ue helps garfield parents win $160,000 for traffic safety improvements
Evangelina Lara, a first-generation immigrant from Mexico, has become her Oakland neighborhood's traffic safety expert.
The mother of four never thought she would be counting pedestrians or measuring traffic signal lengths, but that's exactly what she did this year as part of an advocacy campaign led by Urban Ecology. The data collected by Evangelina and fellow parents underscored what they already know -- that local streets are dangerous to cross. But their research and advocacy was pivotal in winning $160,000 from Oakland City Councilmember Patricia Kernighan to make streets safer around the school attended by Evangelina's son.
"We really wanted to teach community members how to build a strong case so they can get more resources, and that's what they did," said Robert Hickey, who leads Urban Ecology's work to implement the pedestrian safety recommendations of the 23rd Avenue Community Action Plan.
The advocacy efforts couldn't have come any sooner, as the streets surrounding Garfield Elementary represents some of the most dangerous in Oakland.
Two major thoroughfares funnel fast-moving traffic past the school, while providing little refuge or adequate crossing time for neighborhood youth. The result is more car collisions with young pedestrians at Garfield than any other school in the city. After years of dodging traffic, parents were fed up. They ranked pedestrian safety as a top priority during Urban Ecology's recent community-planning process.
For the past several years, Urban Ecology has been working with Latino, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mien and Cambodian parents in Oakland's Lower San Antonio as part of the 23rd Avenue community planning process. The fruit of those efforts was a comprehensive plan for revitalizing the larger neighborhood in which Garfield Elementary sits. A key component of that larger plan was ensuring that residents could get to daily services in a safe and convenient manner.
To address the community's problems, Urban Ecology developed the 23rd Avenue Community Action Plan with parents, merchants, youth and other residents. The Action Plan contains several bold designs for improving the pedestrian environment, including curb bulbouts, a transit plaza, high-visibility crosswalks, and cutting-edge pedestrian signals.
Urban Ecology knew that without effective follow-up advocacy by the residents themselves, these ideas would not evolve into built projects. To build the capacity of local parents, such as Evangelina, Urban Ecology guided a team of Garfield mothers through data collection exercises. The exercises involved timing traffic signals, measuring street distances, comparing pedestrian signal durations to the crossing times required by a spectrum of children and adults, and tallying intersection crossings by students.
The final data helped build a formidable case for making Garfield a priority for city and state funding. In addition to the $160,000 committed in June of 2005, Oakland Public Works also agreed to make Garfield a top priority in the city's application for Caltrans Safe Routes to School funding, which could deliver an additional $160,000 as early as spring 2006.
Winning dollars to implement the 23rd Avenue Action Plan is only one of the goals of Urban Ecology's work at Garfield. "If we're really going to make Oakland healthier and more livable, we need a larger team of neighborhood pedestrian advocates in this city," said Hickey. "The first piece of helping Garfield parents become more effective advocates is helping them develop and tell their own story. These are valuable skills no matter what neighborhood issue they choose to take on next."
This fall, Urban Ecology will continue working with Garfield parents to build their leadership skills and implement the next pieces of a pedestrian safety plan for Garfield. In the meantime, keep an eye out for Evangelina, as she and fellow parents continue to work City Hall.
