Voters in Oakland District 2 will pick a new representative on the city council on April 15 as part of a special election. Whoever wins will replace Nikki Fortunato-Bas, who is moving on to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, Transport Oakland, Bike East Bay, East Bay Transit Riders Union, San Antonio Station Alliance, and the Transbay Coalition held a forum Thursday evening with four of the candidates to hear their views on issues near-and-dear to safe-and-liveable-streets advocates.
You can listen to the full debate here. Or you can watch the Zoom recording of the debate here. Use the passcode uIMk#r0@
Or if you don't have time for the full debate, here's a transcript of the first question, asked by the Transbay Coalition's Carter Lavin, and the candidate answers:
Lavin: Cars are one of the biggest expenses for Oakland households. They're a source of violence in our city with thirty people being killed and hundreds injured by drivers in the town last year. And cars are California's largest source of carbon emissions. If elected, what would you do to make Oakland a better place to get around without a car?
Kanitha Matoury: Well, I travel a lot. As I mentioned, I'm from a different country altogether, Cambodia. You know, if you ever drive in Southeast Asia or India or any of those country, it's very chaotic. People are literally driving every direction.
Nobody's obeying any laws. It it's kinda wild. But long story short, I'm a big biker. I do not have a car. I have a share-car situation with my partner.
I got rid of my car a long time ago when I was going through a divorce. And I no longer need a car and the reason why is because my children live abroad, and they come home about five months out of the year between spring breaks and winter break and summer. So you are right in term of cars [they are] very expensive to have. I also think they're very dangerous. They're pretty much like a moving, dangerous, vehicle.
You know, having to experience the crash and seeing, like, all our life, how do you call it, escape before our eyes when you have a big moving vehicle coming at you? It's nothing more scary. It's crazy. You know, my staff have endorsed that. It's definitely how do we make that better?
I think we need to have more, city like Europe where certain streets are very narrow, permitted-only cars, making it very more expensive to have vehicle versus less. Of course, the United States is a very, of, how do you call it? The lobbyists have make, the vehicle they're taking out--from my understanding back in the day, there's a lot of bus line that was all around the lake than those longer there because of all the lobbying, and they took those away in in in term of making it more vehicle, focused. Sadly to said, but we definitely for urban city, we definitely need to bring those back.
We need to make sure there's certain area that's blocked off. I was working on a block-off street on the Nineteenth Street, which is the business corridor that I've been here for eighteen year. In term of, like, narrowing those street or blocking them off altogether. And, of course, we have a lot of pushback from all the small business in term of trying to figure it out how they're gonna get their delivery between the DoorDash and everything else that which I don't support. I want us, I want everyone to come out and hang out with each other more than ever and not, you know, dashing here and dashing there.
Kara Murray-Badal: So about a better place to be without a car. You know, I think it's a matter of, like, there is lower ridership post pandemic on especially BART. AC Transit has actually seen pretty, consistent rider levels, and that is really because, you know, our citizens who must take the bus take the bus, and so they have they have stayed on the bus. But, absolutely, there's so much so many ways that we can do better bus service and also better BART service. The San Antonio station folks are here, tonight.
You know, Charlene mentioned that she took her family to West Oakland from where she lived in Lafayette. It's crazy that it would probably be easier for her to get from Lafayette to Downtown Oakland or to West Oakland than it would be for somebody living in San Antonio right here in our district. And so I have big support for that, and that's gonna be a really long effort. But, you know, the saying, like, it the best time to start would have been ten years ago. The second best time to start is right now.
And so I'm super in support of building that up and building up our AC transit routes still. You know, Oakland does have the most AC transit stops, but it's definitely not enough and not dense enough for what we would love to have. I do believe it's a, you know, there's lots of evidence that there's a kind of "if we build it, they will come" sort of thing. If we actually have reliable buses, and buses that come often, more and more people will use those buses. And so I do wanna do more towards that.
And the thing that is complicated is that Oakland, is part of a larger county network when it comes to AC Transit and the BART system. And so part of the work of the councilperson is to be pushing on our AC Transit board and pushing on our regional boards to do work. I will say that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, MTC, has not had a member from Oakland City Council or the Oakland Mayor on it for an entire year. That is where most of the regional grants come from. And so the fact that no one was there for an entire year meant that we were losing funds that we should have.
So even in this budget crisis, there are opportunities to strengthen transit. And lastly, I'll just just hold up that we need more bike lanes, and we need more protected bike lanes, and we need more safe protected streets. And that is something that's already in progress in parts of Oakland. Unfortunately, Maia Correia, a four year old girl, was, killed on a a unsafe street, and we are doing that Grand Lake corridor revision specifically because of that. So, that's a little bit.
Rev. Kenneth Anderson: Yes. You know, again, one day, not soon, you know, I'm gonna get older.
And if I can't drive, I'm gonna have to rely on public transportation. So you gotta think like that. You know, we have to face the fact that it is truth that cars are not as functional as it once was, but AC Transit offers infrequent services on many routes, leaving residents reliant on cars. So we have to make sure that we're serious about rapidly expanding public transit. Just eliminating parking requirements won't eliminate the need for parking. So we have to make sure that when it comes to District 2 as it's pertaining to, San Antonio, I'm excited about the potential BART station because, again, I'm looking at members of our congregation, those that have moved farther out.
I'm looking at mothers that are part of the WIC program that go to clinics like, La Clinica, seniors that are part of a senior housing programs, housing that they're able to have this transportation right at their doorstep. I think it's very beneficial, especially when it comes to senior housing. Parking is really, really not a requirement. It's limit parking that is needed for residents. So when we have, more transportation and understanding that, yeah, we're like back to the future.
Cars are decreasing. I think we need to really focus on how we can make our our public transportation even better with improvements.
Charlene Wang: I, myself, also do not own a car. In fact, I have not owned a car for the last thirteen years. Full confession, I am borrowing my mom's car because she's also borrowing somebody else's car, so I can lug around yard signs and whatnot during the course of the campaign.
But, you know, obviously, what we do need to have is just a real advocate on city council to ensure that we can build out our bicycle network. There are so many gaps in our current network as well as ensure, on the the transit side of things that we we have more frequent transit. I might myself ride the bus, and I've noticed, that there are ways that our transit lines you know, it could be ten minutes by an Uber ride or it's forty minutes by bus. That is not an acceptable level of service when it comes to our transit. I think the big question, though, of course, is how do you pay for these things?
And so, I think there's a number of ways that we can ensure that the implementation of these projects go forward in terms of protected bike lanes, bus lanes, transit frequency. We do need to prioritize our Measure U dollars on these active transportation projects, first of all. And we also know at the state level, we've got programs like the active transportation program, that we need to pursue, those grants at the federal level. You know, god willing, the federal, government will continue to issue these bipartisan infrastructure law grants and, of which there are many opportunities to bring in more, you know, transportation upgrades, including safe streets for all. That should be able to fund, important, critical upgrades to, again, our bike and transit networks.
And then, of course, we have things like our state transportation improvement program. These are the major capital improvements. We do need to work with, our Alameda Transportation Commission to ensure that those things went through. And I will say finally in my last few seconds is we need to ensure that we're upzoning the city because, in addition, what makes things car dependent is the fact that things are so far away, and we've designed our city to be so car dependent.
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