Joaquin Miller Road: Safer or less safe?

Carolyn Gregory drove me up and down Joaquin Miller Road in Oakland so that I could see what she sees.

Gregory has lived in the Joaquin Miller Heights neighborhood for 20 years and what she sees is trouble ahead.

The city recently reconfigured a mile stretch on the steep road in an effort to slow down traffic. Two lanes in the downhill direction were reduced to one for about a mile. The problem is that drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are now sharing one lane.

As we sat in Gregory’s car, a woman pushed a stroller up the hill into oncoming traffic, because she had to get around parked cars and there was no sidewalk. That didn’t look safe to me. “It may be slowing the traffic, but

what it does is it’s creating an unsafe situation in that space,” Gregory said.

Bicyclists are also finding the changes problematic, particularly because Joaquin Miller has no designated bike lane.

Beverly Pancher has lived in the neighborhood of egg ranches and horse barns for almost three decades.

“It’s an important span, because it’s downhill,” Pancher said. “If you’re in a car or on a bike, you’re going to be going fast.”

If there were a bike lane, Pancher said the configurations would make sense. It would be safe.

“The cyclists have to somehow squeeze between the cars and the parked cars without having a designated lane,” she said. “The old situation worked well, because we just accommodated the cyclists by giving them a lane.”

Cars would scoot into the left lane and leave the right lane for cyclists, an unwritten traffic law that motorists followed.

Already there have been two accidents. So it looks as if the city’s effort to increase safety has backfired.

Gregory pointed out a root ball in the median, the remnants of a tree that was taken out by a car swerving to avoid a vehicle leaving a parking space on the one-lane stretch. A cyclist has also been involved in an accident, according to residents.

In 2015, the city, prompted by complaints, conducted a study of traffic patterns for the downhill lanes of Joaquin Miller Road between Sanborn Drive and Hedge Lane, according to Sean Maher, an Oakland Department of Transportation spokesperson. The study found that almost 90 percent of drivers were speeding, with many approaching 50 miles per hour. The speed limit is 35.

“When Joaquin Miller Road was recently scheduled for resurfacing, we had an opportunity to address those community concerns and high vehicle speeds by redesigning the street,” Maher said.

It’s true that people speed on Joaquin Miller, but residents tell me the road was safer then.

Recent reconfigurations of Telegraph and Grand avenues, which reduced traffic lanes along strips and added parking and bike lanes, hasn’t clogged the flow of those busy roads.

It’s a different story along Joaquin Miller.

“It’s a heavily traveled route for road cyclists and mountain bikers,” said Lauren Haughey, an avid cyclist who lives in the neighborhood. “It’s like the way out of the trails and the road rides. It’s a way to get back down to the flats.”

Maher told me the city will conduct a follow-up study next year to compare before-and-after traffic data.

“We recognize the concern among some neighbors about two recent collisions that occurred on that same stretch,” he said. “As we conduct our follow-up study, we will be looking for any patterns that can help us identify any needed adjustments to the project, and we’ll report the results out to the community.”