Streetsblog San Francisco

The City of Oakland would apparently like to think it’s doing merchants and shoppers a favor by declaring all on-street car parking free every Saturday until New Year’s.

Of course, parking meters were invented to encourage turnover and allow more driving customers to park near businesses. So while the city’s “gift” probably won’t do much for the local economy, it will help ensure that parking won’t be available. The city is basically inviting car owners to drive on down and circle endlessly for spots.

Meanwhile, the city didn’t see fit to bestow free fares to AC Transit riders, so shoppers considering taking the bus will have even less of an incentive to do so while free parking is on the table. Can the city do any more to get Oaklanders into their cars?

“If parking is filling up, it’s self-defeating — it can actually hurt stores,” said Stuart Cohen, executive director of TransForm, which is based in Oakland. ”You want to look out for unintended consequences, because it could backfire.”

This isn’t the first time Oakland has fallen for the hare-brained notion that free parking is good for business. In 2009, the City Council caved on a proposal to extend parking meter hours into the evening after complaints from some vocal merchants, while businesses in other cities that have chosen to expand meter hours reap the benefits.

The Oakland City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved the 9.5-mile East Bay Bus Rapid Transit line that will run from downtown Oakland to San Leandro. The vote in Oakland follows a similar approval by San Leandro’s City Council on Monday.

The dual approvals mark a huge victory for advocacy groups and AC Transit, which first recommended BRT in 2001 as way to improve transit options on heavily traveled corridors. The East Bay BRT is expected to be completed in 2016 at a cost of between $152 million and $172 million, and will include seven miles of dedicated bus lanes in Oakland along International Boulevard with 33 stops, most located no more than one-third of a mile apart. Once finished, it will be one of the longest BRT routes in the country, and one of the few constructed in such a densely populated urban area.

“It’s tremendously significant,” said Joél Ramos, a community planner with TransForm. “It’s an indication of Oakland being a forward-thinking city… improving infrastructure to make travel, conducting business, accessing services, or even living along the corridor, more sustainable, more enjoyable, and more liveable.”

Before the vote, Tina Spencer, Oakland’s director of planning and service development, told the council: “The issue is slower transit, and it really creates an unsustainable condition. It’s a downward spiral. More congestion equals more delay, which contributes to unreliable service, fewer riders, which leads to less revenue, fewer riders and finally, service cuts.”

International Boulevard is one of the busiest and most important corridors in Oakland, with many homes and businesses, as well as near-by hospitals and medical centers, civic centers, shopping complexes and churches.

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Bike to Work Day in the East Bay broke records once again yesterday, with ten mayors, dozens of council members, and over 17,000 participants riding — an overall 22 percent increase across the East Bay. The record-breaking number of elected officials riding in included the mayors of Albany, Berkeley, Piedmont, Dublin, Fremont, Emeryville, Hayward, Richmond, and Union City.

“It’s great to see so many of our local elected officials out riding on Bike to Work Day and setting an example,” said Renee Rivera, executive director of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition (EBBC). “They understand the benefits of bike commuting, and they’ve directed city resources to help make bicycling viable as an everyday means of transportation.”

The largest ridership increase was seen in Pleasanton at 40 percent more than last year, followed by Alameda at 29 percent and Emeryville at 17 percent. In Berkeley, more bicycles than cars passed by lower Sproul Plaza for the first time yesterday morning, according to the EBBC. “This a doubling of bike mode share at Cal,” the EBBC wrote on its website, noting that Berkeley has the country’s fourth-highest bike mode share at 8 percent, according to the American Commute Survey.

Oakland has the eighth-largest Bike to Work Day in the United States, according to the Alliance for Biking and Walking. The free pancake breakfast in front of Oakland City Hall yesterday drew over 600 people who were greeted with free valet bicycle parking and tote bags before mingling and enjoying breakfast in the sunshine.

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Though it may seem esoteric, one of the biggest impediments to designing streets for people is the over-reliance on design standards that have long privileged movement of vehicles over any other consideration on the streets. That’s why advocates cheered when U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood published a policy paper recently that, at least in word, placed bicycles and pedestrians on equal footing with motorists.

“Every transportation agency, including DOT, has the responsibility to improve conditions and opportunities for walking and bicycling and to integrate walking and bicycling into their transportation systems,” read one line of the statement.

Yet, an advisory policy paper won’t change the streets overnight and that’s where reforming the design manuals and guidelines at state departments of transportation is imperative, work that groups like Congress for New Urbanism have made a priority at the national level.

Various cities in California that have tried to rebuild their streets to be safer for pedestrians and bicycle riders have often been met with resistance from traffic engineers and city attorneys who rely on Caltrans manuals and standards that are good for moving traffic, not always for protecting vulnerable users.

“The Caltrans Highway Design Manual [HDM] has been the bible for highway engineers for the past half century and has guided the development of California’s freeway system,” said Hans Larsen, Acting Director of San Jose’s Department of Transportation. “Unfortunately, the HDM has also become the default gospel for designing local streets by many city engineers.”

Larsen said the standards that make freeways good for carrying large quantities of vehicles at high speeds are not context appropriate on most streets in urban areas. “Even today, the Caltrans HDM continues to promote such commandments as ‘a design speed as high as feasible should be used’ and ‘the basic lane width shall be 12 feet,’” he said.

