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Oakland & Other Fantasies
Feb. 23rd, 2014 11:12 amYesterday while out biking, I caught myself fantasizing about swimming in Tropical waters. Today while showering, I was imagining lush & verdant green landscapes with bright skies and a warm wind whipping through everything.
So, I'm apparently ready to go to Hawaii. It's been a rough 2014 so far, though I think we're on the verge of improvement. But a break to mark that will be nice.
Latham. My biking yesterday took me through Oakland, and this made me curious about what happened to Latham Square. You see, this was a great pedestrian plaza that they set up in Oakland last year, but then the city almost immediately ruined it by letting cars through again (1-way), totally cutting the plaza off. Predictably, the gradual use of the plaza took a big nosedive after that happened. Ever since, I've been wondering why Oakland decided to screw their pedestrians and their plans to make downtown more of a livable focal point.
It turns out that the problem is a single bureaucrat named Rachel Flynn. She unilaterally decided to cut the 6-month pilot program off at 6 weeks because of 4 complaints from local businesses. That's compared, by the by, to 4 local businesses saying good things about the Plaza and pretty much all the residents of the area loving it.
Of course local businesses throwing a fit because they think all customers have to be able to drive right up to their business, even in a downtown where that's not practical, is old news. It's the excuse that our own purist-reactionary councilman Kriss Worthington uses to kill progressive public transit projects like bus rapid transit. Sadly, Flynn is dumb enough to fall for the same whining ... or at least uses it as an excuse.
So, that's why Latham Plaza died before it ever got going. There were recently a few council meetings to revive the plan at the end of 2014 (with lots of public outcry against what Flynn did), but the current plans seem to call for reestablishing 2(!)-way traffic, which means that getting to the plaza is going to be even more dangerous and sitting there is going to be even more unpleasant. So that sounds like a way of killing the project on a longer timescale.
No livable downtown for you, Oakland. It's all about the cars!
Bike Paths. Ironically, as a bicyclist I've been really impressed by Oakland in recent years. They must have someone working full-time on bike projects for how much work is getting done. Recently the entirety of Shattuck Avenue in Oakland got marked with a bike lane which has notably improved the safety of the road for bicycles. I can really see the difference when I bike to Endgame, because the first few blocks of Shattuck that I ride to get there are in Berkeley, so I see the crazy cars going all over without the lanes to curtail their movement. Then I hit Oakland, and everything is nirvanical. So Shattuck has become my prime route into Oakland nowadays. (It used to be Telegraph, but Telegraph has more bad lights and less safe road; meanwhile I used to almost never ride Shattuck before these improvements, which started with a great reconstruction of the intersection at 51st and Shattuck, which used to be awful.)
This is just one of many bike projects that I've noticed in Oakland. Alcatraz picked up some bike lanes recently, as did my occasional back-street route past Summit Hospital. 40th got striped with a somewhat dubious bike lane straight down the middle of the street. (In other words, it's not bikes only, though perhaps it helps with over-entitled drivers like the blonde bubblehead who screamed at me for biking several weeks ago.)
So, go bicycling Oakland. At least we have advocates that don't let jumped-up pencil-pushers like Rachel Flynn ruin the city for us.
A Bike Ride & The Bay Bridge. Yesterday was a beautiful summer day (thanks global warming!), so I decided to get out and ride down by the waterfront.
I biked down to Jack London Square, then to Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, then to the new pedestrian/bike path on the Bay Bridge.
I hadn't been out to the Bay Bridge since opening day, so I was bemused (and sad) to see all kinds of new fascist signs. Most of them relate to the closing of the path every night. Apparently CHP starts clearing the path 1.5 hours before closing(!!), which currently means 4pm. I think that closing the path at all sucks, and hope that this really goes away when the Yerba Buena Island path opens (like it's supposed to), but I don't have faith in our gov't, which seems continually determined to restrict what we can do. My guess is that they'll offer up some compromise plan where you can't use the path if you can't prove residence on Treasure Island, or something, because that's the sort of control that our modern gov't like to assert. Anywho, YOU WILL BE CITED if you're on the path too late. They really want you to know that.
There were also some weird signs up that tell you how long it'll take to walk to the end of the path. The first one says "3.2 miles" and "3 hours". The second says "2.2 miles" and "2 hours". Now, 1 mile per hour: that's really slow even for lazy Americans. Maybe they mean round trip? Still pretty slow.
I had a nice ride out on the bridge. There weren't nearly as many people to dodge as on opening day, but it was still clearly quite well used. More pedestrians than bicyclists at this point. And, it was still a slightly grueling ride, fighting the slope and wind all the way to the end of the bridge.
There's also still lots of construction going on, so part of the path running up to the bridge goes on cruddy old streets and you still ascend to the bridge on a slightly rickety wooden ramp. This sadly means that the Bay Bridge Gateway Park is still far off, which is a darned shame. I love the SF-look I've seen for it in a conceptual drawing, which includes an elevated bike path (apparently already funded!) that makes me think of jet cars flying through the sky.
Meanwhile, a bit closer in, the current signs say that the Yerba Buena Island path is supposed to open in Summer 2015. This is an updated number after the people tearing down the old bridge said, 6 months after they started, that the project was running 6 months behind.
