Next week, the City of Oakland will begin a series of public meetings about a Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA) to create a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line crossing the entire city. BRT has been debated for a decade in the East Bay, and its key feature, exclusive bus lanes, has been the source of some consternation among residents in Berkeley and parts of Oakland. But since the City Councils of Berkeley, San Leandro and Oakland voted to move forward with BRT on Telegraph Ave and International Blvd in 2000, BRT has been an abstract concept. No more. Oakland planners have unveiled a proposal to create a fully-fledged complete street stretching 17 miles across the East Bay, substantially redesigned for pedestrian and bicycle use in addition to bus lanes. Crosswalks, sidewalk bulb-outs, streetlights, and bicycle lanes will complement a world-class transit system, with the potential to transform the heart of the East Bay.
The term “Complete Street” is used to refer to a street that is improved for all modes of transit: motorized, bicycle, and pedestrian. In Oakland, the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plans and their associated policies provide compliance with the CA Complete Streets Act of 2008, but there are no concrete plans to add bike lanes or substantial pedestrian improvements to the entirety of Telegraph Avenue and International Blvd. The BRT plan drawn up by Oakland planners and engineers, formally if confusingly known as Oakland’s Locally Preferred Alternative, would make far-reaching and large-scale improvements to those streets, an opportunity unique in the city today.
Oakland’s Bicycle Master Plan outlines a Bicycle Network, streets in the city that should have some level of bicycle facility installed, ranging from fully-fledged bike lanes to just signage. While the Bicycle Master Plan has an Environmental Impact Report associated with it, city staff can’t remove car lanes or parking spaces without Council permission, which is a huge barrier because of the Council’s limited meeting time. In practice, the City’s Bike/Ped Program installs bike lanes when the opportunity arises, like when a street that’s on the BMP is being repaved for cars. This approach is extremely cost-effective, but frustrates cyclists who must use a patchwork of incomplete bicycle facilities. BRT installing bike lanes on Telegraph and International is a unique opportunity to create an entire 17-mile bike route in one fell swoop. But there’s another reason BRT is uniquely beneficial to bicyclists: without BRT, there would be no bike lane on Telegraph at all. Oakland’s 1999 Bicycle Master Plan EIR was successfully challenged in court, and the 2007 Bicycle Master Plan had to abandon bike lanes on Telegraph (using instead the Webster-Shafter route). Oakland’s transportation planners took advantage of the opportunity afforded by BRT to rethink Telegraph, and brought this much-desired bike lane back from the dead.
Oakland’s Pedestrian Master Plan is more of a statement of policy and establishment of best design practices than a map of areas to be improved. The Pedestrian Route Map, in the words of the plan, is “a long-term planning tool for targeting pedestrian improvements,” with no dedicated funding source. Much like bike lanes, pedestrian improvements are installed in a piecemeal fashion, based on grant funding, a private development’s mitigations, or a Redevelopment Agency district-improvement project. The BRT plan will upgrade pedestrian facilities along the entire length of the system, with widened sidewalks, more crosswalks, and even additional traffic signals. To anyone who has had to cross Telegraph Avenue at night, the need for these improvements is apparent.
Oakland’s portion of the 17-mile East Bay Bus Rapid Transit line is proposed to include dedicated bus and bike lanes across its entire length accompanied by significant pedestrian improvements, creating what could be the longest complete street in California. It’s not actually one street, of course: it’s two streets, and the middle portion (downtown) will not have dedicated bus lanes because buses already occupy most of the roadway during commute hours. That caveat aside, the BRT plan promises to be a radical improvement to an extraordinarily long transit corridor, potentially serving 40% of the city’s population.
So who loses out? After all, there’s only so much horizontal right-of-way. It’s not necessarily drivers who will feel the pinch of losing significant street space to sidewalk bulbouts, bike lanes, and bus lanes. Few portions of Telegraph suffer significant traffic delay, and the Grove-Shafter freeway parallels the route, giving drivers another option. Telegraph’s traffic problems are generally at the avenue’s destination points, where people are most likely to switch from driving to using reliable transit. It’s parkers who are going to see the hit, as the plan takes out more street-side parking than expected. But this is a solvable problem: at worst, AC Transit will install additional parking rather than allow the project to founder. International Blvd’s choke points are accommodated by also using E 12th St for portions of the route. Oakland’s plan appears to be pulling off what was once unthinkable: a major complete-street improvement that’s a radical boon to livability, without draining City coffers or drawing drivers’ ire.
