14th Street Safety Project
Attachment C - Network Connectivity
It is hard to overstate the central importance of this project to the future of Oakland’s network of safe and protected bike lanes. A map of existing and planned bicycle lanes and protected bike lanes is shown below in Figure 1: Downtown Oakland Bicycle Lane Connectivity Map.
Protected bike lanes are of vital importance in the Downtown core where bicycle, motor vehicle, trucking, and transit travel naturally converge. With their mix of uses, travel behaviors, loading and unloading activities, and congestion at peak times, Downtown streets require physical separation between modes to encourage people of varying abilities to choose alternative modes of transportation. As the map shows, there is currently only one complete segment of protected bike lanes Downtown, on Lakeside Drive and Harrison Streets between Madison Street and Grand Avenue. Three more projects are in various stages of Planning and Design, on 20 th
Street between Broadway and Harrison, on Lakeside and Lake Merritt Blvd connecting Madison Street with International Boulevard, and on 7th Street connecting the planned Class II bike lanes on Martin Luther King Jr Way to the West Oakland BART station under the I980 freeway. There is a notable lack of bike lanes of any kind connecting east to west across the Downtown core.
The 14th Street Safety Project will establish this key link and finally create a safe connection into Downtown for people coming from West Oakland or points East of Lake Merritt. This project will seamlessly tie into the growing network of protected bikeways around Lake Merritt. Looking west, the 2019 Bike Plan calls for a similar extension of protected bike lanes on 14th Street through West Oakland to Mandela Parkway.
FIGURE 1 – Downtown Oakland Network Connectivity Map