Improving city infrastructure, like implementing a road diet to reduce vehicle speeds and give bike riders and pedestrians more space, takes time. Each stage, from planning and designing to funding and constructing, can take months or years. Unfortunately, this has postponed many new road projects that can save lives.
To speed things up, the Oakland City Council is urging the city’s Department of Transportation to change how it approves “encroachment permits” that are necessary for many temporary traffic calming projects.
Encroachment permits normally allow private individuals or businesses to take up part of the road and other public space with temporary infrastructure, signs, or other items that can slow or alter traffic, often with the goal of making things safer. One common example is the use of K-rails around the edges of construction sites to create temporary protected walkways for pedestrians while workers occupy the sidewalk.
When applied to traffic safety issues, encroachment permits will allow people to quickly make changes to roads—with the city’s permission—that can save lives. The only problem is, up until now, the city hasn’t issued these kinds of permits solely to create safer streets.
“The City Council wants to improve street safety workarounds to enable creativity around traffic calming, and it took some time for them to understand where the bottleneck was,” said Natalie Mall, a board member with Transport Oakland, a safe streets advocacy group. “Now we know the bottleneck was that no encroachment permit exists for traffic safety.”
Authored by District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife, the new legislation asks the Department of Transportation to prepare a report four months from now to explore the viability of a three-year pilot program where community groups, businesses, and schools can apply for 90-day encroachment permits for traffic-slowing infrastructure.
Just like with other permits the city issues, people will have to pay to obtain one. But traffic safety advocates hope the city will make them free for organizations that will be creating traffic-slowing spaces in low-income Black and brown areas like East Oakland.
Haleema Bharoocha, a UC Berkeley planning student who has been working with Fife, told the City Council’s Public Works Committee recently that Southern California’s Go Human tactical urbanism project has helped residents with the permitting application process, sometimes paying fees, helping them find funding options from local grantmakers, and even renting out equipment.
“It’s great the resolution is focusing on equity priority communities because communities of color and low-income communities and priority equity communities generally suffer much higher rates of traffic violence, said Jenn Guitart, the Executive Director of TransForm, a local safe streets advocacy group.
The full council probably won’t approve the new permit process until April 2024 at the earliest, and applications from community groups probably won’t begin until the summer.
A councilmember and an aide work to speed up road safety solutions
Carroll Fife has been seen at protests and vigils alongside safe street advocates, sometimes asking questions about the science behind traffic-slowing infrastructure and the location’s collision history.
“I’m not an engineer, I’m not a designer. I don’t have a background in building and development. But one of the things my office does that I’m really proud of is the due diligence, the deep community outreach, and bringing in professionals in the field. There’s a lot of work that goes into the legislation that we bring forward that’s going to have an impact,” she said in an interview.
Fife and her staff have been working with the Department of Transportation on the new encroachment permit proposal since last summer, when Transport Oakland, a local transportation advocacy nonprofit, submitted a memo with the encroachment idea for her office to consider. The councilmember said developing the legislation made sense in the context of years of community members asking her to speed up the building of safer infrastructure.
“People in different neighborhoods were like, ‘We need to do something urgent.’ And then it had a direct impact and relationship to what [my staffer] Tonya Love had experienced. It was just a no-brainer, specifically around some of the schools who reached out to me previously,” she said.
In 1997, Tonya Love, Fife’s chief of staff, was a student at UC Berkeley. One day when she was returning home after a work shift at a movie theater she was hit by a car on Foothill Boulevard and 50th Avenue. She flew 50 feet in the air and landed on the back of her head, losing consciousness. She said she was lucky to have only broken her ankle and suffered a concussion.
“My life changed forever,” Love said during a recent City Council Public Works Committee meeting. “It took me almost a full year to recover, and I had to drop out of school because I couldn’t afford expenses. It took me years to fight my way back. The fact that I survived the accident was a message to me that I needed to do something with a purpose and to want to make sure no one is caught in the situation that I was in.”
Because she didn’t have medical insurance at the time, it took Love six months to get money to pay for ankle surgery and another six months of recovery. That made her realize how a collision could derail someone’s life, especially if they were facing more challenging financial circumstances.
