There's nothing like the smell of fresh thermoplast in the morning. Photos: Ruth Miller

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 Council Member Libby Schaaf, an early member of WOBO.

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.

East Bay Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Renee Rivera addresses the crowd.

The Webster-Franklin route, an alternative to the high-speed Broadway, is a key victory for EBBC and WOBO’s joint Oakland Bikeways Campaign, which calls for the city to implement its entire Bicycle Master Plan by 2020 and prioritize key routes like Webster and Franklin.

Mayor Quan challenged the bicycle community to focus on advocating for underserved and disadvantaged communities, evoking the 100 Block Crime Plan from her mayoral campaign. East Bay Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Renee Rivera heartily agreed, commending city staff and leadership for putting bikeways where they’re needed, not just where they’re easy.

“It’s not just putting down more miles, but miles that connect, and create a safe, continuous network that really gets you where you need to go and doesn’t drop you along the way,” said Rivera. “We need to make Oakland a safe place to bike for everyone. We need to pay more attention to the eastern side of town, working with great partners like Cycles of Change and their earn-a-bike program, and bringing more infrastructure to the east side where it’s so badly needed.”

Mayor Jean Quan: "I've only missed one Bike to Work Day in the last nine years, and I'm looking forward to being with you again this year."

Gloria Bruce, Chair of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, struck a similar chord. “It’s a relatively small public investment that pays huge dividends for the thousands of Oaklanders who want to, or need to, walk and bike around the city,” she said. “They’re very hip and cool, but in addition to hip and cool folks, they also serve folks that want to be empowered, that want to access work and play in safe and green ways.”

While 2011 was a big year for bike improvements in Oakland, the 18 miles completed fall far below the city’s goal of 32 miles.

“We expected so much more to get done this year,” explained Jason Patton, manager of the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Facilities Program. “We’ve got about 20 additional miles of striping alone. We’re just waiting for [the contractors] to stripe, we’ve got another 20 miles of sign projects, and we’re just waiting to do those. All of the major striping contractors have active work in Oakland right now.”

Mayor Quan preparing to cut the ribbon on the Webster Street bike lanes, with Public Works Director Vitaly Troyan, Councilmember Libby Schaaf, and Jason Overman of Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan's office.

“We’re probably still going to hit” 32 miles, he said, “but it will be fiscal year [ending June 2012] or even August 2012. It looks like 2012 will be the year where more happens than ever.”

In 2012, Oakland expects to implement bicycle improvements on:

From left to right: Deputy Director of Public Works Iris Starr, and Bike and Pedestrian Facilities staff Jennifer Stanley and manager Jason Patton.

• Fourteenth Street from Mandela to Brush, connecting the edge of downtown to the center of West Oakland
• Broadway from 22nd Street to I-580, or approximately 35th Street
• MacArthur Boulevard between Telegraph and Broadway, where six vehicle lanes will be reduced to four

The Webster-Shafter corridor, between Rockridge and Downtown Oakland, will be painted with sharrows, of which Patton remarked, “We’ve never seen such a positive response in public comment before.”

After that? “We’re running out of easy projects,” said Patton. “At some point it’s going to start slowing down.”

“You’ve got to realize that we didn’t start putting in bike lanes until 1976 and today it’s 110 miles, plus or minus,” said Public Works Director Vitaly Troyan. “We’ve got 800 miles of streets, we’ve got 100 miles of bike lanes, so what does that mean? We’ve got 700 more to go.”

Bike advocates in Alameda County will face a challenge next year when Measure B, the county’s transportation sales tax, comes up for renewal on the November ballot. Measure B funds, pointed out Quan, made the Webster bike lane project possible, and advocates will have the chance to increase the proportion devoted to bike infrastructure in next year’s vote.

“Oakland has always fought for larger share of that not just to be for cars,” she said, “but to be for buses and public transportation and bike lanes. Those hearings will be coming up and we need you to all to come out and speak for bikes.”

Quan dedicated the Webster Street project to the memory of Ron Bishop, a long-time cycling advocate who passed away earlier this week. Bishop, Rivera said, would have been proud of the Webster/Franklin bike lanes, but friends privately noted later that he would probably call it a good start.

Breaking in the new lanes.

OAC image: BART

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."

Reid also urged his colleagues not to put the entire responsibility of funding one or two intermediate stops on BART, but suggested they levy development impact fees within the Coliseum Redevelopment Area to supplement BART. He even referenced an unnamed developer he had been lobbying intensively over the past nine months to site a large commercial development along Hegenberger, one he suggested would benefit greatly from the stop.

Councilmember Kernighan said she was swayed by TransForm's arguments for a lower-cost bus alternative, but was concerned that delaying the project now to study an alternative would set the timeline back by five years and result in the re-allocation the OAC's multiple sources of funding to other counties in the region. According to Kernighan, who said she checked her numbers with the MTC, BART, the Alameda County Transportation Improvement Authority (ACTIA), and TransForm, in the best case scenario, Alameda County could only hope to retain a maximum of $115 of the more than $500 million of project dollars, of which only $7 million could go to funding bus operations at AC Transit (for basic funding numbers click here, scroll down).

