There are cheaper solutions to the highway problem. Some of it can actually be aleviated through some clever zoning. Allowing live/work within 200 feet of points where city streets cross under highways would help. Creating a 24 hour presence would take some of the fear out of these spots. The same goes for 24 hour stores and restaurants. Putting commerce on either side of a highway puts more people there, and there’s safety in numbers. It also attracts people to these boundaries and encourages them to cross under them.

Similarly, high impact social services that attract crime should be removed from these nexuses, or banned in the future. It could also be argued that it’s very bad form to force recovering addicts, reforming ex-cons, and elderly people to live next to highways. Part of what keeps Ghosttown and Dogtown down is that no foot traffic wants to come in from uptown and Emeryville.

Trams are also a great idea. Tax me for that and I’ll smile. Until some new disruptive technology renders the internal combustion engine and the car obsolete, we need to work for alternatives.

The single biggest thing holding Oakland down is that it is chopped into seven by so many freeways. If those were buried or removed huge sections of Oakland would bounce back from bright to prosperity.

Also AC Transit is struggling become it was designed to fail. GM-et al. bought and destroyed the Key system on purpose and only sold the remains to the government after they had ripping up the last bridge tracks. The key system lost hundreds of thousands (100,000s) of daily riders when the stopped the streetcars and then the transbay service. Oakland neighborhoods built around the streetcars have been has been critically wounded by those blows ever since.

Forget BRT and go straight to trams (not over-built LRT) on Telegraph/E. 14th and expand from there. I saw the effect of the new streetcar in Seattle last weekend. Amazing amounts of development and renewal. That would fix much of Oakland and AC Transit right there.

Finally the biggest saving from transit is fuel or emissions, it’s LAND. Transit requires one tenth of the land space for roads and right of ways and one percent (1%) of the space for parking. That vastly increases land values when you don’t need to waste so much of it on parking. Duhh!!

Here’s a commentary on bikeshare in Paris
http://www.commoncurrent.com/notes/2008/06/bike-share-the-future-of-carbo.html

Here’s how I think downtown Oakland should look — more like SF and less like Oklahoma City
http://www.commoncurrent.com/notes/2008/06/europe-dispatch-eu-green-capit.html

We should have had electric cars long ago, and GM/Standard Oil should never have ripped out our fine Key Route electric commuter rail.

Maybe at this late date, Oakland can become a Bicycle City with interurban rail. (not just bart)

Removing the embarcadero freeway in SF raised property values there 300%. Much more pleasant. Time to do that in some parts of Oakland–would reduce crime too!

Julia,

Well, sweetie, I want to thank you for enlightening me on how ‘out there’ I am. Bald patronization has never felt so, uh, so, patronizing. Pity me, I’m working on becoming more enlightened.

The whole riff about medicine
I’m not sure how I should take the ‘riff’ description; modern medicine is a product of the scientific revolution, last I checked. That revolution proceeded hand in glove with the industrial revolution, at least if you believe people (Pasteur, Fleming) whose views on the matter certainly ought to count for something.

And a pre-supposed level of self-hatrid (sic)
I honestly think that no one could adopt some of the more radical environmental positions (Earth First! and others) without a significant dollop of at least regret that they are a member of the same species they believe responsible for ecocide.

Your blanket condemnation of indigenous people of their presumed lack of connection to mother nature
I don’t condemn indigenous peoples: I’m the one who values only people. I said that the notion of ‘indigenous peoples is a useless concept because it has no scientific meaning, only a political one. Either all of us are indigenous or none of is, it just depends on one’s time frame or political agenda. And I certainly don’t condemn their lack of a connection to mother nature–the whole concept of mother nature is bankrupt. A fortiori, no one is to be blamed for being out of touch with it. All humans and all human cultures use the environment for their own purposes. What’s better or worse is the extent to which they accomplish that goal.

But my real point is not which system is best, but rather that we need to think about different options for public transport rather than stick with a system that requires ever increasing tax subsidies, and has ever fewer people riding it. (While the short term impact from gas prices has been increased ridership, the long term trend is down.) And I think that demand service, CyberTran, ride share, and even increasing the number of taxis, along with a hundred other ideas, are all things that AC transit should be looking at to get people where they want to go.

Max – I agree that part of a long term solution is getting jobs and services back to where people live, but it has taken us 50 years of suburban sprawl to get us into this fix, and it is likely to take just as long to get us back out. Not saying that you shouldn’t have a grocery store in West Oakalnd, but that is only one step in the journey.

Setting up ride shares sounds awesome. I’d be down with that. Combine that with GPS tracking they use in NYC cabs to make certain the shortest, fastest route is taken by the cabbie and we might have something cooking.

Incidentally another great way of improving transit is to reduce the need for it.

If we had politicians, say, in West Oakland, who promoted neighborhood shops and services we wouldn’t need to travel as much to live our lives. Instead, some of our local leaders, as you know all too well, seem to try to prevent new services from coming in to our neighborhoods. They’re doing this based on ideology. Practicality and the immediate needs of the people go by the wayside.

Does “corporate=bad” even have enough gravitas to count as an ideology? How about superstition?

It’s called a limited number of medallions. Almost all cities do this. Reducing supply by legal mandate is a way of pushing up demand. That’s a subsidy. Having a government commission that sets rates is another way of subverting the free market.

If taxi’s simply had to be safety inspected and insured, and there were no medallions, taxis would probably be cheaper.

Incidentally, there are mobile web applications in development and early deployment that track users by GPS and set up ride shares. Paid ride shares no less. Give that a few years. Taxi companies will try to ban this innovation, and come out looking like the RIAA.