Oakland Forging Ahead With New Ideas for Transportation

It's exciting times in Oakland, California. In the past six weeks, Oakland has passed a raft of policies that promise to have a lasting effect on the city's future transportation and development. This is all being done as part of the city government's reorganization, creating a new Department of Transportation to better strategize and coordinate transportation planning and construction.

The new policies include a strategic plan, an organizational chart for the now-forming Oakland Department of Transportation, a new citywide parking strategy (adopted last night by the City Council), parking requirements that better suit the city's planned growth, and the adoption—before being required to do so by the state—of induced vehicle travel instead of car delay to measure environmental impacts from new development.

Oh, and the city just posted a job listing for the permanent DOT Director. A national search has begun for the right person for what might be the most exciting job in planning available right now.

Much of this rapid progress is due to the guidance of Jeff Tumlin, who has been Acting Interim Director of the DOT, in charge of heading up the reorganization and laying the foundation for its future. Tumlin gives credit to the high level of local public support for changes, a great team, and the city's “willingness to align civic values with the mechanics of governance.”

The reorganization is giving the city an opportunity to step back and rethink its priorities, of which it has taken full advantage.

This strategic plan will act as a backdrop and framework for future policies and programs. Arielle Fleisher at SPUR wrote an in-depth report and analysis of the plan. In it, she points out some of the plan's strong points:

But, she writes, a strategic plan is only part of the work that needs doing.

Hand in hand with the strategic plan, the parking policy reform the city just passed includes some very Shoupian dimensions. These include dynamic pricing at parking meters to create more parking where it is most in demand—a policy being tested in downtown Oakland—and separating the cost of parking from the cost of renting housing, or “unbundling” parking. The latter can lower living expenses for people who don't have cars and, combined with the city's recent elimination of parking minimums for new developments, will make it less expensive to build new housing as well.

These are the kinds of forward-thinking strategies that, taken together, can make a city a more enjoyable place to be, offering travel choices that allow people to get safely where they want to go without having to get in a car.