A lot of Oakland’s deadliest streets in 2016 were still its deadliest streets five years later, a new report from the Transportation Department shows. But one difference in what’s known as the High-Injury Network map can be seen at a glance: By 2021, the danger of getting seriously hurt or killed in a car crash had moved from central and West Oakland to East Oakland.
The map is one of the most important documents used by the city in its efforts to make roads safer, shaping decisions about how to prioritize new funding, design, and construction. The Oakland Transportation Department recently updated the original corridor map, which used crash data from 2012-2016 from the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) database. The new map uses SWITRS data from 2017-2021.
Many of the high-injury corridors identified in the previous study show up in the new one. International Boulevard and other major arterial roads that were on the 2017 map also appear on this year’s map, as dangerous activities like speeding and red-light running are still leading to high rates of death and injury.
But the new map also shows that the percentage of the high-injury network of streets in East Oakland’s District 6 doubled since the previous report and also almost doubled in District 7. OakDOT staff described Districts 2 and 3 as seeing a “dramatic drop” in collisions that lead to deaths and serious injuries. One reason offered for this change is the greater prevalence in East Oakland of wide arterial roads where people tend to speed. Another potential factor is the introduction of the AC Transit Tempo line, which led to a rise in collisions on International Boulevard.
“It is an interesting shift away from really pedestrian-heavy activity downtown into outlying neighborhoods,” said Charlie Ream, a senior transportation planner who recently presented the map to the Bicyclist and Pedestrian Advisory Commission and members of the public.
Ream told the group that designating a high-injury network of streets helps OakDOT create its capital improvement plan and organize paving plans. It will also determine where speed enforcement cameras will go up. But all of that is done, he said, in service of the city’s ultimate goal to stop the carnage on the streets, especially in those communities of color that have historically been overburdened by deaths and injuries from traffic collisions.
According to OakDOT’s new map, those communities still carry a disproportionate share of the risk from car crashes. About 84% of the new map’s high-injury corridors are in what the city designates as equity-priority communities.
“That is a figure that [we are] working to correct and is, I think, a marker of where we should invest our resources,” Ream said.
In a statement to The Oaklandside, OakDOT said that the High-Injury Network is a “key element” of its traffic safety program, Safe Oakland Streets (SOS): “In alignment with Vision Zero cities around the world, OakDOT seeks to reduce and ultimately eliminate fatal and severe crashes in our city. Identifying corridors with the highest density of the most severe crashes helps the City focus efforts and prioritize limited resources and investments on the streets in most need of safety enhancements.”
The importance of the high-injury corridor map extends far beyond what OakDOT can do with it. The mayor and city councilmembers frequently reference it to determine where to focus their attention. Safe-road advocates use it to highlight dangerous conditions. Journalists like us use it to find stories. And people who have suffered critical injuries on these roads have used it in liability cases to argue that the city has been negligent in improving safety conditions.
Which streets were added, and which ones were removed?
Among the streets added to the 2024 map were nearly 50 blocks of MacArthur Boulevard from Fruitvale Avenue all the way to 73rd Avenue and Claremont Avenue in North Oakland, from College Avenue down to the DMV office. MacArthur and Claremont are restaurant and retail hubs in Oakland tucked close to freeways, with vehicles often coming in and out at high speeds.
New segments of San Leandro Street and Bancroft Avenue are other additions to the map thanks to their high instances of severe collisions.
Ream said the city used California guidelines to determine which roads qualified for high-injury network designation. In 2021, the state said that a city with 25% of all city injuries occurring on 20% or less of its network of streets could be considered for high-injury network designation. In Oakland, according to the 2024 injury map, 60% of all crashes occur in only 8% of its roads. That’s slightly lower than the 64% in 8% of the streets in 2018, but not by much.
In the map provided to the BPAC and reviewed by The Oaklandside, the streets in the injury network that were in both injury network maps were designated as pink, while new ones are colored in purple.
Some of the removals from the high-injury map include sections of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and some parts of Park Boulevard. The latter received some slowing infrastructure over the past five years, including better crosswalks that make it easier to cross the street.
A street or part of a street that has dropped out of the high-injury network isn’t necessarily fixed or no longer dangerous. It just means that it’s not as harmful as it was five years ago, relative to other streets on the map.
BPAC commissioner Nick Whipps said he was disconcerted by the removal of parts of Martin Luther King Jr. Way from the map; the street is still problematic for pedestrians and cyclists. The city has planned an infrastructure project for MLK Jr. Way that is expected to improve road conditions.
The data is tricky and doesn’t tell the whole story
OakDOT’s Ream said it was still hard to determine whether the changes in the high-injury map had anything to do with the city’s infrastructure projects from the past few years. That’s partly because the collision data used for this version of the map reflects a time when OakDOT was still ramping up its projects (Telegraph Avenue’s protected bike lanes were only recently completed). It’s also because the data was affected by shifts in transit behavior during the pandemic. Transportation and health studies have found that, in the early stages of the pandemic, certain parts of cities across the country saw worse speeding on major arterial roads during rush hours because the streets were empty.
In addition to conducting more detailed research on the ground, the department uses data sets from other agencies besides the police, including the Alameda County Health system.
“We use this map as a high-level first pass where we should be focusing our efforts and our time,” Ream said. “Once we take that step of starting the project, we look at patterns of intersection [for example] to figure out what we can do to address the problem.”
In addition to designating the new roads in the injury network, OakDOT also used the SWITRS data to determine the 20 most dangerous intersections in the city. These will also be included in the digital map on the injury network website that the city maintains, but as of press time, the map still needed to be updated.
Below is a full list of the roads in the new High-Injury Network Map:
