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Upcoming Oak Street Corridor Improvements

BikeAlameda volunteers had many long and contentious meetings with the City of Alameda Development Department, Planning Board and City Council, to discuss bicycling along Oak Street and the Theatre and parking garage.

In 2005, John Knox White was instrumental in leading a charge to ensure that bicycling along the Oak Street corridor would not degrade once the parking garage and theatre were open.

Ideally bike lanes on Oak Street would be the most useful mitigation for the extra traffic. These bike lanes would require removing both sides of parking along Oak Street between Encinal and Lincoln. No amount of arguing could convince city staff that that was possible, regardless of new 450 car parking spaces.

Below is a list of what will be happening and ALL of it is due to the tireless efforts of BikeAlameda.
• The parking garage will get 16 electronic bike lockers. These lockers will be compatible with the BART elockers. This kind of day locker should enable anyone who is in the Park Street area for a while to lock their bike securely. Unlike the reserved lockers, currently in use in other places, these lockers discourage long term storage and should be regularly available. Despite the requirement to buy an electronic card, the fee is minimal 3-5 cents per hour. And this fee is only to discourage long term storage. This will be done by the opening of the parking garage.
• There will be bike racks in the parking garage. This will be done by the opening of the parking garage.
• The diagonal parking along Central Avenue between Walnut Avenue and Oak street will be returned to parallel parking. A bike lane will be striped. The signs directly bicyclists onto the sidewalk will be removed. This will be done by the opening of the parking garage.
• A new kind of signage called a SHARROW will be striped along Oak Street between Encinal and Lincoln. This is a stencil on the roadway that is intended to help cyclists better position themselves on roadways (out of the door zone) while getting drivers to recognize the right of the bicyclist to be in the roadway and give more clearance when passing. The "sharrow" also reduces wrong-way riding by bicyclists. Sharrow pictureThis will be done upon the repaving of Oak Street which will occur immediately after the opening of the Alameda Theatre in sprint 2008.

  Thank you to all the volunteers who made these changes happen. You know who you are. And thank you to our members who help us continue to advocate for better bicycling facilities.

  posted: Fri, 16 Nov 2007