From: Kris Venturini
To: City Clerk
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Concern over Fernside/Gibbons Plan
Date: Tuesday, March 18, 2025 4:35:39 PM
My name is Kris Venturini and I have lived on Fernside for 35 years. I am concerned about the new plan to shrink the driving space of Fernside, remove the middle turn lane and add a raised double bike lane. I went to the Transportation Commission meeting in the Fall but truly felt I was not heard as all the committee cares about was the configuration of the bike lane.
If traffic safety and speed is the concern then why has a stop sign at Harvard or speed humps on Fernside not been considered? They didn’t even address my concerns there to slow down traffic . Fast cars will still drive fast and now have nowhere to go except hit other cars driving or parked.
Please try to turn off of Harvard right now onto Fernside. It’s extremely difficult to not hit the raised corner or the middle sign and it’ll get worse with a new concrete structure being added.
My neighbors on the East side of the street are going to have to pull out of their driveways through a raised double bike lane, a row of parked cars and into oncoming traffic. This has not been tested. Go look at Clement. There are not houses there; it’s businesses and it’s still difficult.
On top of all of this for some unknown reason the Gibbons shutoff for traffic moving onto it is back on the table even though the surveys by the public overwhelmingly disagreed with it and the City Planner (not sure her title) voiced that loud and clear at the Transportation Commission meeting. Why is it back on? We live here and understand the traffic better.
Where is all this traffic that used to go on Gibbons going to go? It’ll be Fernside (that already will be extra congested), High and our narrow side streets. Gibbons is meant to have cars. It’s wide. At least it has a stop sign at Harvard.
Please do not approve of all of this without further testing and studying. I am not against biking. I love biking but I feel we already have bike lanes on Fernside (and so many other Alameda streets). We do not need this.
Thank you.
Kris Venturini
3008 Fernside Blvd
5109136955
Sent from my iPhone
Mayor Ezzy Ashcraft, Vice-Mayor Pryor and City Councilors Boller, Daysog and Jensen, I'm writing in support of tonight's item, 7-B (2025-4837), that will critically rework the dangerous intersection at Fernside, Gibbons, and High Street and general traffic calming and bike improvements on Fernside. This will deliver iterative changes to a major safety incident intersection in the near term, in advance of more holistic rethinking that we can learn from.
During the summers my family uses this intersection to bike to the outdoor summer camp in Martin Luther King Open Space in the San Leandro Bay. There is a great bike trail in reach on the Oakland side that we use to get there.
The most concerning stretch from our Central Alameda house is this intersection. When riding back and forth on Gibbons St. from downtown, navigating this intersection to the High St. Bridge is jitter-inducing. The multiple point intersection, with a slip lane from Fernside to High is complex. I hope long term we can explore aggressive redesign concepts like a roundabout here.
The near-term solution of pivoting Gibbons off the intersection does many positive things; drivers from the north are slowed down by forcing to take hard right, the pedestrian and bike zone is greatly increased and promotes visibility, and the road design now deters using Gibbons as a north bound road.
The proposed near-term changes for buffered bike lanes on Fernside also is a pragmatic if imperfect improvement; our roads were designed too wide with a dated engineering-mindset that seems to have lent too much weight on traffic flow over appropriate and safe speeds. The reduced width would immediately reset drivers expectations about allowable speeds. We have many competing road safety priorities and goals across the Island. While I'd love to see the long-term separated bikeways as soon as possible here on Fernside, whole-street-mentality road funding seems likely to face headwinds. This current design seems like a pragmatic iterative step for us to learn from towards the more aggressive traffic calming solution in the future.
Alameda's streets–despite the posted 25 MPH limits and speed check signs–are dispiritingly not as slow as I and many parents would like to see for our kids' safety. Road design changes are the path to hitting our goals.
Thushan Amarasiriwardena
Alamedan, Santa Clara & Walnut