38th Avenue Traffic Calming Project
- Project TypeTransportation
- Project StatusPlanning
38th Avenue between E 12th Street and MacArthur Boulevard is set to be repaved in 2028, giving the City the opportunity to make important safety improvements.
** Early Conceptual Plans Available for Review(PDF, 5MB) (March 2026) **
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PROJECT GOAL
The overall project goal is to create a slow, calm street for people walking and biking between the Fruitvale BART Station / East Bay Greenway and the Harrington/Jefferson, Allendale, and Laurel/Redwood Heights neighborhoods. The City will primarily achieve this goal by:
- Slowing vehicles via extensive traffic calming
- Making people walking easier to see
- Adding new crossings for people walking
Project Toolkit
OakDOT has delivered various traffic calming elements on the project corridor over the past few decades, including reducing the number of lanes, adding pedestrian crossing islands, adding a buffer to the bike lane, and installing a traffic circle at Penniman Avenue. The current project will continue this work, using the following toolkit of safety improvements:
- high-visibility crosswalks
- pedestrian crossing islands
- new pedestrian crossings (e.g., between Cesar Chavez Park and its southern extension)
- traffic circles
- speed humps
- concrete islands to narrow the road and increase visibility of people walking and biking
Traffic Circle at Penniman Avenue, installed in winter 2025/2026.
BACKGROUND
Three main corridors – 35th Avenue, 38th Avenue, and High Street – connect the Fruitvale BART Station and the East Bay Greenway to the eight high-equity priority neighborhoods to the northeast. 35th Avenue and High Street are relatively high-traffic transit corridors that connect the 580 and 880 freeways. 38th Avenue, on the other hand, has no transit service and is mostly residential. Due to these characteristics, as part of the City’s 2019 “Let’s Bike Oakland” Bike Plan, OakDOT identified 38th Avenue as a Neighborhood Bike Route, which are bikeways that provide continuous, comfortable bicycle routes on the local street network instead of busy arterials. This designation made 38th Avenue the priority corridor for bike improvements to connect the Fruitvale BART Station and the neighborhoods to the northeast.
More recently, OakDOT staff have chosen to designate a parallel Slow Streets route along 37th Avenue / Harrington Avenue, from E12th Street to Nevil Street. Slow Streets are a network of streets designed for slowness, just as freeways are designed for speed. They are streets for walking, biking, and running, and for getting about with low-powered electric vehicles. The City chose this segment of 37th Avenue as a Slow Street because it has significantly fewer vehicles using it than the parallel segment of 38th Avenue. Therefore, while this project will include features to calm traffic on the lower portion of 38th Avenue, it will not be installing new bikeways there, since Nevil will be the preferred biking route in the future when Slow Streets elements are instituted.
OUTREACH
Staff began outreach in spring 2026, including mailing postcards to everyone who lives on and near the project corridor.
Outreach Meetings:
- March 18, 2026: 24X Harrington/Jefferson Neighborhood Council
CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS
Early Conceptual Plans(PDF, 5MB) (March 18, 2026) - Share feedback here!
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Design for 38th Avenue is funded by a Technical Assistance Grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). The street is being paved as part of the City of Oakland's 2022 Five-Year Paving Plan, a more than $300M plan to repair Oakland’s streets. Construction is funded primarily by Measure U, Oakland’s 2022 Infrastructure Bond, which requires the City to implement safety improvements with repaving where feasible. For more information, visit our Paving page.