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Editor's note: Interested in getting involved in this issue? Be sure to see the 'call to action' at the end of this post!
Oakland's Department of Transportation and the city's Planning Commission are busy working on the "Green Loop"—a plan to give bicyclists a fully protected, circular bike route across 14th Street and then down through West Oakland and back again via the Jack London Square (JLS) neighborhood on 3rd Street.
However, Oakland's Maritime, Access, Sustainability, and Trade group (O-MAST), an amalgamation of port industry interests in Oakland, is lobbying Oakland's planning commission to destroy that effort.
These same lobbyists made headlines after successfully stopping the Oakland A's baseball team from building a stadium at Howard Terminal. "After defeating the stadium their next mission is to expand industrial zoning in JLS and to remove active transportation, which they see as conflicting with port operations," explained Bryan Culbertson, a safety advocate with the group Traffic Violence Rapid Response.
"East Oakland Stadium Alliance's O-MAST coalition is lobbying to remove these well-established bike safety projects by replacing bike lanes with a Truck Route on 3rd St through Jack London Square's thriving retail and residential corridor, removing bike lanes on Market Street completely, and removing a crucial portion of bike lanes on Martin Luther King Jr. Way," wrote Traffic Violence Rapid Response, Transport Oakland, and Bike East Bay in a joint letter to the Oakland City Council.
O-MAST's Evey Hwang was frank in the group's June newsletter about the ongoing effort to block life-saving safety features from being installed in Oakland. "Our coalition is intent on eliminating the pedestrian at-grade crossing [emphasis added] on 2nd Street and rerouting the bicycle route from MLK & 2nd Streets to MLK & 4th Streets, and we need your help to get us over the finish line."
Culbertson explained that the changes Hwang is calling for will leave dangerous gaps in the Green Loop.
Hwang goes on in her post to boast about the successes they've already had in pressuring the planning commission to:
- Remove bicycle and pedestrian access from Howard Terminal via the Green Loop and removing the Green Loop Overlay from truck priority routes.
- Reroute the proposed bike and pedestrian extensions in the Green Loop from MLK and Market Street to Clay Street to avoid conflict with established truck corridors, though there is still work to be done to ensure the Clay Street reroute occurs at 4th Street as opposed to 2ndStreet.
Culbertson told Streetsblog that the port lobbyists don't seem to oppose any particular bike lane or project. Rather, he said, they seem to be treating this as a zero-sum turf war, where anything that's good for bicycle or pedestrian safety is automatically bad for industry and trucking (never mind that protected bike lanes and commerce coexist at the Port of Rotterdam, which is much larger than the Port of Oakland).
O-MAST is also attacking an adjoining project on Embarcadero West. It's a half-mile section of street where Amtrak and Union Pacific freight trains compete for space with cars and trucks. The city's objective is to finally fence off the busy train tracks where they run in the street and eliminate through traffic. This area is a continual source of crashes, conflicts and train delays (see picture above of a reckless driver who overshot the end of the street and ended up flipping over on the tracks).
Culbertson told Streetsblog that O-MAST lobbied Oakland planning to reduce the length of the project by several blocks. They are now trying to reinstate through-car traffic into the plan, which would assure continued train delays and collisions.
The consistent theme here is that O-MAST wants trucks to have free rein over the area, without pesky encumbrances such as safety.
"Protected bikeway and intersection upgrades on Market Street are needed to improve that corridor, and to avoid future tragedies like the two bike riders already killed by turning semi truck drivers at the Market/5th St intersection in the past," said Bike East Bay's Robert Prinz, referring to an incident in 2013 that took the life of Susan Watson. Even her ghost bike was "hit and obliterated by another driver within a few months. Ten years later there have still been no substantial safety upgrades at that corner."
The port lobbyists have made it clear they want to keep it that way.
The Oakland City Council will hear the first reading of the downtown Oakland specific plan on Tuesday, July 16, which includes the Green Loop project [click here for details on how to attend]. Traffic Violence Rapid Response asks readers to attend if they can and tell the council to put safety first. They also ask people to contact their city council representatives, especially Carroll Fife [District3@oaklandca.gov] and Dan Kalb [dkalb@oaklandca.gov], before Tuesday, July 16, and tell them to prioritize safety and restore the original Green Loop. Click here to see the letter safety advocates wrote to Fife and Kalb for people who'd like to cut 'n' paste.
The plan is to start construction on the Embarcadero West Project in 2026 and complete it in 2030. For more information on that, the next outreach meeting is Friday/tomorrow! July 12. 5:30 p.m.- 6:45 p.m., 10 Clay Street, Oakland.
