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

By Laura Lent Since 2002 I have been part of an informal group of friends who go on an annual bike tour we call the "Spring Ride."  We've bike camped our way from the Antioch BART station to Yosemite and various Sierra foothill destinations, we've gone north and south along the coast, and we've taken AMTRAK to Bakersfield and ridden north through Carrizo Plain. We've stayed at a dozen different campgrounds in the "reservoir belt" of the Sierra foothills.   Laura Lent at this year’s Spring Ride. Photo: Joel Pomerantz We generally carry our own gear in panniers, but are often joined by and sometimes partially sagged (support provided and gear carried) by friends in vehicles. A core group rides the entire time, while others join as they can.  While we delight in searching out bucolic backroads, canalside trails, and creative shortcuts, it's always necessary to ride on some busy roads as well. The Spring Ride is not about getting there quickly, but a...

  In case you’ve been wondering (we have), the City of El Cerrito recently posted information on two projects currently underway for the very big, very bad intersection at Interstate 80 and Central Avenue. Whether this solves the perennial hope for bike access to the Bay Trail is open for debate. I-80/Central Avenue undercrossing bikeway: Caltrans is partnering with the cities of Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond, as well as the Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA) and West Contra Costa Transportation Advisory Committee (WCCTAC) on upgrades to the I-80/Central Avenue undercrossing , a barrier to east-west bicycle and pedestrian travel between the San Francisco Bay Trail and destinations to the east. To improve connectivity, Caltrans is planning and designing new, separated bicycle lanes and pedestrian pathways alongside Central Avenue beneath the I-80 overpass. Environmental design of the project is currently underway, with engineering design expected to begin this fall, co...

By Carrie Hobbs Schulman, co-founder, El Cerrito Strollers & Rollers Several times when I’ve mentioned El Cerrito Strollers & Rollers to people, they say that they're not a parent so it would not be for them. I think the word "strollers" has an immediate connection with baby strollers. While we do advocate for people with strollers, we advocate for all types of active transportation and having "strollers" as the first word after "El Cerrito" paints an inaccurate picture in people's minds. In addition, Albany is already using the name “Strollers and Rollers.” I think it is confusing to have two separate groups so closely situated with basically the same name. It's quite likely that our groups will collaborate on future projects and it will be more powerful to have two unique groups backing a project. Lastly, El Cerrito Strollers and Rollers is just a mouthful. That's a full 9 syllables! I think we can find a shorter name that is uniq...