Cars coming off this stretch of road in Sacramento’s Broadway corridor. Here’s why

Sacramento city officials are permanently closing to vehicles a stretch of Second Avenue in Oak Park to reduce traffic collisions and make the area more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly.

Construction started Monday on the roadway between 34th Street and Broadway and is expected to take a week to complete. Once finished, the stretch of road will no longer be open to vehicles, officials said.

The roadwork is part of the city’s Envision Broadway in Oak Park Plan, which aims to reduce vehicle traffic along the Broadway corridor from Franklin to Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards. It’s one of five projects along the corridor as the city plans to reduce lanes and create a streetscape. It’s also one of five ongoing projects on the Broadway corridor from the Sacramento River to Stockton Boulevard as officials look to ramp up efforts on reducing collisions in the city.

The area is also a key biking spot that has become one of the most frequent crash sites in the city. After multiple residents voiced their issues with the intersection, the city conducted a study of the corridor.

Officials found a total of 177 collisions between 2009 and 2017 were reported along the Broadway corridor between those two boulevards. They also found that the place with the most crashes was Second Avenue at 34th Street, primarily between two cars.

The plan to make this area safer was a four-year process for the city with many community engagement and outreach events to an initial draft. The city then opted to temporarily close the street and turn it into a temporary pop-up park in fall 2019 to test if the closure would reduce crashes.

“We want to ensure we are bike and pedestrian friendly and that we are safe,” Councilman Jay Schenirer, whose district includes Oak Park, said in 2019. “It is about making our streets safer for folks to get places they want to go.”