Alameda County, in conjunction with its partners at Caltrans, held an open house Wednesday evening in Jack London Square to update residents on their latest freeway-widening efforts: the Oakland-Alameda ramp project.
Caltrans and the county, and the engineers and consultants who work for them, know very well that the legislature and governor have instructed them to stop widening freeways and to work towards lowering emissions. But there's much money involved in the so-called "Oakland Alameda Access Project" ($152 million in this case). So, as usual, they look for ways to rebrand widening as something else.
That's what's behind the above image: it's wild to think that at Wednesday's meeting they were still selling a widening of the catwalks in the tunnel as a bike/ped component of a supposedly multi-modal project (read the text in the red circle). For years, advocates have said point blank that, given the horrific noise and pollution in the tunnel, the service catwalk never was and never can be a bike or pedestrian facility. But Caltrans and updated regulations require the path to be widened for maintenance. They're sticking a bike-lane label on it to pretend they're including bike improvements in the overall freeway widening project.
Spokespeople for the project also continue to claim it will be safer for pedestrians in the area because the Broadway flyover off-ramp is being torn down as part of the project. They're only doing that to make room for the new on-ramp to 880 they want to build from the Posey Tube. What they bring up less frequently is that they will also widen Sixth Street and the Oak Street off-ramp to make up for the Broadway flyover and increase overall car capacity. Everyone who walks and bikes between Chinatown, downtown Oakland, BART, and the waterfront will have to cross more lanes, not fewer, of fast-moving traffic when the project is done. That's not safer.
The idea is to keep greenwashing and gaslighting the politicians to keep the project moving forward and the checks coming.
Advocates from Bike Walk Alameda and Bike East Bay have worked their asses off trying to get some real mitigations for bike and pedestrian safety. The most notable success is the shoestring budget they got for the Oakland Estuary Water shuttle pilot. Alameda County gave $1 million, or about a quarter of the money for the two-year pilot. That's great, but as Bike East Bay's Robert Prinz said at Wednesday's meeting: if a project is so bad it requires so much mitigation, let's only do the mitigations.
And that's where District 2's newly elected City Councilperson Charlene Wang can help. Wang, who seems to take an interest in and understand transportation, needs to draft a resolution demanding a pause before heavy construction starts on the ramps. She needs to channel San Mateo's Councilmember Danielle Cwirko-Godycki who recently led the charge to stop Caltrans and San Mateo County from a destructive ramp project in her district. In that case, all local advocates got on the same page and, in one unified voice, said enough is enough. It will be difficult to move that project forward with the city coming out so strongly against it. Of course, the freeway wideners will keep trying.
In Oakland's case, the resolution can also specify that if Alameda County and Caltrans want to move forward with supposed mitigations while the freeway widening parts of the project are reevaluated, so be it. If they really want to increase access between Oakland and Alameda, they can write a check for a second water shuttle and additional operating funds so it can run seven days a week, well into the night. The water shuttle works. We now know that. Let's make it a robust, viable, dependable, and permanent service.
But first we have to cut through the bull and demand that the freeway widening really just stops.
