Drivers traveling through the East Oakland intersection of Seminary Avenue and Foothill Boulevard bumped up and down, rolling over a series of steel plates installed in the street. The steady clunk-clunk was music to Josh Rowan’s ears.

“One of the things we know is that everybody hates steel plates,” said Rowan, who leads the Oakland Department of Transportation, as he proudly showed off the month-old fixture.

Why was the official responsible for the city’s roads bragging about adding obstacles residents can’t stand? He thinks they may be a potent new weapon in a yearslong battle against a phenomenon many of his constituents despise even more than messed-up streets: sideshows.

After being tasked with cutting down stunt-driving at the intersection, which locals complained had become a hotspot for sideshows, Rowan and two of his engineers brainstormed what they could do with materials the city had on hand.

“We came up with an experiment,” Rowan said.

His team contacted Public Works and obtained some old, warped, steel plates — the type typically used to cover utility installations. Then, transportation workers pinned the plates right smack in the center of the intersection with railroad spikes and sealed them in place using asphalt — but not too tight, because they wanted the plates to have some give.

“We just tried to create artificially undulating pavement to see if [sideshow drivers] could learn how to do their donuts here,” Rowan said.

While skid marks on Seminary Avenue indicate that wild driving hasn’t been eliminated from the intersection, the treads seem to steer clear of the wobbly plates. Meanwhile, Rowan said he’s heard from a nearby business owner that sideshows have been less frequent since the plates went in.

The transportation boss is already dreaming of how he can iterate on the steel plates concept, perhaps getting them manufactured with metal bumps that would be even more obnoxious to stunting drivers. He’s just waiting for the next call from the Oakland Police Department asking his team to take on a new location. 

“They’re getting pretty good at saying when they know it’s a good intersection for the nerds,” Rowan said.

Sideshows have been a Bay Area subculture for decades, dating back to car shows in East Oakland during the 1980s. But empty roads and pandemic-era restlessness led to a sharp spike in sideshows in 2020. Stunt drivers took over intersections to burn donuts in front of large crowds — first in major metro areas and spreading to smaller cities and rural communities that had never dealt with the late-night tire-screeching events.

Despite pledges from law enforcement leaders across the region to crack down on sideshows, they show no signs of stopping, seemingly impervious to police response. 

But there’s a new sheriff in town. A sheriff that carries not a gun and badge but traffic plans and engineering degrees. That’s because Bay Area transportation departments are increasingly trying to stop sideshows before they start by redesigning intersections to make doing donuts impossible … or, at least, a whole lot less fun.

It’s no easy task. Without an established body of research or any state guidelines on the best way to engineer away sideshows, local officials are left to tinker on their own. 

That has effectively turned the Bay Area into a petri dish, as cities conduct experiments to find what works — and, more often, what doesn’t — to curb the stunt-driving that bedevils residents.

The Bay Area’s five most populous cities — San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont and Santa Rosa — all confirmed that they have installed physical structures aimed at deterring sideshows at problem intersections.

San Francisco gave the treatment to 10 intersections between September 2022 and July 2024, largely focusing on “hardening” the centerline using rubber humps. San Jose has reshaped 16 intersections in the past three years, building pedestrian bulb-outs and islands that narrow the roadway, which makes it trickier to whip a car around. Oakland’s sideshow prevention pilot has transformed 10 intersections. In Fremont, city workers filled a problem cul-de-sac at Clipper Court with more than 40 plastic “tuff curbs” paired with poles to transform the open asphalt into narrow lanes.

And in Santa Rosa, it’s been one experiment after another. Officials began trying out infrastructure solutions after it became clear that sideshows were proliferating there about four years ago, according to Lt. Josh Ludtke, who leads the police department’s traffic division.

“We struggled to combat [sideshows], Ludtke said. “It was a new phenomenon for us.”

First, city workers installed Botts’ dots — round pavement markers typically used as lane dividers — at problem intersections. But they had to install them in specific patterns so the dots wouldn’t become a hazard for motorcyclists and bike riders.

“We can’t just litter an entire intersection with Botts’  dots,” Ludtke said.

The dots initially stopped the sideshows, according to Ludtke. But in this ecosystem of illegal fun, adaptation continued: Stunt drivers started bringing tools to pry the dots off the asphalt … or just drove over them until they broke off.

Next, Ludtke and his colleagues looked to shrink the amount of space drivers had to burn donuts by extending hardened rubber lane dividers farther into intersections. That fix turned out to be effective at discouraging sideshows — but it’s been hard to replicate in many spots, since it might interfere with buses or bike lanes.

Contra Costa County Senior Traffic Engineer Monish Sen is well aware of the limitations of infrastructure to stop sideshows. He was ahead of the curve in 2018, when his department announced it would install Botts’ dots at a rural county intersection, far from any city. Officials have received fewer complaints from neighbors since the dots were installed, according to Sen.

Despite numerous requests to sideshow-proof other intersections in the years since, Sen hasn’t been able to implement changes at other spots for fear of impeding regular traffic. 

Still, he thinks there’s another experiment going on — an accidental one. A growing movement in traffic engineering is to design intersections with “road diets”: bike lanes, medians and curb extensions that narrow streets, encouraging slower driving. While road diets weren’t designed to combat sideshows, they may well end up having that effect.

“Those intersections ideally will be less attractive to folks who do sideshows,” Sen said.

So are the new techniques working?

The streets never lie. In Oakland, it’s clear that the Transportation Department’s efforts are having mixed results. 

Just a few blocks east of Rowan’s laboratory of steel-plates is the intersection of Seminary Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, where the city in 2022 installed yellow curbs topped with poles in the centerline of the intersecting streets. On a visit in July, The Standard spotted the signature skid marks of a sideshow. The treads even, insultingly, ran up onto the sidewalk.

It’s one more data point in the great traffic engineering experiment of the sideshow era. 

“This just isn’t a class that was taught in school,” Rowan said.

Well, you can’t blame the nerds. Street engineers were trained with a fundamental assumption that people would actually obey the signs and markers they install.

“Now, we’re having to physically change behavior,” Rowan said. “We literally are writing the textbook as we go.”