Rebuild Oakland’s Streets to Make Them Safer
By: Garlynn Woodsong
Oakland North Editorial-June 16, 2010
With a bicycle fatality, a little girl hit by a car and multiple car accidents along Market Street in the past couple of months, just in the stretch of Market Street between the intersection of 57th/Market/Adeline and 40th/Market, I think it’s high time that this community begin a dialogue about the relationship between pedestrians, bicycles, automobiles, safety and the design of roadways and our public spaces. There is a direct relationship between the design of the street and the safety of pedestrian and bicycle users of that street (or lack thereof).
Before the construction of Highway 24 and the rest of the freeway system, the major streets in north Oakland — Market, Adeline, West, Martin Luther King, Jr., Telegraph, etc. — were built up around streetcar lines that connected the residential neighborhoods to the major job center of downtown Oakland, or on into San Francisco via ferries and then the streetcar lines across the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. In the 1950s, sidewalks were narrowed and streets were re-designed to move autos efficiently and quickly to the same destinations, following the removal of the streetcar system.
When the freeways came, the added auto capacity remained on these surface streets, but went largely under-used. Today, the legacy of this is wide streets where cars are un-impeded by traffic and can easily move more quickly than is safe in a residential context.
Read on at oaklandnorth.net