Project Length: 0.6 miles

Right-of-Way Width: 70’

Participating Agencies: OakDOT/City of Oakland, AC Transit

Timeline: 2014-2017

Cost: ~$4.5 million

Goals

Safety: Reduce crashes and injuries along Telegraph Avenue through street design improvements.

Multimodal Use: Redesign Telegraph Avenue to make it more comfortable and enjoyable for people walking or biking.

Neighborhood Vitality: Uplift Telegraph Avenue as a commercial and community destination.

Overview

As early as 2005, Oakland identified the opportunity to transform Telegraph Avenue, one of its most important streets, into a more livable and vibrant place for people. Telegraph Ave is a critical intercity connector, a vibrant commercial corridor, an arts and culture hub, and an anchor for multiple neighborhoods. Despite this, it was not a place where people of all ages and abilities could bike or walk comfortably. Starting in 2014, the City initiated plans to turn Telegraph Avenue into a complete street by prioritizing walking, biking, and transit along the corridor.

The redesign began as a pilot project, with new pedestrian and transit-oriented street features added over time. This flagship project for Oakland’s complete streets program won national recognition and demonstrated the transformative power of design in enhancing public space.

Design Details

After two years of gathering community input and developing design concepts, the City implemented a paint-only pilot in 2016, striping lane lines, high-visibility crosswalks, and Oakland’s first-ever protected bike lanes on the street. The City also removed two out of five travel lanes to free up space to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. The pilot grew over the next several years, adding painted curb bulb outs, parking reconfigurations, and bus boarding islands along Telegraph Ave.

Keys to Success

Comprehensive Data Collection: The City of Oakland collected a wide range of data to fully capture the impacts of changes to Telegraph Avenue across modes. Metrics the City monitors include the number of collisions, speeding, yield rates, traffic volume and transit ridership, parking tickets, sales tax revenue, pedestrian and bicyclist intercept surveys, transit delays, bus speeds, travel time, and operator surveys.

Communication: City of Oakland staff prioritized presenting data and project information in a clear, accessible manner. The before/after data collected along Telegraph Ave served as the foundation for communicating project benefits and building public support for additional changes. These results were compiled into a 2017 progress report directed at local stakeholders while staff covered technical details in online Medium posts.

Engagement and Partnerships: City of Oakland staff developed a strong community engagement process and worked deliberately to identify and engage stakeholders early in the project. The City prioritized sustained engagement with AC Transit and neighborhood and business associations in the area to build community buy-in and incorporate local needs into the project. Based on input from this stakeholder engagement process, the City made changes to Telegraph Avenue, including installing concrete bus boarding islands, more bike lane stencils, and improving sight lines for across the corridor for people driving and people on bikes.

Outcomes

After implementation, the City saw major improvements in safety, especially for active modes. 73 percent of bicyclists and 63 percent of pedestrians reported feeling safer on Telegraph Avenue, with over half of bicyclists opting to use the street more often following the design changes. For the first time in five years, there were no reported pedestrian collisions on the street, while median speeds dropped to a target speed limits of 25 mph.

The design changes on Telegraph Avenue had measurable economic impacts, with businesses along the corridor seeing a 9 percent increase in retail sales. Combined with the safety outcomes, this project raised public awareness of the potential of complete streets while allowing the city to apply the same principles to its other transportation projects. In 2016, the City won the opportunity to scale up its transportation projects after 82 percent of Oakland voters approved a $350 million bond package to fund transportation projects for a decade. This will include a project to connect Telegraph Avenue to other priority complete street corridors in the city. Oakland installed and evaluated multiple design and traffic control features along Telegraph Avenue, testing their utility for that corridor and future complete streets projects in the city.

Implementing a complete streets retrofit of this scale in a major commercial corridor created opportunities for Oakland–it also presented challenges. The Telegraph Avenue redesign revealed the City’s shortcomings with community engagement at the outset of the project. This resulted in design details that limited public compliance and safety along the corridor. Learning from this, Oakland has been engaging in community outreach and leading in-depth evaluations, and will be rolling out interim and permanent grant-funded improvements in 2020-21 as a result:

• Installing bigger, flexible bollards to make pedestrian safety zones more intuitive and more clearly demarcate the protected bike lane.
• Improving loading zone markings to improve compliance with permitted loading and parking areas, reducing infractions from drivers.
• Improving safety for people walking or biking by increasing their visibility and adjusting driver sight lines.
• Installing bollards and bike stencils at bike lane entrances, exits, and driveways in order to improve legibility for street users.
• Replacing the modular boarding islands with concrete, which will more permanently improve transit operations along the corridor and free up the current islands for use elsewhere in Oakland.
• With grant funding, raise all existing painted safety zone and buffers between parking and bike facilities to concrete medians; install rectangular rapid flash beacons to enhance pedestrian crossing safety; replace modular boarding islands with concrete (stated above).