I wrote last month about the many problems confronting Oakland’s transportation planning process. With civic leaders pushing new ballparks, my thoughts turned to the transportation aspects of planning a major entertainment destination. Two of the announced sites were West of Jack London Square, including a site called Jack London North that has stirred significant interest (and is the most popular plan in a poll at Oakland Local). But it poses some serious transportation access problems, including being certainly outside of what can be considered reasonable walking distance from BART (as is AT&T Park in San Francisco, of course). Without an up-to-date downtown transportation plan or even summary information, it’s hard to blame decision-makers for not knowing the transportation context of grand plans. But what is really striking is how important many downtown plans consider ferry service to be, from Jack London Square developments to the proposed shuttle service, yet those making the plans clearly are unaware of the ferry’s serious shortcomings, including the likelihood that Oakland will lose its ferry service in five years.

All the information below can be found in WETA’s Transition Plan.

The City of Alameda, in partnership with the Port of Oakland and Alameda County (ACTIA), provides a commuter ferry to San Francisco called the Alameda – Oakland Ferry. Its operations are contracted to Blue & Gold Fleets, using two publicly-owned ferries. Alameda, like many other cities, subsidizes this transit service out of its General Fund, and the Port of Oakland also contributes a significant sum yearly out of general revenues, for a total subsidy of about four million dollars. Next year, the new Water Emergency Transit Authority will take over operating the service, but WETA is only committed to maintain current service for five years. So here’s the problem: the Port doesn’t want to keep paying, and WETA wants to expand service to South San Francisco, which will require increased subsidy. With Port and City budgets squeezed, the future of ferry service is very much up in the air.

The present state of ferry service is also a big problem. Everyone seems to assume that people use the ferry, but the truth is that almost nobody rides it. Ridership declined ten percent from 1997 to 2008, and has dropped 15% in the current fiscal year. The ferry’s maximum roundtrip capacity is only 2328 passengers a day,* and average daily ridership is a pitiful 640 people**, with two-thirds of commuters coming from Alameda (though most weekend trips originate in Oakland). Because Jack London Square and Alameda are so far from BART, and SF’s Ferry Terminal is in a major job center, there are several thousand people that could use the ferry to commute, but they don’t. The ferry is slow, expensive, and frankly, unpleasant to ride. There’s no signage, no ferry employees outside of the ferry itself, no waiting area, the ferries’ interiors are shabby, and the snacks and alcohol bar is woefully underutilized. On top of that, tickets are expensive. And what kind of “emergency” transit closes during a rainstorm? Unless WETA addresses these problems, ferry ridership can’t increase significantly enough for the ferry to be a real transit option.

If City officials are going to say that Jack London Square’s ferry pier is a transportation option, or attempt to make any plans including it, Oakland must determine the future of the ferry. The City should ask the Port and Alameda to explain their plans for ferry subsidy over the next ten years. Oakland should tell WETA in no uncertain terms that if they want Oakland to commit to long-term funding, WETA’s multimillion-dollar planned investments in Berkeley and South San Francisco should be matched by investments in Oakland. To determine how much of a commitment public agencies should make, Oakland should also find out what plans WETA has for increasing ferry ridership, because current levels don’t justify a continued subsidy. Local leaders are making plans based around a ferry service that is clearly failing, with no plan to improve it or to ensure it doesn’t disappear. Burdened by a chaotic and unfocused transportation bureaucracy and decision-making structure, it’s unclear who is keeping an eye on Oakland’s transit infrastructure, even as it slips away.

** 466,818 trips in FY 2007-2008, divided by 365 days, divided by two trips/person, means an average of only 640 people rode the ferry each day during that period. Remember, this includes Alameda as well as Oakland; Alameda passengers represent about 2/3s of the riders, so the Jack London Square ferry terminal is only serving about 220 people on an average day.

