These stimulus funds, contrary to popular belief, can be used to fund transit operations and not just capital projects. The share of the $70m which would go to AC Transit would be almost $7m, with MUNI and BART receiving even more. AC Transit’s $7m share of transit stimulus funds would give the agency about six months before it had to slash service more than already planned because of state budget cuts, which could be enough time to secure additional taxpayer funding without ending night and weekend service.

Here’s the choice before the MTC Wednesday: give BART one last but impossible chance to save their Airport Connector and lose $70m forever, or keep the $70m for the region. The OAC, which becomes more expensive and less useful with every passing year, needs to be put out of its misery. Though the federal government won’t give the OAC a penny, BART has been willing to bankrupt every rival agency and steal from every available pot of money to fund their pipe dream, up to and including robbing their own seismic retrofit bond of funding to fix the Transbay Tube, so losing the FTA’s nod may not actually kill this zombie project.

If you care at all about transit in the Bay Area, I urge you to make your voice heard to the MTC. TransForm has an excellent email form that allows you to communicate with the entire Commission. Please take a minute to send a note to the MTC and urge them to make the OAC’s death throes less harmful, preserve much-needed stimulus funding for less glamorous but more necessary transit operations across the reason, and save Hegenberger from the fate that befell 7th St. For the MTC to do otherwise would just prove the civil rights complaint’s point: that BART and the region place suburban comforts over urban necessities.

The lack of coordination on transportation extends to the City Council level. Transportation issues are split up among different Council Committees, making it harder to have a coordinated policy: parking fees are at Finance, investments and most policies go to Development, most right-of-way issues go to Public Works, and taxi regulation goes to Public Safety. Meanwhile, Oakland’s representatives on major transit agencies are scattershot: Rebecca Kaplan is our representative to ACTIA (the County’s main funding agency for transportation), Jane Brunner is our representative to the MTC-ABAG Joint Policy Committee, and CM Reid is Oakland’s voice on the Congestion Management Agency, which is the County’s transportation planning authority. A casual observer of transit issues will know that these three Councilmembers don’t see eye-to-eye on transit issues.

Though Oakland’s economy and cityscape is defined by transportation more than any other factor, the city has ignored transportation planning and has no coordinated or formalized means of addressing a whole host of transportation issues, from parking ratios for new buildings to bus stop locations. There is absolutely no planning whatsoever for transit improvements, and, frankly, CM Reid seems to be intent on preventing Oakland from making any transit investments now that he has approval for the Airport Connector, using his positions on the Congestion Management Agency and the Bus Rapid Transit Steering Committee to undermine BRT without doing anything that his bus-dependent constituents would even notice. In 2006, the Mayor’s Transportation Task Force recommended (PDF) creating a Transportation Commission “to develop. implement, and prioritize transportation strategies,” yet this idea was only half-formed and didn’t address many of the problems outlined above.

Can these problems be addressed with a Transportation Commission? Does the City Council have to restructure its own appointments and committee system in order to address transportation issues? Do City agencies need to be reorganized in order to create a Transportation Department, or can the Task Force’s suggestion of a “go-to person” and a working group be sufficient? Do you agree that the issues outlined above are real problems, or is Oakland doing just fine transportation-wise? Like almost everything else that came out of the Mayor’s Task Forces, the Transportation Commission idea has gone nowhere, but if the idea is worthwhile, there may be an opportunity to revive it. But that begins with identifying the problem. In this case, the problem may be bigger than the proposed solution.

UPDATE: I added a link to the Transportation Task Force report (PDF).

Safeway on Claremont Environmental Impact Report

At a contentious meeting last week, the Planning Commission listened to public input on what should be studied as part of Safeway’s Environmental Impact Report for expanding their store at Claremont and College. Dozens of neighbors lined up to say that they don’t want outsiders coming to their neighborhood to do grocery shopping, and that somehow Rockridge’s small-shop character is best enhanced by a gigantic surface parking lot at a prominent intersection.

You can write a letter to Planning Staff and the Commission outlining what you think should be studied. If you support the new store, you could emphasize that the pedestrian impacts of the no-build option are important to study, and that study of land-use issues or impacts on all of North Oakland (as requested by some neighbors) is unnecessary. If you oppose the project, feel free to think of the craziest thing you can imagine, and ask that it be studied. You can find contact info for comment on the Planning Commission’s November 18 agenda (PDF).