So, good going keeping those signs updated, I guess. Even if that's all you got done in six months.
Hawaii.
So, I'm apparently ready to go to Hawaii. It's been a rough 2014 so far, though I think we're on the verge of improvement. But a break to mark that will be nice.
Latham. My biking yesterday took me through Oakland, and this made me curious about what happened to Latham Square. You see, this was a great pedestrian plaza that they set up in Oakland last year, but then the city almost immediately ruined it by letting cars through again (1-way), totally cutting the plaza off. Predictably, the gradual use of the plaza took a big nosedive after that happened. Ever since, I've been wondering why Oakland decided to screw their pedestrians and their plans to make downtown more of a livable focal point.
It turns out that the problem is a single bureaucrat named Rachel Flynn. She unilaterally decided to cut the 6-month pilot program off at 6 weeks because of 4 complaints from local businesses. That's compared, by the by, to 4 local businesses saying good things about the Plaza and pretty much all the residents of the area loving it.
Of course local businesses throwing a fit because they think all customers have to be able to drive right up to their business, even in a downtown where that's not practical, is old news. It's the excuse that our own purist-reactionary councilman Kriss Worthington uses to kill progressive public transit projects like bus rapid transit. Sadly, Flynn is dumb enough to fall for the same whining ... or at least uses it as an excuse.
So, that's why Latham Plaza died before it ever got going. There were recently a few council meetings to revive the plan at the end of 2014 (with lots of public outcry against what Flynn did), but the current plans seem to call for reestablishing 2(!)-way traffic, which means that getting to the plaza is going to be even more dangerous and sitting there is going to be even more unpleasant. So that sounds like a way of killing the project on a longer timescale.
No livable downtown for you, Oakland. It's all about the cars!
Bike Paths. Ironically, as a bicyclist I've been really impressed by Oakland in recent years. They must have someone working full-time on bike projects for how much work is getting done. Recently the entirety of Shattuck Avenue in Oakland got marked with a bike lane which has notably improved the safety of the road for bicycles. I can really see the difference when I bike to Endgame, because the first few blocks of Shattuck that I ride to get there are in Berkeley, so I see the crazy cars going all over without the lanes to curtail their movement. Then I hit Oakland, and everything is nirvanical. So Shattuck has become my prime route into Oakland nowadays. (It used to be Telegraph, but Telegraph has more bad lights and less safe road; meanwhile I used to almost never ride Shattuck before these improvements, which started with a great reconstruction of the intersection at 51st and Shattuck, which used to be awful.)
This is just one of many bike projects that I've noticed in Oakland. Alcatraz picked up some bike lanes recently, as did my occasional back-street route past Summit Hospital. 40th got striped with a somewhat dubious bike lane straight down the middle of the street. (In other words, it's not bikes only, though perhaps it helps with over-entitled drivers like the blonde bubblehead who screamed at me for biking several weeks ago.)
So, go bicycling Oakland. At least we have advocates that don't let jumped-up pencil-pushers like Rachel Flynn ruin the city for us.
A Bike Ride & The Bay Bridge. Yesterday was a beautiful summer day (thanks global warming!), so I decided to get out and ride down by the waterfront.
I biked down to Jack London Square, then to Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, then to the new pedestrian/bike path on the Bay Bridge.
I hadn't been out to the Bay Bridge since opening day, so I was bemused (and sad) to see all kinds of new fascist signs. Most of them relate to the closing of the path every night. Apparently CHP starts clearing the path 1.5 hours before closing(!!), which currently means 4pm. I think that closing the path at all sucks, and hope that this really goes away when the Yerba Buena Island path opens (like it's supposed to), but I don't have faith in our gov't, which seems continually determined to restrict what we can do. My guess is that they'll offer up some compromise plan where you can't use the path if you can't prove residence on Treasure Island, or something, because that's the sort of control that our modern gov't like to assert. Anywho, YOU WILL BE CITED if you're on the path too late. They really want you to know that.
There were also some weird signs up that tell you how long it'll take to walk to the end of the path. The first one says "3.2 miles" and "3 hours". The second says "2.2 miles" and "2 hours". Now, 1 mile per hour: that's really slow even for lazy Americans. Maybe they mean round trip? Still pretty slow.
I had a nice ride out on the bridge. There weren't nearly as many people to dodge as on opening day, but it was still clearly quite well used. More pedestrians than bicyclists at this point. And, it was still a slightly grueling ride, fighting the slope and wind all the way to the end of the bridge.
There's also still lots of construction going on, so part of the path running up to the bridge goes on cruddy old streets and you still ascend to the bridge on a slightly rickety wooden ramp. This sadly means that the Bay Bridge Gateway Park is still far off, which is a darned shame. I love the SF-look I've seen for it in a conceptual drawing, which includes an elevated bike path (apparently already funded!) that makes me think of jet cars flying through the sky.
Meanwhile, a bit closer in, the current signs say that the Yerba Buena Island path is supposed to open in Summer 2015. This is an updated number after the people tearing down the old bridge said, 6 months after they started, that the project was running 6 months behind.
So, good going keeping those signs updated, I guess. Even if that's all you got done in six months.
Hawaii.