El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll blog

Which business wins the prize for the greatest effort to attract bicycle riders? 24 Hour Fitness on San Pablo Avenue! It has 9 bike racks visibly adjacent to the entrance. As a fitness center, it makes sense that customers pursuing health would choose a healthful mode of transportation to get there. But as the saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” The presence of bike racks doesn’t guarantee their use. The racks at 24 Hour Fitness are underutilized. Most patrons of 24 Hour Fitness are driving there, with lots of cars in the parking lot. Yet if business patrons make a sincere effort to arrive by bicycle only to have their bikes stolen for lack of secure bike parking, chances are they won’t make the effort a second time. 24 Hour Fitness deserves kudos for making sure patrons can park securely. As climate change worsens, we’re seeing more bikes showing up on racks in the East Bay. Businesses should follow 24 Hour Fitness’s example and install racks ev

By Steve Price Passed in 2014 and championed by Councilmember Janet Abelson (who passed away in late 2022), El Cerrito’s form-based code shapes development along the length of San Pablo Avenue, as well as both BART stations and El Cerrito Plaza. An alternative to conventional land-use zoning, form-based coding is focused on shaping public space and giving back to pedestrians their rightful place in the built landscape. By comparison, conventional zoning is about designating where in a town housing, businesses, and industry are located; it color-codes a map for those uses but says almost nothing about the experiential quality of the places on the map. A form-based code returns the built landscape back to the scale of people walking and bicycling much as historic towns and cities did in the past. With form-based codes, the public realm — whether a street, square, or plaza — is shaped by two basic sets of standards: public space (shown, at top) and building form (shown, above). Public-spa

By Janet Byron On May 24, Berkeley SafeTREC and El Cerrito Strollers & Rollers convened a community training to explore opportunities for improving the pedestrian and bike route from BART to the San Francisco Bay and Bay Trail. Residents of El Cerrito and Richmond Annex have long sought a better way to get to the bay than Central Avenue, which is currently not welcoming to those on foot or bikes. “The training aimed to identify near-term projects and programmatic work that could formalize a safe, comfortable route for those walking and biking between the El Cerrito Plaza BART station and the Bay Trail,” SafeTREC wrote in its recently published report on the workshop. The training was cosponsored by the City of El Cerrito, California Walks, and California Office of Transportation Safety, and followed on from a previous Community Bike and Pedestrian Safety Training workshop on July 25, 2022 . The 18 stakeholders who gathered at the Hana Gardens community room included representative

On July 4, El Cerrito Strollers & Rollers asked visitors to our booth at the WorldOne festival in Cerrito Vista Park to “Help Us Choose a New Name!” by placing dots on a poster with about a dozen ideas for renaming our group. We received lots of feedback from passers-by, but the overwhelming favorite with 36 dots was “El Cerrito Walk & Roll” — a late entry suggested by Allison Cooper. The other top dot-getters were “Walk Bike El Cerrito” (21 dots), "Access El Cerrito" (17 dots), and "El Cerrito Streets for All" (15 dots). Interestingly, “El Cerrito Strollers & Rollers” received 21 dots in support of keeping our current name. Please help us make a final decision about our name by taking this survey . We will discuss and decide at our next meeting on Sept. 11. — Janet Byron