Safety improvements will come too late to a deadly East Oakland intersection 15%
By Jose Fermoso19%
7/21/2026, 9:06:28 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Unattributed Quote, Optimism Bias, and Confirmation Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 14.7% saturation with 87 hits. Analysis detected 602 faulty-reasoning hits from 592 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 31.6% and a BS Rank of 15% (17,429 of 20,454 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 85.20% of the article peer group.
A man died last week crossing a road in East Oakland that has been spotlighted by street advocates as desperately needing a redesign focused on safety.
According to the police, Keith Barnes, an Oakland resident, was hit on July 14 by a dump truck while walking in the southeast crosswalk at the intersection of High Street and Coliseum Way.
The collision occurred at about 6:22 p.m., during the day’s peak commuting time and just in front of the Go!
Gas and Food service station.
The Oaklandside reviewed video from the gas station and confirmed the time and place of the collision.
The police said the truck was driven by a 25-year-old male driver, who stayed at the scene to talk to authorities.
Neither his name nor his place of employment was disclosed by the police.
The Oaklandside has reached out to the city to learn more about Barnes and his family.
According to Bike East Bay advocacy director Robert Prinz, the intersection has been under road design development since the 1990s.
The city recommended in its 2019 Bike Plan to add Class 2 bike lanes on a nearby span of Howard Street and Class 3 buffered bike lanes on High Street north of Howard, which would include the High Street/Coliseum Way crossing.
Even a buffered bike lane, which places cyclists on the same road as cars (rather than in safer concrete-separated bike lanes), still narrows driving lanes and can slow vehicles, making the roads slightly safer.
The truck driver, who has not yet been identified, was making a turn from High Street into Coliseum Way.
He dragged Barnes for over ten feet until he stopped the truck, according to authorities.
Prinz wrote in a post on BlueSky last week that redesigns of the intersection by the Oakland Department of Transportation contemplate adding a new left-turn lane and changing how the stop-and-go signals on High Street work.
Doing so would separate the times pedestrians are alerted to walk across the road from the times vehicles are signaled that they can begin turning left through the crosswalk.
“This change could have saved Keith’s life,” Prinz wrote.
This road redesign hasn’t begun.
OakDOT has presented these safety improvements to the Bicyclist and Pedestrian Advisory Commission in 2020, 2025, and earlier this year.
According to the 42nd Avenue and High Street I-880 access improvement project page, of which this intersection redesign is a part, construction is still years away with a preliminary start date of summer 2029.
The commissioners and other advocates also spoke with OakDOT during and after those meetings, raising their concerns and offering further recommendations to improve the design.
One of the examples they raised was that the painted bike lanes OakDOT added to High Street in recent years dead-end at a newly proposed sidewalk at the entrance to the Home Depot.
Another issue possibly related to last week’s fatal collision is that the latest design for the intersection did not include a high-visibility crosswalk, as Prinz noted in an email to OakDOT, with “advance stop/yield markings, bike lane striping including buffered lane striping, green striping at bike lane transition areas, and more.”
In an email with OakDOT civil engineer John Chin earlier this year about the project, Prinz wrote that he hopes the city can deliver on the commission’s recommendations.
“If not exactly, then with at least the intent to serve the same bike connectivity, given that the 880 crossings are few and far between in this area,” he wrote.
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