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Transit advocates, community groups, and faith-based environmental justice organizations made another plea to Oakland and regional policy makers to kill the half a billion dollar Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) with a resolution sponsored by Oakland City Council members Nancy Nadel and Rebecca Kaplan at their monthly meeting last night. Citing a significantly more expensive project from the $130 million dollar proposal supported by voters in 2000 without intermediate stops along Hegenberger Boulevard and with fares three times those originally promised, the groups argued in vain that the council should not support the existing proposal but should seek a surface Bus Rapid Transit option at one-fifth the cost.

Most of the political class lined up in opposition to the council resolution and in favor of completing the OAC as an elevated people mover under the current design. A late letter of support from Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums urged several provisions, including intermediate stops and hiring requirements, but did not set up parameters for their inclusion in the project. Most speakers honed in on the need for job creation in Oakland, which is suffering from more than 17 percent unemployment, though disagreement raged over whether or not the construction jobs (estimated from 689 to 15,000, depending on the job creation metric used by the speakers) merited the public outlay of funds.

After testimony from more than 100 public speakers late into the night, at 1:15am this morning Nadel and Kaplan conceded they didn't have the votes to carry the resolution opposed to the OAC and the council approved an alternative resolution introduced by Councilmember Ignacio de la Fuente to support the OAC with three provisos mirroring Dellums':

• Bind local job requirements (50 percent of hires from the region, 25 percent from Oakland) with penalties for non-performance, versus BART's current non-binding hiring objectives
  
• An intermediate stop funded by BART out of project funding that is allocated, but may not be needed for the project if construction costs reduce the contractor bids below the expected $522-552 million price tag
  
• An analysis of the OAC Fare with regards to social equity impacts, particularly if bids come in lower than expected

Councilmember Larry Reid, who has been a proponent of OAC for more than 20 years, argued that rejecting the fixed rail connector would prevent Oakland from maintaining its regional competitiveness with other airports. "This is a regional airport," he said. "If we are going to be competitive with San Francisco or San Jose, we need this to be seamless.  San Francisco has always been one of our competitive modes."

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The Oakland City Council voted early this morning to delay action on proposed parking changes until its next meeting. After three hours of discussion that spilled well beyond midnight, a proposal to roll back parking meter enforcement from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m. was narrowly defeated, despite calls for immediate action from dozens of merchants who attended the meeting.

In late June, the council voted to raise the parking meter rates by 50 cents to two dollars an hour, extend weekday meter enforcement to 8 p.m., and authorize more aggressive enforcement. Those changes have angered some residents and sparked cries from merchants that the new policies are hurting business.

Several councilmembers were skeptical of the options presented for making up the $900,000 budget gap the rolled-back enforcement hours would create, and requested a more detailed proposal from staff members. "Without an actual proposal for people to speak to, it's hard to say that staff will just come up with something," said Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan.

The rejected proposal, presented by Councilmembers Jean Quan, Patricia Kernighan and Council President Jane Brunner, would have made up for the gap with a mixture of a crackdown on handicap placard abuse, installation of parking meters in new areas, money saved from automating payment at city parking garages, opening up some city garages for paid residential use at night, and selling ad space on the back of parking receipts. Staff would have been directed to come up with ideas to cover the rest of the gap, which was still estimated at over $300,000.

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Facing mounting pressure from merchants and residents, the Oakland City Council will vote tonight (agenda PDF) on whether to partially roll back parking changes that have spurred an effort to recall the entire council.

In late June, the council voted to raise the parking meter rates by 50 cents to two dollars an hour, extend weekday meter enforcement to 8 p.m., and authorize more aggressive enforcement. The council will vote tonight on whether to reduce enforcement hours, either to 7 p.m. or all the way back to 6 p.m. They'd also need to identify up to $1.3 million in new revenue or cuts to make up for the loss of additional parking revenue.

The chief voice calling for a policy reversal has been Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater, who has organized protest meetings at his theater to rally opposition from other businesses and residents. Michaan insists that the new parking rules are deeply harming business in Oakland and causing customers to flee to surrounding East Bay communities that have free parking. He's cited a drop in revenue of 25 to 30 percent at his theater as evidence that the new parking rules are killing business.

In spite of Oakland's dire budget shortfall, Michaan has insisted the city find another way to cover its budget gap. At a protest at his theater in late July, Michaan said he'd be willing to make cuts to the police budget instead, which is likely to be a non-starter in a city where crime is among citizens' biggest concerns.

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With BART's operators' union declaring an imminent strike that will shut down the entire system starting this Monday, Bay Area commuters are scrambling to find other options for getting to work, particularly from the East Bay, where BART and the Bay Bridge are the two primary transportation links across the water.

Despite gridlock expected on the roads as hundreds of thousands of BART riders move to other transit operators or their cars, Caltrans doesn't plan to alter its traffic management across the Bay Bridge.

"At this point we're going to operate within our standard traffic management. We're going to adjust metering lights as is necessary," said Caltrans District 4 spokesperson Lauren Wonder. She noted that Caltrans engineers would be out monitoring traffic throughout the day starting on Monday and for the duration of the strike in order to gauge the traffic impacts as they arise. "We are looking at possibly changing hours on HOV lanes, but if you make it too restrictive, you might alienate a portion of the community and make those other mixed flow lanes even more crowded."

While she didn't rule out the possibility of converting a mixed-flow lane into a transit-only lane if deemed appropriate by Caltrans engineers, that option is not expected, said Wonder, in part because AC Transit and other transit operators are running at near-capacity conditions and don't have that many more buses to put into service.

"You have to look at the big picture and if a transit-only lane would result in more overall traffic," she said.

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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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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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