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Car Failing to Yield

CHP tickets 168 Alameda drivers in less than 4 hours for not yielding to pedestrians

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, CHP officers issued 168 tickets to drivers – a mind-boggling rate of a violation every 75 seconds. As Roberts notes at the beginning of the segment, […]

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Oakland proposes parking-protected bike lanes on 20th street

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 20th Street and applying for a grant from the state’s Active Transportation Program (ATP) to implement the project. We covered the woeful conditions of 20th Street […]

Stanislaus County

Stanislaus County plans to expand freeways in the name of safety and air quality

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 SB-375 in 2008 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by linking transportation and land use planning and setting regional emissions targets. In theory, SB-375 was intended to […]

Double Parked in Bike Lanes

Illegally parked cars clogging new Oakland bike lanes

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 by Volvap Egroeg, shows parents at Oakland Technical High School using the entire block of the bike lane as a pick up zone. Cyclists, displaced from […]

Bakersfield1

Bakersfield plans to bulldoze a neighborhood and build a freeway

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 communities was far-reaching: while freeways benefitted the development of outer-ring suburbs, their expensive construction divided and blighted existing neighborhoods, displaced thousands of residents, and contributed to […]

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Signal timing: a critical element of safe, livable streets

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 advocate for better signal timing. Whereas the physical designs (and deficiencies) of streets are tangible, signal timing is less discernible. It’s not uncommon for communities to […]

12-foot lanes don’t improve safety. So why do we keep building them?

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 recently published a convincing piece on CityLab against a transportation feature that nearly all of us confront on a daily basis: 12-foot travel lanes. Over the […]

Oaklavia

Oaklavia highlights need for better bicycle infrastructure around Lake Merritt

    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 that both showcases the city’s vibrancy and the potential for stress-free (or low-stress) walking and biking on the city’s streets. At the same time, Oaklavia reinforces […]

Pedestrians dying at disproportionate rates in America’s poorer neighborhoods

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 at higher risk of getting hit and killed. We already know that children, seniors, and people of color make up a disproportionately high share of pedestrian […]

Accident Ahead

What is the cost of traffic crashes?

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 million damaged vehicles in 2010. What does all this data mean for our society, economy, and quality of life? In a new report, the National Highway […]

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