Toll increase on Bay Area bridges

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission burns through billions like it’s monopoly money, and though constantly short-changing public transportation, can’t even manage its pet highway projects well. Thus, the MTC is facing a severe deficit for the seismic strengthening of many bridges, including the Bay Bridge. True to form, rather than look for more efficient solutions, the MTC just wants more money. Currently the Bay Area Toll Authority, which is more or less the same as the MTC, is seeking public comment on a toll rise for state-run bridges (eg, not the Golden Gate Bridge or Fruitvale Bridge). This would be the first toll increase in almost twenty years that would not be endorsed by voters and would not include funds for improving public transit. On the other hand, the MTC is considering congestion pricing, which is very efficient. Comments can be addressed to the Bay Area Toll Authority before Dec 21. And if you’d like to know more about why these toll increases are needed, consider donating to McSweeney’s Bay Bridge seismic retrofit investigation, pitched on Spot.us.

AC Transit Service Changes

V Smoothe has been covering AC Transit’s service changes extensively for several months, and today writes that the final adjustment plan, released last week, is a triumph for careful consideration of public input, providing a model for other agencies. By contrast, BART slashed off-peak service 25% without even a ridership survey, and the Oakland City Council tries their darnedest not to implement inevitable service cuts. Be that as it may, the final service adjustment plan is out, and it’s open for comment. Highlights include improving service along the 51 corridor by splitting the line in two at Rockridge (which I do not like at all), and expanding service to educational destinations in the East Hills, including new service to Skyline High School, the Oakland Zoo, and the Chabot Space and Science Center. You can provide comment online, or in person at a meeting on December 1.

Union Pacific Railroad Right-of-Way Feasibility Study

Union Pacific Railroad is in negotiations to sell its “Oakland Subdivision” right-of-way to Alameda County, which would use a portion of it to recreate passenger rail connections on the Dumbarton Bridge, in South County. Union Pacific would like to sell the entire subdivision, though, and so the County is looking at possible changes to the use of part of the subdivision, which in Oakland mostly runs below the BART tracks along San Leandro St. The main thrust of the study is to make bicycle and pedestrian paths, though I don’t find the underside of BART tracks to be very scenic. In any event, it’s an interesting idea, and planners are looking for public comment. They are particularly interested in whether bicyclists would prefer Class I (grade-separated) or Class II (on-street) bike lanes as part of the project. Check out the study and leave your comments, at Alameda County Public Works (it’s the first item under Community Updates).

Next Thursday (June 18), the Oakland City Council Rules Committee will hear a request from Councilmember Nancy Nadel to agendize a discussion of the proposed Oakland Airport Connector project. Ms. Nadel will request the connector be discussed at the Public Works Committee, which she chairs, and that the project then be forwarded to the full Council. The project is being sold to the region as a great investment in Oakland, yet Oakland’s elected officials have not had an opportunity to examine it in eight years, and the project has changed substantially since then. Nevertheless, transit advocates expect a fight over whether Oakland should even have a discussion.

A lot is at stake for Oakland. On one hand, project supporters claim that it will improve the Oakland Airport area, attracting more airline passengers and perhaps more businesses to Airport and surrounding area. For the reality-based community, however, there are enormous costs to the City of Oakland to moving ahead with the project. ACTIA funds that would otherwise go to East Oakland bike/ped/transit improvements, such as a mooted transit village at the Coliseum BART station, would be lost. The Port of Oakland will have to use funds that would otherwise go to airport renovation and expansion. Regional stimulus funds would go to this instead of to shoring up AC Transit and BART service. And the City of Oakland will lose the opportunity to improve transit service that would serve the workers and businesses in the Hegenberger Corridor, since the RFP for the Airport Connector does not include any intermediate stops. Many of these problems are a result of changes to the project, and many former supporters are now opponents.

