Caltrans held an open house Wednesday evening at a school in West Oakland as part of its continued outreach on a project to possibly remove or cap I-980 between West Oakland and downtown.
Three scenarios were presented at the meeting: capping portions of the freeway, enhancing crossings, or complete removal. Caltrans has created a survey, open until Friday, July 11, to get more public feedback. However, West Oakland resident and advocate Mike Chouinard, who attended Wednesday's meeting, told Streetsblog that "the response to anything short of removal was overwhelmingly negative." He said he only heard one person who supported keeping the freeway (the guy is featured in ABC7's story, of course) out of approximately 45 attendees.
More from Caltrans's project page:
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is conducting the Vision 980 Study to hear from the community about ways to reimagine the I-980 corridor. The I-980 freeway divides neighborhoods in West Oakland from downtown Oakland and is a barrier to travel and economic opportunities. The Vision 980 Study aims to improve the quality of life for impacted residents through a community-led and equitable visioning process that seeks to reimagine the freeway to create new opportunities for land-uses like housing, businesses, open space, recreational, and cultural facilities.
Previous racially discriminatory decision making and redlining policies resulted in I-980 directly cutting through West Oakland. The freeway’s 1.6-mile-long connection between I-880 and I-580 displaced many West Oakland families and led to community disinvestment. Today, I-980 represents a painful physical monument to the segregation and discrimination of generations past.
Today, West Oakland residents continue to breathe more pollution and suffer other direct effects from the freeway's "barrier effect," dividing them from the rest of the city. Ultimately, the hope is to reconnect Oakland's two halves and create a new housing and merchant corridor with parks and public space.
Streetsblog has covered this effort for many years. Back in March, during a political forum, now-mayor-then-candidate Barbara Lee sidestepped a question about whether she supported removing I-980. "It's important that the community weigh in and that those who are working on this have community engagement before any decisions are made," she said when asked. Back in 2022, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff and toured I-980. This eventually led to funds to study removing it.
Unfortunately, there is no timeline or budget to actually proceed with removal or any of the other scenarios, so, for the foreseeable future, this is just a design effort, according to Randolph Belle, a consultant for the outreach and study. And, given the Trump Administration's attitude towards funding freeway removals or any other kind of environmental justice (and his general hatred of everything California), it's unlikely that's going to change for many years.
However, there's a hope in the short term to at least try a new use for the freeway spur—by doing a local version of L.A.'s "Arroyo Fest" and closing the freeway to traffic for at least one day a year.
Let's open it one weekend a year "...to people walking and rolling," wrote Bike East Bay's Robert Prinz, in an email to Streetsblog, pointing to the success of the Niles Canyon Stroll and Roll on a stretch of Highway 84. "That's the best way to get more people aware of and in support of reuse opportunities, as it is hard to visualize how big the space is until one experiences it on a human scale."
It's unclear when that might happen, however. Belle said he's familiar with the proposal and that in the future "there may be some activation, if not on the freeway, adjacent to it."
Read more about the Vision 980 project here.