As Becks and I have written, we and other pedestrian advocates are opposed to the construction of a surface parking lot on Telegraph Avenue at 19th St, next to the Fox Theater. The one hundred or so spaces created by this ugly lot could be found by better using existing parking resources, including the several nearby parking structures, or by extending parking meter times. The issue is not parking in the abstract, but urban design and transportation planning. At the City Council committee hearing at which the members postponed approving the lot, Pat Kernighan observed that “Oakland is not Manhattan,” and that parking is needed for Oaklanders to come from all over the city to enjoy Uptown. I do not disagree, but because 90% of trips are not going to car-free, does that mean 90% of trips must be by car? Parking is more complicated than being for it or against it. Though surface parking next to the Fox is not acceptable not matter how dolled up in flowers, planning for parking can be a boon for bicyclists and pedestrians. 

The main argument against surface parking is that it is a pedestrian hazard, and its prominence may have some driving-inducing effects. Surface parking is a pedestrian hazard in three main ways: curb-cuts allow cars to cross the sidewalk, surface parking lots are often magnets for crime, and traffic swarming around the lot will make crossing the street more dangerous. Additionally, surface lots symbolize disinvestment, and a lot on Telegraph would entirely ruin the pedestrian experience of up-and-coming Uptown. All of these objections do not apply as well, or at all, to structured parking. Portland OR has a great deal of structured parking in its transit-oriented downtown, but it is appropriately located and designed. I would not necessarily oppose structured parking in the Uptown area, as it is more efficient use of valuable downtown land than surface parking, and can integrate retail or other uses.

Not planning, but parking

The Redevelopment Agency apparently agrees, though their appetite for structured parking is insatiable. In addition to the lot under contract with Forest City for which they want surface parking, the RDA controls three lots downtown, for all of which it is in preliminary talks to dispose and develop. The three lots are 21st and Telegraph, 20th and San Pablo, and 21st and Broadway. For all three the RDA envisions structured public parking as a major component of development. This has been arrived at by no analysis or even guesstimate of parking demand; the RDA justifies their call for surface parking on Telegraph by asserting that because there were hundreds of parking spaces where The Uptown Apartments now sit, and those spaces have been replaced by new development (including parking), therefore there is a “severe parking shortage” now. That is not planning, and certainly not becoming to an allegedly transit-first city. Before requiring all future development of Uptown Redevelopment lots to include public parking, Uptown’s demand for parking should be studied in the context of overall transportation patterns and existing parking resources. It is possible that parking demand may require an additional parking structure, and, as part of an informed look at Uptown circulation, this could be a benefit to pedestrians as well.

What induces parking demand is not parking itself, but artificially cheap parking. Imposing minimum parking requirements, subsidizing parking facilities, setting meter or public lot rates lower than market rates, and planning for an overly large number of parking spaces, are all government actions that weight transportation choices in favor of driving a car. But an appropriate amount of parking, at market rates and in response to market demand, does not necessarily encourage people to drive rather than take transit or other means, but allows commercial districts to meet actual parking demand and be more economically successful. The economic success of transit-oriented neighborhoods in an inherently green endeavor, even if most customers are not taking transit. Without artificially-cheap or overly-abundant parking, well-conceived alternative transportation can compete with driving, and punitive anti-car regulations are unnecessary.

Putting the car before the house

Just as lot parking is worse than structured parking from a pedestrian perspective, and the main problem with building Uptown structured parking lots is that it is not part of a transportation plan, the idea that parking is inherently problematic can lead to a misunderstanding of the relative harm of different kinds of parking. In January, there was a brief tussle in San Francisco over a 36-unit development receiving permission to exceed San Francisco’s maximum parking requirements. In this case, the developer wasn’t arguing only that there is demand for more than one space for every other unit, but also that building so little parking would make it infeasible to put it underground, and so preclude pedestrian-oriented streetfront retail. It was a tussle because progressive San Franciscans were aghast at the prospect of parking. But what SF’s bike-ped activists miss is that advocating for a 21st-century streetscape does not mean blindly opposing the construction of new parking.