A half-billion-dollar regional investment in Oakland should clearly merit some review by the Oakland City Council. However, transit advocates expect Councilmember Larry Reid, who represents the Airport and is on the Rules Committee, to resist allowing a public hearing on the project. He has claimed several times, most recently this morning at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission committee hearing, that six of the eight councilmembers support the project. If that’s true, why wouldn’t he welcome a public hearing and the opportunity for the Council as a body to weigh in? Supporters of the Oakland Airport Connector, mainly BART and MTC staff, have been resisting any review of alternatives to the project (today MTC Director Steve Heminger said it was “too late” to look at alternatives, even though they’ve been mooted for years). BART staff have repeatedly lied to decision-makers about the specifics of the project, for example telling the Port Commission about local hire and project labor agreements that are mysteriously missing from the RFP, or providing outdated ridership projections to the MTC. A well-placed City Hall source tells me that when Council staff contacted BART about having a public hearing on the project, BART said they would rather meet privately with each councilmember. Clearly Airport Connector supporters don’t think they have the truth on their side.

So, what do you think? If you agree that Oakland’s elected official should weigh in on the project, with public comment, please send an email to the members of the Rules Committee, especially Council President Jane Brunner (addresses below). If you think projects should be decided without the input of relevant elected officials, well, then you are probably quite thrilled with the direction of Bay Area transportation spending, and you don’t need to do anything. Without Oakland’s elected officials having a public hearing, the citizens of Oakland have no formal voice in the process. The Oakland City Council needs to step up to plate and make the decisions they were elected to, on behalf of the city. Please advocate for your chance to have a voice.

Rules Committee (meeting on Thursday, June 18)

Council President Jane Brunner, North Oakland: jbrunner at oaklandnet dot com

Jean Quan, Montclair-Laurel: jquan at oaklandnet dot com

Ignacio de la Fuente, Fruitvale-Glenview-Jingletown: idelafuente at oaklandnet dot com

If you’d like to learn more about the meeting and the Directors’ comments, please see my Twitter (@dto510), @MaxAllstadt, and @TheBlackHour. Even if you don’t have a twitter account you can subscribe to RSS feeds of my twitter to follow breaking news or my other updates. Living in the O and I will blog when there are further opportunities to advocate for a more cost-effective Airport Connector that better serves East Oakland.

Obviously, ancient sidewalks and pothole-ridden streets are bad for bicyclists and pedestrians. There is still a crippling bike parking shortage in many parts of downtown, and major construction projects are unnecessarily impacting bike commuters. The Fox Theater isn’t following the new Bicycle Parking Ordinance, yet had the gall to ask the city for a subsidized parking lot on Telegraph Avenue, gaining the support of the Redevelopment Agency. Transportation planning is as much of a mess as it ever was.

But a lot has been accomplished in the last year. Oakland’s Bicycle Master Plan was passed in 2007 and is being implemented in a stuttering but cost-effective manner. Bike route signage will soon grace most thoroughfares. Pedestrian advocates were able to delay the Uptown parking lot in favor of public art (no thanks to the downtown councilmembers). Bike parking has finally come to Old Oakland and other parts of town. The Bicycle Parking Ordinance has been followed with pedestrian-friendly zoning and ground-floor design standards recommended for downtown by the Planning Commission, setting a precedent for the citywide zoning update. Dramatically increasing pedestrian and bicycle trips are not only apparent but now they are documented, setting the stage for greater government awareness of the need for, as it’s called now, complete streets.

Bike to Work Day may only be symbolic of the quest for better transportation options, but it’s fun! You can join a Pedal Pool, and bicycle with your Councilmember and neighbors to City Hall, where you’ll be greeted with a pancake breakfast and gift bag. If you’re biking to work somewhere else in the city, energizer stations will provide food, drink, and swag (a map is in today’s East Bay Express). The East Bay Bicycle Coalition will provide valet bicycle parking all day, and in the evening there’s a North Oakland Bike From Work Day party, sponsored by ULTRA, the EBBC, and Tip Top Bike Shop (starts at 5:30, on 49th St between Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues). It’s an opportunity to engage in an alternative commute in a more welcoming environment than usual, but as Becks points out, it’s also a chance to talk to your councilmembers about bike/ped issues, and even to stop by BART HQ to speak for a better East Oakland investment. If only every political event came with a gift bag!

NRDC Switchboard’s Justin Horner (former Oakland City Council aide) discusses the recent change in America’s driving habits.

StreetsFilms gives tips on locking a bicycle, and Streetsblog kicks of its national coverage with an update on progress toward a new Surface Transportation Act. Meanwhile, Transportation For America releases its priorities for greener, more equitable transportation policy.