"Some people have said the Oakland Airport Connector is a really bad project. I don't think it's a bad project, it's just an expensive project," said Kernighan. "It's a little bit wishful thinking to say that, 'if we don't build this over-priced connector, the East Bay is going to have oodles of money.'" 

Council President Jane Brunner went further, calling MTC Spokesperson Randy Rentschler and ACTIA Executive Director Christine Monsen to the lectern, where she ran down each line item of OAC funding and asked where the money would go if they didn't build the connector. In almost every case, argued Rentschler and Monsen, the money would be reprogrammed elsewhere and would not benefit the corridor.

Ultimately, the Oakland Council's provisions were not formally agreed to by BART and the resolution does not have statutory authority over the operator. BART Spokesperson Luna Salaver confirmed that BART is not compelled by the resolution, but said they wanted to maintain good relations with the city:

We do seek to partner with all the local entities that we serve.  I know that [BART Director] Carol Ward Allen made a commitment to make sure that many of the jobs that were created would go to Oakland residents and under-served contractors.  In terms of a fare, there has always been this issue by the opponents of the connector.  $6 was never set in stone. The board is the entity that would have the final say on what the fare would be, not an engineering estimate. It would be based on the realities of the economic situation when the connector opens.

As for the intermediate stop, Salaver said that has always been on the operator's radar and has been the intention should funding be secured. When asked whether BART would use the balance of the up to $150 million in TIFIA loans it has sought from the FTA if construction bids come in significantly lower than $500 million to build an intermediate stop, Salaver said should would have to consult with the project manager. BART would clearly have a competing incentive to return the FTA loan and keep its debt obligations lower.

Although the OAC is now closer than ever to moving forward, opponents are pinning their hopes on a Title VI lawsuit filed by Public Advocates against BART for failing to analyze the impacts of the current OAC project on minority and low income residents of Oakland. The FTA received the lawsuit in early September and has until early December to respond. For a detailed account of the case, read Transbay Blog's excellent coverage here.

Grand Lake Theater owner Alan Michaan exhorts the public to "Stop the Parking Madness!" Photo: DigiAnt

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."

The champion of cheap parking was again Alan Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland's Grand Avenue district, who claimed that his business was down 50 percent because of the parking regulations. Michaan started his testimony with an apology to city council members for his previous outbursts and the anger he leveled at them, though he continued with arch rhetoric and veiled threats of a recall vote if they did not roll back meter rates and time.

"People aren't coming to my business and my business is just one of many businesses that are being so affected all over Oakland," said Michaan. "This is not about my business any more, about whether my business survives or not, it's about whether Oakland survives or not. You've basically shattered my business and thousands of others all over town."

The aggressive ticketing is so "out of propriety," he claimed, it's leaving the city open to a class-action lawsuit. He also called on the council to forgive all parking tickets issued since July 1st and claimed that his critics would be humbled by sales tax revenue numbers when they were released:

I know some of you don't believe in what I'm saying, how major this impact has been on the City of Oakland and on businesses.  You'll find out in three months when the 3rd quarter sales tax results are going to be released by Sacramento.  And you're going to be shocked, stunned, and dismayed. Our customers are abandoning our city; it's not worth getting a ticket.  It's not worth paying the over-the-top price for parking. We're not San Francisco, we're not Paris or New York, we're Oakland.  We're already struggling with an image problem already.  Let's make our city succeed rather than be a catalyst for its failure --that’s what this is, a catalyst for its failure.

Though Michaan received tremendous applause from the audience, not every member of the public supported him. Max Alstott accused Michaan of bluster and political naivete and offered his support to council members who instituted the parking changes.

"I do not believe that you guys scared everybody out of Oakland's parking spaces, I believe Alan Michaan did by getting on the 6 o'clock news and telling everyone to be terrified of parking in Oakland," he said. "One of you ought to scold him for the level of invective he brought out here. You guys were accused of extortion for raising the fee from $1.50 to $2, but you were accused of extortion by a man who charges $3 for a small coke."

Councilmember Jean Quan, who chairs the Finance and Management Committee, said she and her colleagues went into the budget process in good faith and tried to apply equally painful cuts and revenue increases across the board.  She said the public didn't pay attention to the budget until parking, but she felt increased parking hours and rates were preferable to shuttering libraries and firing police officers.  She also warned of further budget deficits by January and hinted that raising parking would still be on the table, pending the citywide study.

Councilmember Patricia Kernighan, who was credited by her colleagues as leading the compromise and reaching out to concerned business groups, said that despite their good faith efforts to create a balanced budget across city divisions, they had failed. She apologized for not conducting better outreach and said, "People don't want to feel like we're balancing the city budget on their backs or that we're punishing people."

To sum up the sentiment of the evening, Kernighan read from an August 2nd post from trade magazine Parking Today's blog, which featured a story on Oakland's parking drama.

"Parking is the most emotive subject known to man. Screw with a person's taxes and you have a heated discussion, screw with their parking, and you have a revolution."