Mike Blume

I write to you with an inquiry and proposal for a sidewalk safety project in our Oakland neighborhood of Redwood Heights, surrounding the site of the city of Oakland's Avenue Terrace Playground Park.

The Avenue Terrace Playground is surrounded by three streets; Jordan Road, Bennett Place and Guido Street. Two of those streets immediately surrounding the park, on Bennett Place and Guido Street, do not have sidewalks. Instead of a sidewalk there is a space (about 6 feet wide) with a dirt shoulder that surrounds the outside of the park fence along Guido Street and Bennett Place. This dirt shoulder is where I would like to propose the installation of a sidewalk that would link the existing sidewalks on Guido Street and Jordan Road.

A sidewalk would provide increased pedestrian safety. Currently, with no sidewalk in this area, pedestrians most commonly traverse the area surrounding the back and side of the park by walking directly in the street. The street is most often used due to the trash, overgrowth, mud, broken glass or other items that litter the shoulder. The shoulder is also often blocked by parked cars pulling off of the street. This neighborhood is heavy with pedestrian traffic, both from residents as well as park visitors. The neighborhood is also populated with many families that have young children. Those children do not have a reliably safe way to navigate the park’s surrounding streets of Bennett and Guido. The installation of a sidewalk along the outside of the park fence would tremendously improve a safe route for all pedestrians who are accessing the park or simply walking in the neighborhood. The sidewalk would also provide additional pedestrian safety for families using strollers and small children using scooters. Without a safe paved route all strollers, scooters and anything with wheels use the street.

There are two crosswalks at the intersection of Bennett at Guido, but the crosswalks lead into the dirt shoulder and do not offer a secure pedestrian connection to a sidewalk. First, this feels like a route that was either poorly designed or never completed. Second, the crosswalks can often be blocked by parked cars that use the shoulder as off street parking. It would make sense to revisit the crosswalk design and enable them to connect to a sidewalk to provide a complete route since there is space in the shoulder that can be used for this purpose.

Another reason for this sidewalk proposal is to help provide increased neighborhood safety by developing this shoulder area surrounding the park.

Lastly, we believe this would be a welcome improvement to our neighborhood and the Avenue Terrace Park facility. The Avenue Terrace Park would provide increased accessibility with the addition of sidewalks in the existing shoulder. The neighborhood residents would be able to enjoy the use of a sidewalk on this heavily trafficked walking route.

There are a few problems here:
- Offramp from 13S has no visibility to pedestrians who are trying to cross the offramp until it's too late, making this a frightening street to cross
- Drivers from Northbound Moraga often are making U-Turns onto the 13S ramp. Technically, these U-Turners have the right of way vs. someone turning right off of Estates, but nobody seems to know what to do. The only way to know whose turn it is, is to make eye contact with the other driver and issue some hand signals before someone feels comfortable to go.
- In the meantime, southbound traffic from Moraga is coming up over the hill and there's no visibility to who's coming. So after you're done hand-signaling with the U-turners and you're ready to make a go of it, you kind of have to pray no one is coming up over Moraga. (This is the accident I witnessed today -- a U-turner was t-boned by someone coming up from Moraga.)
- People who are trying to turn left onto Estates often pass each other because they think the person in front of them isn't turning left, but rather waiting to make a U-Turn. So you'll be waiting to turn left, and just as you're making the turn another car will pull around you and make the same left turn, nearly colliding into you.

A couple years ago after lots of complaints to the traffic department, the solution was to put in a bunch of neon cones on Moraga (not pictured) to help with visibility for pedestrians. Well, not sure if these actually help the pedestrians (I certainly don't feel safer when I try to cross Moraga) but what they do instead is block visibility of the traffic coming up over the hill on Moraga, so there's even less visibility now.

My neighbors and I have been asking for help for years, with no response. In fact, one of my neighbors was told by a city worker that until someone dies in an accident here, something like this won't be prioritized.

So who is going to die? Me? My kids? Someone else's kids?