Transbay Blog looks at newly-released BART rider survey data, and concludes that infill stations are a better investment than suburban extensions.

Tomorrow is also the big vote on the Oakland Airport Connector. Will BART borrow $150m, steal from its seismic improvement fund, and potentially bankrupt the Port of Oakland to build a flyover connector between the Coliseum BART station and Oakland Airport, with no stops at the hotels between, and a $12 roundtrip fare? Or will the BART Board choose a vastly cheaper option that would provide greater local service and free up funds for other transit improvements around the Coliseum and throughout the Bay Area? You’ve probably already read Becks’s blog, and TransForm’s report, but here’s a blog from the BART workers’ union.

Yesterday I had an hour between meetings to have coffee with my mother in Rockridge. I thought it would be a good opportunity to twitter the latest BART protest, and hopefully to pick up a few more readers of my microblog thanks to intrepid, live reporting of what promised to be a large and potentially riotous demonstration in the heart of Oakland’s supposedly “power elite” neighborhood. Unfortunately for me and for the protesters, it was a complete bust. The media outnumbered the handful of protesters, and BART and the neighborhood took no chances securing the transit station. I enjoyed no discernible uptake in my twitter popularity, and the protesters looked pathetic and marginalized. But lost in their divisive and extremist rhetoric is the fact that the protesters are basically right: BART is a deeply flawed and unjust organization.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system opened in the early 1970s with a promise of uniting the central Bay Area with a high-speed rail system. The system’s construction wreaked havoc on Oakland and San Francisco’s downtowns, precipitating the fall of the DTO as an upscale shopping destination by tearing up Broadway for years, and driving the final nail into the coffin of West Oakland’s once-vibrant 7th St. As the system expanded throughout the 80s and 90s, far-flung suburbs received high-intensity transit service far out of proportion to their size and density, and the residents of central cities found themselves subsidizing suburban transportation at an ever-increasing rate. Despite failing to meet ridership projections, a uniquely costly construction type, and decades-long problems with escalators and elevators, BART remains the most politically popular transit service, receiving a share of regional transportation dollars far out of proportion to its ridership. Today, BART’s legacy is an ever-expanding regional development footprint and fantastically wasteful expansion plans that starve the much more efficient and larger bus agencies of needed operating funds. This is not just an issue of priorities, it is an issue of social and environmental justice.

BART’s per-rider public subsidy (at an average of $6.14) is more than twice that of AC Transit ($2.78), neatly intersecting (PDF) with the fact that its ridership is twice as white as AC Transit’s (43% to 21%). Its subsidized parking lots in the suburbs encourage driving and transfer additional funds to the suburbs at the expense of the inner cities. Most galling, fares from the outer suburbs don’t come close to covering the operating costs of those train lines, while intra-city fares in Oakland are actually more than the operating cost of a trip from, say, Fruitvale to the DTO. This means that every trip within Oakland is subsidizing a trip from the outer suburbs. Both the structure and the operation of BART is subsidizing suburbanites at the expense of the central cities, and its low-cost parking has been shown to encourage more driving.

This is not just a legacy of the 1950s BART plan, it is a result of continuing policy choices by the elected BART Board. The same Board that for decades refused to create a civilian oversight board for its large police force has chosen to create an unjust fare structure and repeatedly break promises made to voters. Those broken promises include a shockingly wasteful Airport Connector that bears no resemblance to the project approved by Alameda County voters, and the VTA’s 2008 tax measure that took all of a month after it was approved for the transit agency to announce that it would jettison all of the local-serving projects in the tax and redirect the funds to the duplicative San Jose expansion (which won’t even go to downtown San Jose, as promised to Alameda County voters when they approved the Warm Springs extension).

The BART Board flies below the radar of public and media interest. The last contested BART election, for the North Oakland-Berkeley seat, saw a transit advocate unseated by Bob Franklin, a union leader upset by Roy Nakadegawa’s efforts to run the system more equitably. The wasteful nature of BART is part of its political power: the construction companies and unions are strongly supportive of the enormous costs of expansion, which go directly into their pockets, while low-cost bus systems aren’t lucrative to big political donors. AC Transit is relentlessly criticized for buying nice buses and for attempting a widely successful Bus Rapid Transit project, yet nary a peep is raised by the media when BART embarks on trains to nowhere, at the cost of over half a billion dollars a mile.

