El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll blog

By Steve Price Automobiles are taking up more and more space on our local streets—they're getting bigger and heavier. Light trucks, which include SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks, were 33% of the new vehicle market in 1990; they're now 78%. Average horsepower for light-duty vehicles grew by 85% between 1975 and 2021. This targets the most dangerous vehicle users, young men.  The top-selling vehicle in America is the Ford F-Series pickup. Compare that with the modest-sized best selling car in Europe, the Peugeot 208. (See the comparison in the graphic above from carsized.com.) For older communities like El Cerrito and the Richmond Annex, where street space is not growing, this car bloat puts more and more squeeze on bicycle riders and makes crossing streets for pedestrians more dangerous. As cars get electrified, they will get heavier, which means that they will be deadlier at lower speeds. The taller the front end of a vehicle, the more deadly it is. Low front ends, as typical in

With cars and trucks getting heavier and more powerful, some governments are taking measures to address this growing concern. ​​Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, France wants to “stop the excesses of carmakers, who are pushing people to buy ever bigger, more expensive, more raw-material-intensive, more polluting vehicles.” She has set up a referendum for Parisians to vote in February 2024 for parking-fee increases for SUVs and trucks. Washington, DC, is substantially increasing annual registration fees for heavier vehicles. At $500, the annual fee for a vehicle over 6,000 pounds, will be seven times more than for a smaller car. The fee for vehicles less than 3,500 pounds, $72, remains unchanged. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed AB 251 , authorizing a study of the effects of vehicle weight on pedestrian and bicycle rider safety, and exploring the possibility of a passenger vehicle weight fee. In the European Union, Australia, China, Korea, and Japan, vehicles are t

Structured parking is envisioned as part of the development at the El Cerrito Plaza BART station. How will its design respond to an evolving vehicle future? As automobiles get larger, cities will be under pressure to change parking to accommodate the growing sizes, which means more asphalt and concrete. There are serious questions about whether existing parking garages can hold the extra weight of American vehicles going forward. Structural engineers in the United Kingdom are expressing concerns about the impact on parking garages of heavier, electrified cars. Electrified American cars are bigger still. The concrete industry is responsible for 8% of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. We will likely need to use more concrete in future parking garages given vehicle bloat. Hopefully emissions from concrete and steel manufacturing can be reduced, which, if improved processes can be developed, will nevertheless take time to scale up. Meanwhile other solutions: Make parking spaces bigger

If you’ve driven, walked, or rolled along San Pablo Avenue recently, you may have noticed a new type of traffic signal at the San Pablo Avenue and Eureka Avenue intersection. Installed by Caltrans, the signal is called a pedestrian hybrid beacon or PHB, and is a special type of traffic signal that reduces pedestrian-vehicle conflicts on busy roadways. A before and after study of pedestrian hybrid beacons in Tucson, Arizona, identified a 29 percent reduction in total crashes and a 69 percent reduction in pedestrian crashes. Learn more on the City of El Cerrito website .

On Dec. 4, Jarrett Mullen, El Cerrito’s sustainable transportation program manager, gave a presentation to the city’s Arts and Culture Commission, which proposed a public art project linked to new bike parking corrals. The proposed art program would integrate work by local artists into on-street bike parking facilities, in order to help the city to achieve its overlapping goals of placemaking, increased access to public art, improved sustainability, expanded business access options for customers and employees, and leveraging of transportation resources. “The commission essentially directed staff to develop a ‘call for artists’ process for pavement artwork that we could package with on-street bike corrals. This is something staff will be working on in 2024!” Mullen noted. In the December 4 art commission meeting agenda , scroll down to item 6 to see Mullen’s full presentation. Photo: Bike parking with public art could be coming soon to El Cerrito.