Cruising the San Pablo SPINE — a green streets test lab
From tattoo parlors to senior housing, and ethnic-food vendors to world-famous record shops, it’s been said that if you can’t find what you’re looking for on San Pablo Avenue, then it doesn’t exist. And now, the busy thoroughfare, which runs north-south through the heart of the East Bay, is also a testbed for a distributed network of rain gardens. The project, known as the San Pablo Avenue Green Stormwater “SPINE”, began nearly ten years ago (the caps are used for emphasis, not as an acronym). In the fall of 2012, the U.S. EPA issued a $307,000 portion of a larger green-infrastructure grant for the design of seven garden sites in seven different cities.
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