So how does this relate to Oscar Grant? The protesters are eager to connect Oscar Grant’s death with wider social justice causes, yet they focus exclusively on the BART police. BART’s unjust operating structure, the subject of a racial-discrimination lawsuit, has been utterly ignored, and the protesters appear to fail to understand that the elected BART Board is fully responsible for a lack of civilian oversight for the BART police, as well as the despicable response to the incident in the first place. This gives BART Directors, like the aforementioned Bob Franklin, cover to claim they “take the protesters’ demands seriously” while in fact doing nothing to address the substance of those criticisms. Unless and until the protesters connect the dots of BART’s deeply unjust operations and the culpability of its elected officials (who are accountable to the voters), lame attempts to shut down urban stations will do nothing to improve transportation equity or social justice.

Transit advocates had reason to cheer on Election Day. California voters endorsed high-speed rail, Berkeley voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure intended to halt Bus Rapid Transit, and East Bay voters ignored the noise about Van Hools and approved a transit tax to make up for state budget cuts. But as the euphoria fades, it’s increasingly clear that Oakland could be really screwed by post-election transportation decisions made by local bodies.

As I wrote before the election, the particular SF-to-LA route chosen by the High-Speed Rail Authority bypasses the largest part of the Bay Area, the East Bay, which also precludes service to Sacramento and Modesto without a costly extension. Many of my friends argued that this isn’t really a big deal for Oakland (though of course we would benefit from hosting the HSR hub), because downtown SF is just as convenient for us as the Coliseum. However, that’s not true for most East Bay residents.

Be that as it may, immediately after the bond passed, HSR Authority boardmember and former SF Supervisor Quentin Kopp said that the costs of the service may not be covered by the bond (surprise), and that service may not go to downtown SF but instead to the Fourth and Townsend Caltrain station. Aside from drawing attention to the fact that locating a regional system in San Francisco is unnecessarily expensive, this stop is far less convenient for everyone in the Bay Area outside the Caltrain corridor. East Bay trippers will now have to take BART to DTSF, then transfer to light-rail. Aside from adding a mode change, which is off-putting, the Fourth St light-rail line does not have anything close to the capacity to host the number of passengers carried by HSR. The prospect of overcrowded light-rail trains and a long schlep to a sketchy part of SF makes High-Speed Rail less appealing against the constant flights out of the Oakland Airport, a conveniently BART-available destination, especially with the forthcoming rail link.

Except the kibosh is on the OAK light-rail line. Currently BART operates a bus service between the Coliseum BART station and the airport. The bus operates in mixed-flow lanes and is often held up by traffic. The bus is extraordinarily popular, even turning a profit, and creating a rail connection between BART and the airport has been on the drawing board since at least 2001. However, the airport connector project has secured only $295m in regional transit funds, and with a significant private-sector partnership precluded by the credit crunch, BART is giving up. Meanwhile, SF continues to receive enormous regional subsidies for its airport connector, part of a $1.6b BART extension that has vastly underperformed ridership expectations and so continues to receive outsized subsidies.

Of course, with the now-probable passage of Santa Clara County’s Measure B, Oakland and the region will be on the hook for billions of dollars for a BART expansion justified by ridership projections so fantastic as to constitute lying. Combined with Governor Schwarzenegger’s push to build capital improvements while further cutting operating funds from unglamorous but cost-effective transit services like the bus, the East Bay is in for a very tough transit future.

One outlet for trapped transit users is market-based public transportation. Strangely, Oakland lacks jitneys and limousines, leaving us dependant on a taxi duopoly. With the paucity of taxi service inspiring a public outcry, city staff has reformed the taxi ordinance and will propose issuing new permits. Unfortunately, rather than issuing the 200 permits needed to make up for 30 years of a service freeze, city staff is only going to ask for 11 new permits. A San Francisco operator has said at public hearings that they would start a new service in Oakland if they can get at least 20 permits. City policy will instead maintain the duopoly, leaving Oaklanders bereft of service. At the state level, in regional transportation priorities, and even at the level of local transportation regulation, Oakland is totally screwed. As usual.