El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll blog

By Scott Badler Vacation in Davis? It works for me. I’ve been doing it regularly for the last several years now but this was the first time I did it without a car. Using BART, Amtrak, bicycle, and of course, my feet, connections were seamless and easy.   I began by walking 10 minutes from my apartment in the Richmond Annex to El Cerrito Plaza BART. After catching the train to Richmond, I hopped aboard the 12:22 p.m. California Zephyr bound for Chicago. I was surprised that the train was so full during this noncommute time. The train arrived in Davis on time at 1:36 p.m. at the historic station. It’s adjacent to downtown Davis, where all the action is.   From there, I made the easy 10-minute walk to the University Park Inn. The walk includes going through the Davis Subway , better known to the community as Richards Boulevard Underpass; it is listed on the prestigious National Register of Historic Places. The subway, built in 1917, is formed by the last remaining I-bea...

By Steve Price A study by consultants Kimley- Horn exploring options for transit upgrades to San Pablo Avenue suggested that bicycle access to the avenue could be achieved by parallel routes such as the Ohlone Greenway. How would that work for residents in the Richmond Annex? The Greenway does run in a straight line fairly parallel to the avenue, but because of the prevalence of T-intersections on the avenue (in our area streets don’t cross the avenue), Annex bicycle riders from the Richmond Annex on the west side of San Pablo Avenue have to ride on the avenue to access streets on the east side of the avenue that lead to the Ohlone Greenway. This negates the safety of the greenway as an alternative to bicycling on the avenue. Numerous T-intersections make it impossible to avoid bicycling on San Pablo Avenue. Maybe Richmond Annex bicycle riders should use a parallel route on their side of San Pablo Avenue. Yet for those living in the Richmond Annex, there is no equivalent straight route...

  By Steve Price San Pablo Avenue is designated State Route 123. That conjures up heading out on the highway looking for adventure, or the allure of distant big-box stores. But if locals slowed down, they would find a wealth of useful and desirable destinations within minutes of their front doors, all on San Pablo Avenue or immediately adjacent to the avenue. If your car magically disappeared, could you survive without it just on the retail and services available on the corridor? Easily! The richness of San Pablo Avenue is a nearby blessing with all its useful destinations: groceries, drug stores, hair salons, gyms, restaurants, coffee shops, hardware, building supply, post offices, a bookstore, a movie theater, clothing stores, tax advice, car rental, pub and taverns, and of course AC Transit. (Just check out the current list of El Cerrito Chamber of Commerce members , which doesn’t even include all the businesses in town.) If locals get on board, El Cerrito could showcase the pos...

  By Steve Price The good news in El Cerrito is that our per capita GHG emissions have dropped. But look at the blue sections of the bar chart above. Our transportation emissions are growing! How could this be? We're driving more electric cars aren’t we? The fact that we're driving bigger and bigger vehicles and driving more frequently and farther is part of the problem. The City of El Cerrito is updating its Climate Action Plan from 2013 — it's now called the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan . The city hired consultants to help with research, writing, and community outreach. What will come out of this plan is a list of strategies and actions that the city council, city staff, and public can pursue. The question remains how to prioritize which of these strategies and actions are priorities — what will produce the most certain greenhouse gas emission reductions and do it quickly. Input from the public is crucial. Provide the city your thoughts about addressing climate chan...

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...