If you’ve noticed potholes on Oakland streets that have stubbornly grown bigger without getting fixed, you can add them yourself to the city’s inventory of infrastructure needs at Oak311, the city’s report-an-issue website from the comfort of your own couch.
Or, if reporting holes sounds funner with friends, you can join a community event this weekend run by street safety advocates that should get you started contributing to Oakland’s long-term safety.
Bike East Bay, the safe streets nonprofit, will be running an on-site pothole reporting event this upcoming Sunday in West Oakland, from 10 a.m. to noon. Their advocacy team, led by long-time staffer Robert Prinz, will teach anyone who wants to learn how to navigate the Oak311 website to report an issue and follow up with the city to get it fixed.
The event will start at the corner of San Pablo Avenue and 27th Street for 30 minutes of training, followed by a walk along San Pablo Avenue to report potholes there. People will then gather again at 11:30 for lunch at a local joint, Stay Gold Deli.
The advocates chose the location to support their advocacy for improving infrastructure on San Pablo Avenue, which is in the midst of a years-long project that will transform it to a multimodal corridor with dedicated bus lanes, better crosswalks, and other vehicle traffic-slowing work. The advocacy group will present their latest thoughts on the project at a webinar ahead of the pothole reporting event tonight at 6:30 p.m. on Zoom.
On Bluesky, Prinz said the group is seeking “thoughts on how walking, biking, driving, or taking transit down San Pablo Ave could be improved.”
Bike East Bay says on its website that most of the San Pablo corridor “remains inaccessible and hazardous to people walking and rolling due to fast vehicle traffic and the lack of protected, people-oriented infrastructure, and buses are frequently delayed behind backed-up car traffic.”
The Oaklandside previously reported on the San Pablo Avenue project’s community outreach by the county’s main transit funder, the Alameda County Transportation Commission, which is managing the project and leading the engineering design. San Pablo leads all major roads in the East Bay in collisions, with about two-thirds of serious injuries or fatalities on it involving pedestrians and bicyclists. That the project is now expected to break ground in 2030 at a cost of $250 million.
Pothole reporting through Oak311 can lead directly to improved roads in Oakland.
After the reporting system went online 16 years ago and became easier to search, the city experienced a rise in claims from people who have suffered injuries. In many of those cases, lawyers for plaintiffs alleging injuries invoke the constructive notice legal principle, under which a city is liable if a structure is dangerous and the city had a reasonable amount of time to fix it but failed to do so. Last week, we noted that Oakland paid out $55 million during that time from nearly 6,000 lawsuits and claims.
To protect residents and prevent more of these financially backbreaking lawsuits, Oakland has attempted to accelerate its paving program for poorly maintained roads. Josh Rowan, the city’s transportation director, told The Oaklandside that when streets carry people, it’s often “the pavement condition itself creating the risk.”
Just in 2026, Bike East Bay’s Prinz has submitted more than 130 reports across the city, with his staff and other volunteers adding to that tally — more than almost any other individual or group.
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