Since working for the city, Love has attended vigils for people killed in road collisions. Building physical infrastructure, she said, is what Oakland needs to orce drivers to slow down.
“Putting cameras up is not enough incentive to get people to follow the rules of the road. Oftentimes they actually just need a physical barrier to comply,” she said. “Cause right now, Oakland drivers are at a place where they don’t care about signs, they don’t care about laws, and they don’t care about warnings.”
OakDOT was initially hesitant to create the encroachment permit, said Love, because the department felt it might be duplicative of the work it’s already doing through the Safe Routes to Schools and the Rapid Response programs, But the Rapid Response program, which involves an expedited change to a road like speed bumps or a crossing signal, usually only happens after a terrible, often deadly collision. Fife, Love, and other traffic safety advocates say they know from residents that those programs were no longer doing enough to prevent collisions.
Fife is confident that Oakland will implement the encroachment permit program by next year.
“I was encouraged by the reception that it received in committee,” she said. “Hopefully, this will move forward. I will continue to lobby council members for the importance of this legislation. The body understands how important this is. No one’s gonna disagree with this. And if they are, they’re super assholes.”
Other cities are already using encroachment permits to allow community groups to slow traffic
The cities of Atlanta, Nashville, and Columbus already have encroachment permit pilot programs like what Oakland is considering. Fife and her team have studied these initiatives and say they are inspiration for what Oakland could do.
Also called “tactical urbanism” projects, because they cut through bureaucratic red tape, can lower collision rates and lead to higher revenues for small businesses, say proponents. Groups like MARTA Army in Atlanta and TURBO in Nashville were instrumental in building a coalition of supporters for these efforts. In Oakland, the Traffic Violence Rapid Response group has played a similar role.
Business groups are also supporting the encroachment permit proposal. Savlan Hauser, the Jack London Improvement District executive director and chair of the Oakland Bid Alliance, spoke about her support for an pilot project at a recent City Council committee meeting.
“I wholeheartedly agree that we need to treat traffic violence the same way that we would any emergency,” Hauser said. “And so this is a really wonderful program in that we trust communities and their observations and their experiences, and we couple it with the innovation and energy and wisdom from staff that we have in the DOT.”
Anwar Baroudi, a commissioner on the Mayor’s Commission for People with Disabilities, said at the same meeting that fast-tracking safe street projects through a new encroachment permit could help the city improve its engagement with communities who often feel forgotten by legislators.
“Getting community engagement and support is really hard, and that’s understandable when, in a lot of situations, it is hard [for them] to see the community feedback and how it’s being taken, when the projects they [give] feedback on don’t start for another five years,” she said.
Other supporters of the pilot program proposal included the Senior Services Coalition of Alameda County, Transport Oakland, and Care 4 Community.
Some traffic calming projects that could be carried out if the encroachment permit program is adopted include new crosswalks and heavy concrete planters in front of schools to reduce the number of vehicle lanes and create safer student drop-off points.
One school that could benefit is Bridges Academy at Melrose, where some parents speed on 53rd Avenue while kids walk on the street. Creating a traffic chokepoint with concrete planters would make this kind of dangerous driving impossible.
Other possible traffic-calming infrastructure that would be used could be curb extensions, crosswalks, and new parklets.
“Since these [will be] 90-day pilots, we want them to encourage the city and the community to use traffic calming that maybe haven’t been tried out but that have been successful elsewhere,” Traffic Violence Rapid Response’s Mall said.
According to Fife, the city will collect data about each new encroachment permit project’s impact, including what people think about how the road was altered. It could help the city’s transportation department determine whether the new builds make the streets safer and should be permanent.
Jenn Guitart of TransForm told The Oaklandside she thinks the program will take one of the community’s most significant resources—the collective energy of people who want to make streets safer—and use it to benefit people who can’t or are not able to advocate for safer roads for themselves.
“The advantage of a quick build is that if you have these materials that are removable, you can try things out and that can be a more robust community engagement process than having a workshop where maybe people who are working two jobs aren’t gonna make those community meetings,” she said.
