodate safe bicycling, key gaps in the region’s infrastructure become ever more apparent. Much of the growth in bicycling…

As San Francisco develops safer street designs to better accommodate people walking and biking, an unlikely opposition group has emerged: the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD). SFFD has…

Last week we looked at the Dangerous by Design report. One of the useful features is the map tool, which overlays the locations of every pedestrian fatality in…

Crosswalk countdown signals are an increasingly common tool to inform pedestrians precisely how much time they have to cross the street. The idea behind these signals is that…

Street safety depends on the fair enforcement of traffic laws, but enforcement is not always fair. The juxtaposition of two stories over the past week illustrates the incongruent…

In discussions of street safety, there is a tendency to stereotype pedestrian and bicycle advocates as hipsters, gentrifiers, yuppies, and a host of other terms that connote a…

The City of Berkeley is a well-known leader in environmentalism, social justice, and public health. Given that active transportation plays an integral role in each of these fields,…

Recently we discussed the ongoing battle between California cities and Caltrans over street design, most notably cycle tracks. As it turns out, Caltrans just announced its official endorsement…

As cities across California seek to build safer, healthier, greener “complete streets,” many have come into conflict with Caltrans over what constitutes an acceptable (and legally defensible) design….

A report released earlier this week is urging San Francisco’s mayor and Board of Supervisors to increase efforts to reduce bike fatalities, calling for an ultimate goal of…

Much like most major cities, in Seattle there are currently a number of construction projects underway. Old buildings have been demolished to give way to new apartment complexes,…

A California Senate bill proposing restrictions on motorcycle lane splitting was placed on hold this week pending a safety study currently being conducted by UC-Berkeley. The bill, which…

Despite offering a good starting point, there’s still plenty of information missing when you look at the Walkscore of a specific location. As has been pointed out plenty…

Distracted driving is a serious threat to street safety, but what about distracted walking? A new bill in Nevada would make it illegal for pedestrians to text, enter…

An article from the DC Area blog “Greater Greater Washington” posed an interesting question about whether a recent pedestrian enforcement campaign is essentially “blaming the victim” by targeting…

Thanks to a $140,000 federal grant, the San Francisco Police Department will be stepping up traffic enforcement efforts in 2013. SFPD plans to focus on some of the…

California is now the third state to legalize driverless cars, joining the ranks of Nevada and Florida in paving the way for what might be the new technology’s…

Saturday, September 15th will mark the 8th Annual Peak2Peak Walk, an event led by the pedestrian advocacy group Walk SF. The walk begins in the heart of the…

Behold, the bicycle minivan. Last week the Bay Citizen featured an article on how some San Francisco parents are opting to make the bike a family vehicle. The…