Streetsblog San Francisco

If the recent parking battle in Oakland had you thinking of UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, you're not alone.

After the Oakland City Council raised parking fines and extended parking meter hours to help balance the city's books, some merchants raised an outcry. Merchants, lead by Grand Lake Theater owner Allen Michaan, said the new policies were hurting business, and threatened to recall the entire City Council if the changes weren't rolled back.

Shoup, whose market-driven parking management theories are the inspiration for San Francisco's SFpark pilot program, told the East Bay Express the merchants may have some legitimate complaints about how the city made the changes:

First, the council shouldn't be using parking meters as a cash register for its general fund, [Shoup] said. "You shouldn't set the price to raise money, but to manage supply," he explained.

Second, the council is micromanaging when it sets parking meter prices for every district in the city, he said. Instead, the council should delegate those responsibilities to city staffers who then set prices based on how difficult it is to park. As a result, it makes no sense for parking prices to be the same in busy districts, such as Rockridge and Lakeshore, as they are in less crowded ones. In addition, parking meter prices should fluctuate during the day, based on how tough it is to find a place to park. It makes no sense, Shoup said, to charge the same price at 8 a.m. when stores are closed, as at 1 p.m., during the height of the lunchtime rush.

The East Bay Express also notes that San Francisco is making some not-so-Shoupian moves of its own with the SFpark program, including sending all revenue to the MTA instead of funneling a portion back to the districts that it originates from for streetscape and other improvements.

A recently-striped bike lane is causing confusion along Lakeside Drive in Oakland. Brian Smith posted the above photo to Livable City's car-free living mail list, and Walk Oakland Bike Oakland blogged about the issue earlier this month. It still hasn't been corrected, but Jason Patton, Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager for the City of Oakland, said in an email that the city is aware of the issue and is working to correct it:

This is a known issue and I'm working on it diligently. We also discussed the matter at the City of Oakland's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee meeting last Thursday. The bike lane should end at the point where there is insufficient width for the bike lane. To mark the transition, the last 100' of bike lane stripe will be a skip stripe (Detail 39A) and then two sharrows will follow the end of the bike lane to establish bicyclists' positioning in the travel lane.

I don't have a date for when these modifications will be completed, but my goal is as soon as possible.

The more important point, as Roger Miller of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland points out, may be be that the bike lanes have gone in with virtually no impact to traffic. "The city reduced auto lanes from 4 to 2. And there's no traffic. None," Miller wrote in an email to Streetsblog. "The City could easily stripe that bike lane on Oak St all the way to I-880. Tomorrow. And for that matter most of the bike plan's downtown routes with ease."

Genesis, a local affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, joined with representatives from the national Transportation Equity Network (TEN), AC Transit, and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192 today to call on Congress to act to stem the tide of transit service cuts, fare hikes, and operating budget shortfalls. The press event coincided with the release of Stranded at the Station, a report prepared by Transportation for America (T4A), Gamaliel, Nelson Nygaard and TEN, which details the woeful fiscal conditions of most of the major transit operators around the country and offers solutions for how to get them out of the quagmire.

As the report notes, in 2008, Americans took 10.7 billion transit trips, the highest since 1956 and the signing of the Interstate Highway System. "Transit ridership has been growing at nearly triple the rate of the population and almost twice as fast as the number of miles driven," the report states.

Locally, according to advocates and community leaders, especially in the East Bay, funding cuts have hurt the most vulnerable demographics, making it difficult to get to work, to school, and to medical appointments.

"The federal government is slicing the pie for their guests without asking them how hungry they are," said Reverend Scott Denman, President of Genesis and Rector, St. John's Episcopal Church in Oakland. "As a result, some guests are overeating, others are going hungry, and might I add, some are not even invited to the party."

He continued: "Our government says it is committed to reducing our dependency on foreign oil, says it is concerned about greenhouse gases, claims that government is by the people, for the people. Nonetheless, federal policy currently encourages more cars on the road and less help for those who have no cars."

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Cyclists in Oakland's Lakeshore district are celebrating a hard-fought new bike lane that runs along Harrison and Oakland Avenues south of I-580. Jen Jackson, Vice Chair and co-founder of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO), helped spearhead the initiative, and was thrilled:

WOBO is very excited about this important new addition to Oakland's bike lane network. We've worked long and hard with neighborhood activists in the Westlake Community Coalition, Oakland Councilmember Nancy Nadel's office, Oakland City staff and the bicycling community to put paint on the pavement to improve bicyclist and pedestrian safety. We look forward to further improvements in the Harrison-Oakland corridor with the future addition of bike lanes on Harrison Avenue and Oakland Ave north of 580!

See a map of the new lane and proposals for additional bike and pedestrian infrastructure after the jump.

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Born in the streets of Oakland, scraper bikes have become so much more than just a colorful trend of tricked-out bicycles. Scraper bikes have become an Internet phenomenon via YouTube, a practical means of greening urban space, a social movement, and a rallying cry for young people organizing against violence in their community.

Tyrone "Baby Champ" Stevenson, who styles himself the "Scraper Bike King," says the bikes were created by Oakland teens who coveted but could not afford scraper cars, the souped-up sedans painted with bright colors and with rims so large they scrape the undercarriage. Scraper bikes are such a hit that many teens skip the cars and keep pedaling well past the age of 16.

