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Oakland Unwrapped M-T-C, K-E-Y By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor The Oakland City Council was wondering, the other evening, how Oakland might get better representation on the Metropolitan Transit Commission, which makes some sense. The MTC is the official trans-portation planning group for the nine-county Bay Area, setting policy for public money that goes for transportation in our area. If MTC doesn't support it, you can pretty much bet it doesn't get done. There are 19 commissioners, several of them local elected officials. The cities of Alameda County are represented by the mayor of Alameda. Alameda County itself is represented by County Supervisor Scott Haggerty, who was raised in Fremont and lives in Livermore. San Francisco has two representatives: Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano and a guy named Jon Rubin, who is listed as the appointee of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Stop me when you see anyone on this list who might be looking out for Oakland's transportation interests. It may not look it now, but getting around Oakland was once an easy thing to do. And I'm not talking about the old Key System streetcar line, either, which I don't remember. They were tear-ing up the tracks right around the time I was born, making way for the postwar auto boom. Still, even with the sudden increase in automobile use beginning in the 1950s, Oakland through streets that were laid out in the mid-nineteenth century were still pretty functional in the mid-twentieth. Travel on E.14th and San Leandro Street and Telegraph and San Pablo Avenue in those days were probably faster than rush hour traffic on 880 and 580 are now. And though I wasn't yet a driver back then, it seemed pretty easy using the crosstown routes like 90th and Seminary and Park to get to the regional parks up in the hills. And though AC Transit wasn't my favorite mode of transportation as a teenager, it was passable. All that's changed, and let's not blame our city streets or our public transportation system. With the exception of BART, all of that was built for an earlier time that's long gone. The problem is, we haven't kept up and made the necessary alterations. BART was not built primarily to get people from one point in Oakland to another ... except for the downtown and Coliseum stops, it was built primarily to get people through Oakland. And the only major street-widening project I can remember in my lifetime had nothing to do with helping people get around Oakland. It was the 73rd Avenue / Hegenberger project, whose goal seemed more to make it easier for out-of-towners to shuttle between the Airport and the Coliseum Complex and 580. Same thing with the present widening of 98th Avenue which, you can bet, is not designed to help build up the business district in Brookfield Village. Other than some tinkering here and there, and BART and the freeways aside, we are pretty much traveling along Oakland pathways that were carved out when folks still rode on or behind a horse's ass. And as we grow, it's going to get worse. Regional cooperation on trans-portation issues is a reasonable thing to do. But Oakland needs to act like we're more than just a shortcut to get from Gilroy to Antioch, or a nice place to stick a stadium and an airport. Some attention to our own needs as a city is in order. Right now, MTC seems to think that the most pressing transportation issue in Oakland is a BART feeder line to the airport. Having missed the trolley era in my lifetime, I sort of have a nostalgic soft spot for light rail. Seems to work good in San Jose. I think a system running down International and Telegraph and San Pablo Avenue might be nice ... feeding into the BART stations and linking up with the AC Transit crosstown lines. But that's just my idea. I'm sure there are better ones. City Council said it wanted to talk to Mayor Brown about getting himself on the Metropolitan Transit Commission. That's not one of the better ideas I was talking about. Mayor Brown, bless his heart, has other things on his mind. Oakland needs an MTC representative who knows transportation and will advocate for Oakland. And Oakland needs it soon. J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an author, a journalist, and a graduate of Castlemont High School. He can be reached at www.safero.org and [email protected]. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]