Skip to content

North Oakland Now: The wages of improvement

on September 18, 2009

A dispatch from last night’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting, at Oakland City Hall:  First, where the sidewalk ends, to quote the late Shel Silverstein, might be closer to home than you think. At the intersection of 29th Avenue and Ford Street in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, along the Nimitz   freeway, a half-mile from the Fruitvale Bart Station, and a mere four blocks from Lazear Elementary School, the sidewalk, literally, ends.  A pedestrian walkway comes to a stop, that is, at an uncontrolled intersection where there are no stop lights, no crosswalks, and no road signage warning drivers, pedestrians, or cyclists, that a collision, given the right circumstances, is very plausible. There are talks underway to remedy the death-trap intersection, but design plans aren’t due for another two years, and the fix will be apart of a larger construction project slated to take three years.

In other news…in that same area, a new project is underway to revamp, or should we say re-ramp, a freeway entrance on 29th Street and E. 9th Street. The relatively quiet entrance, which takes commuters onto the 880, is across the street from Lazear Elementary.  The new design would make school-goers coming from the north walk several extra blocks and cross three more crosswalks than they do currently to get to school. Plus there’s the construction noise the Lazear little ones will have to endure for three years. If they have hearing impairments before graduating to junior high school, at least when they learn to drive they’ll also have a nice onramp.

1 Comments

  1. e blakey on September 22, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    Something else that should be of concern. By altering E 9th to be one-way, drivers coming from N 880 and wishing to use the Fruitvale (Miller-Sweeney)bridge will need to either travel on 29th ave to San Leandro – compounding the already busy traffic around the BART station, or go the other way on 29th and cut through the neighborhood between the Park St. Bridge and Fruitvale Bridge. Don’t see how this is better. Different maybe, but not better.



Oakland North welcomes comments from our readers, but we ask users to keep all discussion civil and on-topic. Comments post automatically without review from our staff, but we reserve the right to delete material that is libelous, a personal attack, or spam. We request that commenters consistently use the same login name. Comments from the same user posted under multiple aliases may be deleted. Oakland North assumes no liability for comments posted to the site and no endorsement is implied; commenters are solely responsible for their own content.

Photo by Basil D Soufi
logo
Oakland North

Oakland North is an online news service produced by students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and covering Oakland, California. Our goals are to improve local coverage, innovate with digital media, and listen to you–about the issues that concern you and the reporting you’d like to see in your community. Please send news tips to: oaklandnorthstaff@gmail.com.

Latest Posts

Scroll To Top