While I do not drive, I don’t think that owning a car forces someone to live a lifestyle that is bad for the environment. One can take transit to work, walk to restaurants, bike the grocery store, and still have a car for the occasional trip out of town or to Ikea. In the case of the aforementioned housing development, its residents were effectively being asked to give up their cars in order to live near transit, a position that will not smooth the transition of cities to transit-dependence. And since it’s unrealistic to demand that residents of any particular new building not even own a car, using the planning process to artificially lower the construction of off-street parking will simply encourage dependency on curbside parking. It is not private parking, but curbside parking that poses the greatest opportunity and real costs on bicyclists and pedestrians, and on car drivers and mass transit as well.

A car-park off the street is worth two in the street

In-street parking is the most harmful kind of parking because its presence in the street necessarily takes away from other transportation options. While lot parking, and structured parking to a lesser degree, may be an inefficient use of land parcels, street parking uses the precious, and severely limited, public right-of-way. The linear (street width) space devoted to car parking on a major street necessarily takes away from sidewalk, bike lanes, or lanes for motorized traffic (including cars, taxis, buses, and light-rail). Street parking’s impact on bike lanes is increased by almost one-half by the “door zone,” the area of the public street occasionally occupied by open car doors, which pose a particular danger to cyclists. A well-built bike lane does not use this space and so has to push even further into the shared right-of-way.

Curbside car parking also imposes a congestion impact beyond the opportunity cost of using its space for moving traffic. The act of parallel parking slows circulation, and the potential convenience of curbside parking over off-street parking encourages unnecessary car driving, circling the block looking for a space. While parking structures, whether stand-alone or as part of mixed-use buildings, plan the locations of their entrances and exits based at least in part on optimal circulation, street parking is haphazardly littered across major streets, with parking absent only when it is a huge and obvious barrier to other forms of transportation. Even in areas with abundant off-street parking and severe traffic congestion (like College or Piedmont Avenues), the majority of the main street is lined with car parking.

Street parking’s impact on other forms of transportation that share the right-of-way is worse than the possible driving-inducing effects of structured parking. If some amount of parking is needed for commercial districts to thrive, careful planning should guide decisions to install transportation facilities. The Redevelopment Agency must study how much parking is actually needed in Uptown before deciding that every single one of its lots should have a large parking component, and a surface lot is simply too ugly to front Telegraph Avenue. But some new public parking is probably needed in Uptown, and it’s no environmental crime to own a car. If off-street structured parking is built, rather than adding to existing street parking, new parking can replace it.  Removing curbside parking as part of building off-street parking can create additional bicycle and pedestrian facilities: widened sidewalks and door zone-free bike lanes. And that’s how car parking can be good for pedestrians and bicyclists.

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.

Yesterday, Mayor Dellums announced that the Oakland Police Department would investigate the killing of Oscar Grant III by a BART police officer on a BART platform. There is no reason the Oakland PD should undertake such an investigation. Mr. Grant, a resident of Hayward, was arrested because of his involvement in a fight that began in San Francisco. A regional police officer unjustifiably killed him. Though the arrest and killing happened at the Fruitvale BART station, within the boundaries of the City of Oakland, the Oakland police department is not involved and has no jurisdiction over the BART system. Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff is responsible for prosecuting the responsible officer, Johannes Mehserle. Mr. Orloff works not for Oakland, but for the entire County, and is uninterested in prosecuting Oakland homicides. Many are angry at the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, but Oakland is only one of many cities in the four-county BART district, and a glance at the ward map will reveal that it is not well-represented on the board.

