Streetsblog San Francisco

As city contractors stenciled new bike lanes last Friday at Oakland’s 25th and Webster Streets, a group of advocates, city staff, and elected officials celebrated the final project in Oakland’s busiest bicycling year to date.

“This year we put in 18.1 miles of new bike lanes and 292 new bike parking spots,” Council Member Libby Schaaf told the group.

Oakland was recently recognized by the League of American Bicyclists as a Bronze Bicycle-Friendly City and “named one of the 20 most bike-friendly cities in the country,” noted Mayor Jean Quan, and “we’re working to get into the top ten.”

On top of a major expansion of bikeways this year, Uptown Oakland will get its own bike station as soon as 2013 near the 19th Street BART station, announced Jason Overman of Council Member Rebecca Kaplan’s office, which recently won a $500,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Safe Routes to Transit program to create a space similar to the Downtown Berkeley bike station and host valet bike parking and repairs.

Over the next two weeks, crews will complete the bike lane along the one-way Webster Street south to 14th Street, and a complementary bike lane will be installed on the parallel Franklin Street in January. Combined, the pair will create a north-south corridor to Downtown Oakland.

Many of Oakland’s 2011 bike projects focused on completing the network of bike lanes and sharrows, including segments of major crosstown routes like Fruitvale, Lakeshore, Telegraph, and West Grand Avenues, as well as Foothill Boulevard and East 12th Street.

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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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During another raucous staging of political parking theater at last night's Oakland City Council meeting, where more than 90 speakers often shouted their opinions on the city's parking policy, the council reversed its position from July, scaling back the 8 pm evening time limit until 6 pm and assenting to a dynamic, citywide parking study. To make up the approximately $1 million in lost parking revenue, the council will look to new advertising deals, including nearly $500,000 in billboard revenue from Clear Channel. Only Councilmember Nancy Nadel of Downtown and West Oakland voted against the roll-back.

Oakland City Administrator Dan Lindheim, despite his own admission it would contradict an existing city ordinance, instructed staff to make the changes immediately after the vote, while the council meeting was still in progress, prompting a hearty applause from an audience overwhelmingly opposed to the extended meter hours and increased meter rates. 

Angry residents and business owners as well as several chambers of commerce and business associations lined up one after another to decry the initial changes, suggesting that the increased rate and hours were the death knell to commerce in Oakland.

"We have heard enough from our merchants about the impacts of this parking to their businesses," said Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce Board President Sugiarto Loni. "I'm here to urge all the citiy council members, please don't defer any more your motion to roll-back parking meters from 8 to 6.  It's going to help the small business a lot."

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