VICTORY! Increased Capacity of Oakland’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Program

In November 2008 WOBO members successfully lobbied City Council to fund a new staff person critical to the successful implementation of Oakland’s bike plan!!! This new staffer will do design and engineering to smooth projects starting in 2009. We are thrilled with this accomplishment and look forward to riding on the results!

In December 2007, WOBO and other community groups successfully pushed for the City Council to pass the new Bicycle Master Plan. However, a plan on paper is only as good as the folks who are there to implement it.

We will need to continue to push the City Council and the Community Economic and Development Agency (CEDA) to add more staff to support walking and bicycling in Oakland. We still simply do not have enough staff to get new bike and pedestrian projects planned and implemented. We need will still look for every opportunity to add staff so that new development (especially along our priority campaigns along East 12th and 15th Streets, Webster-Franklin, Telegraph-Broadway, Harrison and 27th all get implemented with good bike-ped input and oversight.

Email your councilmember to thank them for adding this position while reminding them we will still only have THREE in a city that employs almost FIVE THOUSAND. For comparison, San Francisco has 13 bike/ped staff but only double the population!