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OAKLAND — Over potholes and down side streets, through busy intersections and residential neighborhoods, a cadre of youth from Oakland’s Scraper Bike Team on Saturday led cycling advocates on a tour of their turf.

It was a chance to celebrate spring and the first few days of consistently sunny weather, but also a chance to highlight the lack of bicycle infrastructure and crumbling roadways that keep many of their East Oakland neighbors from ever riding a bike, said Reginald “RB” Burnette Jr., the nonprofit’s chief operating officer and a member of Oakland’s Bicyclist and Pedestrian Advisory Commission.

He, along with the cycling advocacy group Bike East Bay and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, have been advocating for a protected bicycling and walking path, called the East Bay Greenway, that would stretch 16 miles from the Lake Merritt BART station down to South Hayward under BART’s tracks. The first 10-block span was completed in 2015 in an area of East Oakland where Burnette said there aren’t many options for cyclists or walkers. The greenway runs parallel to San Leandro Street, a four-lane road with fast-moving cars.

“It gave people who live here 10 blocks of safer access to BART,” Burnette said, “versus riding on the street with 40 mph traffic or walking on the dirt.”

Last year, the trails conservancy and Bike East Bay unveiled a mural celebrating the Scraper team at the corner of 75th Avenue and San Leandro Street along the greenway as a way to celebrate the team’s continued advocacy for cycling.

Further east, on 90th Avenue, the city plans to repave and reconfigure the street to improve safety by bringing it down to one lane in each direction and adding a center turn lane. When it does, the street will become a “Scraper bikeway,” Burnette said, with a mural down the center median to celebrate Scraper culture, which typically features bikes that owners customize with aluminum foil on the tires and spraypaint.

“That’s pretty much how we ride anyway,” he said. “Since we have little to no bicycling infrastructure, we just use the middle lane.”

Those improvements, plus a redesigned bike plan that prioritizes infrastructure in neighborhoods like East Oakland, which has historically seen very little investment, have all contributed to increasing awareness about cycling, said Jeremy Garcia, an Oakland resident who’s been riding with the Scraper team for about a year.

He’s noticed an uptick in the number of people he sees opting for two wheels.

“(The Scraper team has) been out here for a long time,” Garcia said, “but it seems like now, more people have started noticing.”

Ben Kaufman, a trail developer for the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy, is hoping that trend continues. He’s working with cycling advocacy groups to build a 2,700-mile bicycle network around the Bay Area. Much of the infrastructure already exists, traversing much of the open areas and connecting urban parks throughout the region, he said. The real work is filling in the gaps.

“It’s about connecting all the trails in the Bay Area to each other,” he said, “so everybody around the Bay Area not only has access to other communities, but also public open space.”

That’s good news for the people who live in East Oakland, which has historically seen higher rates of crime and poverty, said Chuck Davis. He’s been riding with the team for the past eight years and now works at The Shed, the only bike repair shop in East Oakland, which the Scraper team operates.

For Davis, growing up in East Oakland wasn’t easy, but joining the Scraper kept him out of a lot more trouble than he might have gotten into otherwise, he said.

“They keep my mind right,” he said. “When I’m riding a Scraper bike, it makes me feel free.”