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Oakland parents, teachers, city officials and traffic safety advocates gathered at Oakland Technical High School Wednesday and Thursday morning to seek a solution to temporary traffic delays on Broadway, the main thoroughfare in front of the 109-year-old school with about 1,500 students. .
Volunteers from local traffic safety organizations, including Walk Oakland Bike Oakland and Traffic Violence Rapid Response, created a temporary, rainbow-colored traffic-calming crosswalk around Broadway to show how easy city officials can make crossing busy streets safer for students and other pedestrians.
The event comes two months after a young man was hit while crossing Broadway. The student is back in school after suffering a fracture.
“Anything and everything the city can do to make this high school or any other school safe for pedestrians and cyclists should be a priority,” District 1 Councilman Dan Kalb said in a statement before the event. “Let’s check the area [is] High school kids don’t know how to act, but how to act as safely as possible.
“I am very happy because of the energy of the volunteers [we] They’ve been able to design something that shows what changes are possible on this trail,” said Chris Hwang, Board President of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland.
The event coincides with the city’s 30th Bike to Work Day today, and more than a thousand East Bay residents have pledged to participate, said Bike East Bay, which coordinated the ride.
Cars speed too often at Oakland Tech, putting students at risk
The biggest traffic safety issue at Oakland Tech is that cars constantly speed down Broadway as the school’s students try to cross the street. This usually happens during lunch and afternoons when students cross Broadway to buy food, sometimes off the sidewalks and at stoplights. The school sits on a very large block, more than 600 feet and with no crosswalks in between, encourages students to walk to the end of the block instead of walking to the end of the block. Push crosswalks below to stop traffic and allow them to cross.
Traffic safety advocates also say Broadway is too wide, with four lanes, two in each direction. This encourages drivers to increase speed and slow down on drivers passing cars or vehicles trying to cross a pedestrian in front of them.
“Four-lane roads are very dangerous,” said Natalie Moll, a Rapid Response volunteer and one of the organizers. “When someone is trying to cross the road, one car may slow down, but another car in the other lane may not be seen, and neither can you.
Organizers of the pop-up crosswalks have received written support from nearly all of the businesses in front of Oakland Tech, including Burger King and O’Reilly Auto Parts.
Nick Sock, manager of the Lee’s Donuts corner store across the street from the school, told us he supports more sidewalks. He said he doesn’t blame the youth for crossing the road at this time, as he and other food vendors technically cross the road near the entrance of the school.
Building new infrastructure often takes months, not a lot of time, mall advocates said, adding that they hope the city will use cones, traffic signals and other traffic-slowing devices to make a quick turnaround on the most dangerous streets.
The crosswalk on Broadway was added by volunteers using chalk and removable spray paint, and the “road diet” leading to the intersection used lane reductions using traffic cones and dilators. The volunteers added a disabled ramp and built large traffic signs. The total cost of the march was $400-$500 for materials and four volunteers for three weekends of work, organizers said.
To ensure road nutrition follows proper design road standards, the volunteers talk to local traffic engineers and copy Oakland Department of Transportation guidelines for other traffic calming guidelines. They also applied for a temporary conservation permit a few weeks ago and received permission from the city to create pop-up trails.
Students and teachers want changes
During the two-day peaceful demonstration, hundreds of drivers slowed down, allowing students to cross the temporary intersection safely, especially during lunchtime. The 51A AC Transit bus and several very large delivery trucks were able to ply without incident. Most of the students we spoke to said that it was safe to use and hoped it would be sustainable.
“I’m happy with this,” one exclaimed.
Several students explained why they thought the march was so important.
One student, Dylan, told us that he witnessed a fellow student being hit in March, and that sometimes it’s a traumatic experience he doesn’t want to talk about. A student named Halima told us that the reason she gets off in front of the school is because it is dangerous to walk to it. Tech parent Maria Torres often worries about her 11th grader walking the four blocks to the school’s upper campus. Torres encourages her son to bring their own lunch so they don’t have to walk across Broadway.
One of the students involved in making the event happen today is Amalia Campbell, a 10th grader who lives a few blocks away with her family. Campbell is an avid cyclist who is comfortable enough to ride a bike all the way downtown in Oakland, her father, Andy Campbell, told us. The elder Campbell is a member of the Oakland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission and a cyclist. But Amalia, her father said, is aware of the unique dangers students face, especially since most of her friends walk or bike to school.
“The way the road is designed it doesn’t make sense how many pedestrians there are,” Campbell told Aucklandside. When Natalie Moll emailed her father and other environmental activists to create a temporary intervention, the younger Campbell asked her principal to try to make it happen.
Principal Martell Price has been thinking for years about improving the dangerous conditions students face on Broadway. He told Oaklandside that he wrote to city officials to add more crosswalks because he saw children getting hit.
“We always encourage children not to cross. Sometimes they do anyway. But other times they’re just talking in their group, and not paying attention. If one person gets out, everyone gets out,” says Price. “So if they’re going to do it anyway, let’s encourage them to make a difference in their activities and the way they move around the world.”
Chris Hwang from Walk Auckland Bike Auckland told Aucklandside she was impressed by the principal’s commitment to improving road safety. She recalls a pre-planning discussion in which Price explained that some parents might be confused by the temporary sidewalk during drop-off, but that shouldn’t stop them from doing so.
“I think teachers want things to change,” she said.
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