Master Bicycle Plan Do-over

In 2007 Oakland prepared a master bicycle plan to determine which roads would have class 1/2/3/3a/3b bike paths. The plan was accepted and reaffirmed by a city council vote in 2012, you can see that plan here, and the full city website here. On this original plan some of the now proposed road-diets such as Park Blvd, were never designed this way but instead used shared road approaches such as Sharrows . Now, the city has established a new group called Let’s Go Oakland to update this master plan. This group collaborates with Bike East Bay, so they will obviously be lobbying for many more road-diets. In fact, their first “survey” was heavily biased to suggest that the majority want more road-diets which we know is a lie. Complete their survey and make it clear about what we want, and be careful about the intentional bias they are using as you answer the questions.

We need to get involved now, don’t be complacent because the bike collation has heavily funded lobbying power, and despite the fact that in the Bay area, less than 5% of people bike, we are constantly losing 50% of our road area to road-diets.

Follow the money – ask why the bike collation is funded by city governments, and also by the same traffic consultants, such as Fehr & Peers and Kittelson and Associates who are performing traffic counts and road designs for Oakland, including Park Blvd. Does this seem appropriate to you –  it is apparent that OakDOT, the traffic consultants, and the bike collation are in a coalition to support each other – and of course, they each benefit from this getting taxpayer money to fund their activities, without taxpayer approval. A clear conflict of interest which needs to be recognized and ended – this is not how a taxpayer-funded city government should be run, time to wake up and take action.