The crashes on Otis Drive continue to continue

While we're waiting for polls to close and ballots to be counted across the country, here's an "evergreen" blog post: Otis Drive in Alameda is not currently designed to promote safe use by drivers.

This morning, when looking at my phone, I noticed a PulsePoint notification that had come in at 1:21 a.m.: a traffic collision on Otis Drive. It was marked as resolved by the Alameda Fire Dept in 3 minutes. So I figured it was a very minor accident.

Later in the day, I signed into social media and saw the above pic posted to the Alameda Peeps group on Facebook — looks like a crash that probably required more than 3 minutes to resolve!

In any case, this crash is probably of little interest to Caltrans for two reasons.

First, the vehicle hit that tree on city-owned right-of-way, rather than Caltrans-owned State Route 61:

The fact that the driver had to somehow reach sufficient speed to flip their vehicle — presumably by speeding along the Caltrans-designed right-of-way to the east and through a Caltrans-designed intersection may not be reflected in the police report that is sent to the CHP SWITRS state-wide system and eventually geo-referenced in the TIMS system.

Second, Caltrans District 4 staff when arguing against a road-diet along their portion of Otis Drive on Alameda Island, didn't analyze crashes along that subset of roadway. Rather, they averaged all crashes over the entire ~5 mile length of the "project limits" (including Doolittle Drive in Bay Farm and Oakland) and compared this value to other highways state-wide:

Such a coarse analysis said Otis Drive was no worse than any other state highway, so no need to give any special care to any portions of the project.

But spend some time around this section of "highway," follow PulsePoint notifications about Alameda Fire calls, chat with people who actually live right here, look at the pics posted to social media... and a different picture emerges. (Other Caltrans analyses, not presented by District 4, do identify the specific blocks of Otis Drive on Alameda Island as having crash exposure rates greater than the 90th percentile, when compared with the rest of the state.)

It's time to stop hiding from this problem – a street pretending to be a "highway" – and fix it.