Oakland’s Supervising Transportation Engineer Joe Wang recently unveiled a revised draft crosswalk policy, which includes a series of questions about a crosswalk’s location and use, leading the city to determine if it should be made more visible to increase the safety of pedestrians.

While the crosswalk policy - announced at last Thursday’s public Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting - might seem like an obscure subject of transportation planning, it affects everyone that drives or walks in Oakland.

Did you know:

• Any time a sidewalk ends, whether it is at an intersection or in the middle of a block, the route that extends into the street is a legal crosswalk?
• Many legal crosswalks are unpainted, especially in residential neighborhoods?
• A vehicle is required to stop whenever a person is in a crosswalk, painted or unpainted?
• Neighbors often approach the city to paint crosswalks, because a painted crosswalk is more visible to drivers, increasing the safety of people that walk?
• Most of Oakland’s marked crosswalks are painted in one of four ways, in order of increasing visibility: two white lines, white lines with a perpendicular “hash marks,” two yellow lines and yellow lines with perpendicular hash marks?

Up to now, city engineers had to study each potential crosswalk improvement in a process that requires time and expense. Now, by answering the policy’s questions about the location, one can easily determine if the city should make the crosswalk more visible. Ultimately, by reducing the time required for the city to study each potential project, it will be able to spend more effort on the crosswalks themselves.

The questions include:

• Is the crosswalk near a park, school, hospital, senior center or other area that attracts a lot of people that walk?
• Do more than 20 people per hour use the crosswalk?
• Have two or more people been hit by cars at the location in the past five years?

City staff created the policy at the behest of pedestrian advocacy organization Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, or WOBO.

“By drafting this policy, the city has created a tool for citizen engagement,” said WOBO’s Executive Director Kassie Rohrbach. With a written policy, the public can more effectively argue for improvements to crosswalks at locations that meet the policy’s requirements.

Though the policy is a working draft, Wang expressed uncertainty on the next step for the policy.

“My director is considering signing it and making it official department policy,” he said. As official policy, the city would be bound to apply the recommendations of the policy. As a draft, the document is a guideline, and the city can freely make exceptions.

Rohrbach said she is hopeful the policy will be formally adopted soon.

“The city now has a standard process to follow for any requests received for crosswalk improvements," she said. "We applaud the city for bringing transparency into this process and hope that they will proceed to adopt this draft into official policy.” Oakland Crosswalk Policy

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