Last weekend, Stevenson organized the second annual "Bike 4 Life" ride to call for an end to violence in Oakland's neighborhoods. "We're trying to bring together a gun truce," he says, "because a lot of people in our community are dying from guns." This Streetfilm features scenes from the ride and more from Stevenson about the movement he helped launch.

As Oakland businesses struggle to weather the downturn, parking policy has become a rallying point as well as a scapegoat for the long-term suburban exodus.

Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, wants to recall every member of the Oakland City Council. Their offense, he says, is raising the parking meter rates by 50 cents to two dollars an hour, extending weekday enforcement to 8 p.m., and authorizing more aggressive enforcement.

Since the new parking policies went into place, Michaan says his theater has seen "a dramatic decrease in business."

"I see our attendance dropping on a daily basis," said Michaan. "It's an attack on the community."

At a meeting of about 100 business owners and residents yesterday at Michaan's grandly restored movie house, about a dozen business leaders and another dozen residents spoke their minds about Oakland's recent parking policy changes. Many business owners started by expressing concerns about the parking policy's effects on their customers, and built up to broader complaints about Oakland's anti-business political climate, a lack of safety, and anxiety about losing customers to surrounding suburbs.

Calling the policies "anti-business," an Oakland real estate agent said Oakland should remove parking restrictions and make its new motto "You're free to go about Oakland."

Many of the merchants in attendance were skeptical about transit's importance to their businesses.

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When Oakland installed its first pay-and-display parking kiosks in early 2007, parking managers ordered employees to remove the heads of the approximately 5,000 single-space meters they were replacing. Just like other cities transitioning from using single-space parking meters to newer multi-space pay stations, the parking managers failed to realize the utility of those old meter poles for cyclists, who used them for locking up their bicycles. 

"This was the last breath of turning your back on cyclists. It was obscene," said East Bay Bicycle Coalition (EBBC) Executive Director Robert Raburn, who admitted that they weren't prepared for the change and the effect it would have on cyclists, so their advocacy was "reactionary." 

The EBBC lobbied the Oakland City Council to retain what meters they could after the process had started. "What we were asking for was to make sure there was some integration between the installation of parking kiosks and bike parking," said Raburn

Jason Patton, Oakland's Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager, said that the initial problem stemmed from the fact that two divisions of two separate agencies within the city weren't on the same page about bicycle parking and so the provisional solution was the best they could do.

"The plan for the new parking stations didn't address bicycle parking. Really the only option we had in working on their timeline was to leave meter heads," said Patton.

Over the complaints of the parking division, the EBBC worked with Oakland's bicycle program to develop an interim policy of preserving a minimum of two meter heads per block space in the areas where kiosks were installed. The bicycle division then spent a good deal of time and money surveying bicycle use on every street where the meters were being replaced to maximize the benefit to cyclists. Parking managers removed the "guts" of the meter heads so that drivers were less confused and affixed small yellow stickers that remind cyclists to park their bicycles parallel to the curb.

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Dave Burdick yesterday offered up his choices for the Top 5 videos featuring a bicycle on the Huffington Post. While it's nice to see the mainstream blogosphere types showing some love for two-wheelers, c'mon man! Robin Thicke bouncing around NYC on a crappy bike to "Disco Beethoven" is the world's number one bike video?! I think not.

The Mercedes Benz-ollieing, sidewalk-riding, pedestrian-buzzing Thicke is an ass. As a former pedestrian and cycling advocate in New York City who worked hard to dispel the cyclist-as-sidewalk-riding menace myth, I'd like to see someone hit Thicke with a nice, solid cross-check. Stereogum has it right calling Thicke a "Dick on a Bike." Bottom line: If you're going to promote bad behavior on bikes, at least let it be talented bad behavior.

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The debate over how to spend the federal transportation stimulus money at the regional level is heating up and may boil over tomorrow morning at the next Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting. 

As we reported here two weeks ago, the nine-county Bay Area will get nearly half a billion in stimulus funds for transportation.  MTC staff originally proposed spending much of it on rehabilitation and operations, with $145 million for two capital expansion projects, the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) and the Transbay Terminal train box.

Now that the final stimulus numbers are in from Washington, with transit funds lower than expected and high-speed rail money much higher than expected, MTC staff has scrapped the proposal to build the train box from the formula funds. 

Transit and social justice advocates are concerned, however, that OAC is still on the table. They argue that it is not a good use of funds, and that the $70 million dollars proposed by MTC should go instead to transit operations.  Genesis, a local affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, will hold a rally and press conference before the Wednesday meeting to decry the proposal, calling it a moral issue that deprives AC Transit bus riders of service and threatens fare increases.

AC Transit, for its part, admitted that the stimulus money would be helpful for combating the $57 million budget deficit it expects to run by end of 2010, but said that the agency has been considering fare increases and service cuts since spring of 2008, well before the stimulus package was a reality. 

"The more money we get to close the budget gap, the less severe the consequences will be," said AC Transit spokesperson Clarence Johnson.  "It's not a matter of any one source of money completely satisfying our needs, but every nickel counts."

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