Just as vandalizing Creative African Braids and the charming shops along 17th Street is not justice, holding Oakland responsible for the actions of a regional body that happens to be headquartered in a Lake Merritt high-rise is unfair. Mayor Dellums has proposed using scarce Oakland Police Department resources to investigate the incident, yet their most recent high-profile projects have been scandalous, including the Chauncey Bailey and Acorn Gang investigations. And what is there to investigate? We all know that Mr. Mehserle killed Mr. Grant. With what to charge him is the prosecutor’s decision. Instead of investigating the BART Police, the OPD should investigate their own response to Wednesday night’s riots, especially how fewer than one hundred vandals were able to terrorize a large residential neighborhood.

Within the dense Lake Merritt Apartment District, at least one car was set afire, dozens of cars were damaged, and residents were prevented by police from returning to their homes. An officer gave extraordinarily unsafe directions to Uptown to a friend, who wisely took refuge in a bar until past midnight. The Oakland Police, as Fox Theater developer Phil Tagami implied, were poorly prepared for the riot and handled the situation badly. The Oakland Police Department, far from acting as an independent investigator of the BART Police, should investigate its own handling of a protest that may not have needed to become so destructive.

Before the clock runs out on election interest, this is the first of two blogs noting electoral trends.

Real estate development is a political football in many cities in California, with some battles reaching the ballot box. This November, NIMBY initiatives across the state were defeated. The three most radical anti-growth measures in California were Measure KK in Berkeley (anti-Bus Rapid Transit), Measures V and W in Redwood City (wetlands preservation), and Measure T in Santa Monica (cap on commercial construction). All lost, by substantial margins.

Regular readers of this and other blogs know that Bus Rapid Transit’s showdown in Berkeley was followed closely by transit activists. I was part of the No on KK campaign, which won with 77% of residents voting No. Measure KK received more attention than anything else on the Berkeley or even East Bay ballot. The media, from the blogs to the Daily Planet to the Chronicle, devoted far more space over the course of the year to Measure KK than to Berkeley mayor’s race, the wide-open City Council seat, or Oakland and regional measures. Now BRT opponents are arguing that people voted based on No on KK’s excellent mailer and not because they support BRT on Telegraph Avenue, but the overwhelming margin of defeat and the great deal of substantive public discussion shows that voters support changing car lanes to other uses.

Several years ago, Cargill Inc sold their pink-hued, salt-producing wetlands to the state in a large and complicated deal, while reserving two profitable portions to offset the cost of the land. In Redwood City, influential Oakland-based nonprofit Save The Bay placed a measure on the ballot to upend this deal and prevent development on a newly-created parcel by requiring a two-thirds vote to change its General Plan designation to open space. In response, the City Council placed a measure requiring only a simple majority vote. In the end, voters rejected both measures, Save the Bay’s W by 63%.

Arguably the most radically anti-growth local ballot measure was in Santa Monica. City Councilmember Bobby Shriver, working with a local NIMBY group, sponsored an initiative to cap commercial construction at 75,000 square feet. Not only would that entirely preclude office development, it would also prevent retail and urban mixed-use (housing over retail) projects. Much like Smart Growth links transportation and growth, so did Mr. Shriver and other supporters of Measure T attempt to convince voters that ending growth would somehow “fight traffic.” Also like KK, Measure T enjoyed a sympathetic media. Yet just as KK supporters failed to convince Berkeleyans that next-generation bus service would worsen traffic, Santa Monicans rejected T’s traffic argument by 56%.

There are other examples: Beverly Hills voters narrowly approved construction of three hotel / residential skyscrapers on the ugly white concrete high-rise Beverly Hilton, referended by NIMBYs; and Moraga’s restrictive Measure K was voted down by 56%. On the other hand, San Francisco voters approved NIMBY-in-chief Aaron Peskin’s powerful Landmarks Preservation Commission (Measure J), but there was no argument filed against it and it was lost in the confusing morass of San Francisco’s ballot questions, A-V. Without opposition, it earned only 57% of votes. The failure of anti-growth measures across California show that Smart Growth proponents can craft winning messages, and that electoral sympathy for NIMBYs and anti-transit activists is low.

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.