Cyclists running red lights is a common issue in cities throughout Northern California, including San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. Understanding why cyclists run red lights can help improve... Read More
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 children... Read More
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 everyone... Read More
The project has decreased collisions for all modes by 40 percent, increased yield rates, and reduced speeding. However, not everyone is happy... Read More
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... Read More
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. Read More
Oakland has several skewed intersections that could be candidates for peanutabout designs. In particular, two intersections exhibit potential for such a design... Read More
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... Read More
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 and... Read More
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 the... Read More
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 accident,... Read More
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 was... Read More
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 cities... Read More
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 badly... Read More
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 on... Read More
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 in... Read More
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 collisions... Read More
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, two... Read More
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 of... Read More
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 Oakland... Read More
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 San... Read More
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 divergent... Read More
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 part... Read More
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 comes... Read More
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 the... Read More
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 Avenue.... Read More
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 travel... Read More
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 the... Read More
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, straddling... Read More
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 hours,... Read 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) on... Read More
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 enacted... Read More
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, submitted... Read More
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 these... Read More
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 or... Read More
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 Speck... Read More
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 event... Read More
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 drive... Read More
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 24... Read More
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 the... Read More
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 Switchboard,... Read More
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 over... Read More
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 vocally... Read More
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 the... Read More
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 enforcement... Read More
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, it’s... Read More
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 of... Read More
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. This... Read More
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 “zero... Read More
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, office... Read More
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 would... Read More
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 of... Read More
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 data,... Read More
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 the... Read More
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 article... Read More
A recent experiment conducted by Brooklyn Spoke blog author Doug Gordon has confirmed what many people already suspected; simply having a barrier between the road and bike lane can... Read More
Reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) show that between 2001 and 2010 nearly 70 people were killed in Bay Area car crashes resulting from problems with... Read More
Congress is looking at a transportation spending bill this week, but bike advocates are worried that senators who are “anxious for a deal” will toss out a provision that... Read More
The recent and tragic death of a Portland bicyclist is serving as a stark reminder that “right hook” accidents are far too common. The woman, Kathryn Leah Rickson, was... Read More
A new study using accident data from Insurance Corp. of B.C. and the Vancouver Police Department determined that nearly 75 percent of all pedestrian accidents occur at intersections, with... Read More
With bright green bike lanes spreading across the Bay Area, the hope is that even the most oblivious drivers should start to take notice. The freshly painted bike lanes... Read More
Ensuring transit-only lanes are free of other vehicles is a costly endeavor. Even with just over 15 miles of transit-only lanes in the city of San Francisco, penalizing drivers... Read More
With the number of cyclists in San Francisco continuing to increase, creating a safe environment for bike commuters poses a serious challenge. One option currently being explored in London... Read More
The thought of being killed as a pedestrian in San Francisco is terrifying. Fatal pedestrian accidents happen far too often in the Bay Area, especially considering that San Francisco... Read More
As a proud San Francisco resident, I’m excited when organizations or magazines rank the city as a great destination for anything and everything. That was my initial reaction when... Read More
It’s no secret that biking on San Francisco’s Oak and Fell streets can be incredibly dangerous. In fact, the cross-town city arteries have proven dangerous for motorists as well,... Read More
Yesterday morning, a big rig truck collided with a UCSF shuttle van, killing 52 year-old Dr. Kevin Mack and injuring three other passengers. The accident occurred on Octavia Boulevard,... Read More
It’s always fun to write about good news related to traffic safety in San Francisco. That pleasure comes this week as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency reports that... Read More
Since The Bay Citizen began publishing local news little more than a year ago, their Bike Accident Tracker app has been one of my favorite features. First, the app... Read More
Early this morning, Wednesday May 25, a pedestrian was struck and killed by a vehicle on the corner of Pierce Street and Lombard Street in San Francisco’s Marina District.... Read More