Oakland’s plan, of course, is still unfinished. The City is sponsoring a series of public meetings on the project, with the opportunity to give detailed input on specific streetscape choices along the entire route. If you live, work, or hang out near the BRT route and would like to delve into nitty-gritty details like stop locations, I recommend that you visit the meeting in the neighborhood of your interest. In addition to five neighborhood meetings, there’s a meeting at City Hall for general discussion. With resuscitated Telegraph Avenue bike lanes, significant pedestrian improvements, and dedicated transit lanes, the East Bay BRT plan is Oakland’s best chance for the foreseeable future to make a citywide livability improvement on a grand scale.
You can find more information, including dates and locations of public meetings on the BRT LPA, at OaklandBRT.com.
Update: Oakland’s portion of the BRT system is 11 miles.
Very exciting. Telegraph is a nice street to bike on – not to hilly, and connects many great places.
It will remain safer and more pleasant to bicycle the webster shafter route than to ride telegraph,even with bike lanes–not that the project shouldn’t go forward.
Gimmie a HOOOOO if you got yo’ funky bus fay’ah!!!
One more meeting has been added in Elmhurst on Jan. 28th. Learn more, send a letter or watch a really cool video simulation of the project at:
http://transformca.org/brt/oakland
This is interesting. Much of international, down to 55th St., is not a designated bike route. Are they planning on ignoring the BMP and putting in a bike lane anyway to achieve a ‘complete street’?
I believe that yes, both International and Telegraph will receive the full bike-lane treatment even though they are not on the BMP. Detailed route maps will be available at OaklandBRT.com soon.
Bike lanes are proposed according to the Bicycle Master Plan. There will not, therefore, be a bicycle lane on International until 55th. The designated bicycle lane is one block over, on E. 12th. Full plans are now availalble on http://www.oaklandbrt.com.
I just looked at the photo mock ups, and I don’t see a single one with a dedicated bike lane. And since the traffic lanes are going to be reduce to single lanes in each direction, this looks like a disaster in the making for bikes.
It also looks like pedestrians are going to suffer. It seems as though the bulb outs are going to be reduced or eliminated in many places, along with elimination of the medians in places. Although there will be a refuge for peds where there is a loading zone, this doesn’t look like it will be at every intersection. This seems to be making things more dangerous for pedestrians.
The plan adds bike lanes across the entire length and adds pedestrian bulbouts and crosswalks as well. You are probably looking at the renderings AC Transit did three years ago, which were conceptual. The actual street design, with the pedestrian and bike facilities, is new. You can find information about the actual plan at http://OaklandBRT.com.
Also, single traffic lanes are better for bicyclists if there are bike facilities installed, and medians are bad for pedestrians if they are not designed as part of a pedestrian-oriented streetscape, as few in Oakland are.
I believe that light rail is the best technology for any regional transit situation, the simpler, the better. I believe the mistakes pop up when the management does not operate it properly. That is why we don’t outlaw circular saws or guns. We try to teach people how to use them safely.
While we were in the Los Angeles area, I tried out their new “bus rapid transit” in the San Fernando Valley that feeds the subway serving Universal Studios and Downtown. I understand they saved about 20% when compared to cost estimates for light rail. Cost overruns ate that up in real life. It was built on an abandoned RR bed ending up with a shar 7b p left turn onto the city street for several blocks to a side of the street terminal. The articulated busses are painted grey and blend into the concrete sound walls and are hard to see at cross streets. Cross streets are “protected” by traffic signals, supposedly tripped by the busses. On my Eastbound trip, they only worked that way about 20% of the time. At about 30% of the public crossings, the driver came to a stop, no matter what color the light was as she was gunshy about the cross traffic. They T-boned and killed a woman talking on her cell phone the first week of operation and everyone was wary. At the rest of the intersections, the light was red for the bus. On the Westbound trip, the driver really pushed the bus. As a result, it porpoised so badly that the standees had to hang on for dear life. The articulated design ducked and dove at the slightest dip in the roadway. If you want to counter the pro-bus folks, tell them to go take a ride.
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