Coddle Costco, Screw the Truckers & Consequences be Damned

City of Oakland Puts Head in the Sand on Urgent Environmental and Economic Matter

In your backyard–or your mom’s or a friend’s–maybe there’s a small apple tree and a sandbox, a couple of robins pulling at worms: the typical mini-haven of the individual family. But imagine one day waking up to find a house-sized semi squatting there, squishing the swing set as the huge motor surges to life, belching visible clouds of black diesel fumes right into your window and everywhere else in the surrounding neighborhood.

And it doesn’t stop. For at least another hour, maybe even as much as two, that monster truck will chug away on idle as your whole family begins its day–kids getting ready for school, grandpa fixing coffee, you preparing breakfast–with the persistent, all but overwhelming noise and fumes infusing every aspect of your early morning.
Maybe that kind of nightmare can’t happen to you, but that’s exactly what life is like for far more than just a few who happen to live in West Oakland; neighborhood after neighborhood. And, because of it, the cost of retrofitting an old engine to run cleaner is becoming more and more expensive, making everything even worse. As a matter of fact, it’s reaching meltdown: the trucker’s profit, when he’s lucky enough to have one at all in this harried economy, is rarely enough to keep up with inflation, let alone tend to the maintenance he’s deferred for two or three years now while waiting for better times. So the cost of a retrofit, even with the promise of today’s advanced technology, is mostly a dream–a dream that equates to a nightmare for those who have to live with or near or in the way of his truck.

Maybe you’ve even begun to notice that there seem to be more and more trucks on the road these days. Guess what? That amount is likely to double within the next fifteen years or so, maybe even triple if forecasts as to Pacific Rim trade are anywhere near accurate. And your only hope of getting any relief lies in a governor who, we can only hope, still loves a Hollywood ending. Him and a guy who the media badly wants to get because the yellow dogs of journalism are on the spoor. Yes, it’s our Pro Tem of the State Senate, Don Perata, the only time in our lives we’ll likely ever have someone from the Bay Area, let alone Oakland, who actually cares about–and has solutions for–the looming transportation crisis we’re just now beginning to face.

I don’t know what Don did to earn the nasty press–maybe it was the legislation he introduced banning assault weapons near schools. But, given that this even greater assault on the lungs of our school kids is a statewide crisis, maybe it’s high time we took a breather from the recriminations game that both political parties play (and many Greens, as well) and got to work on making sure that blockbuster hit the governor is looking for can really get done this time.

Fortunately, the plotline leading to the happy (and boffo) ending is real simple–and it’s in Technicolor. First, look at the entire Bay Area as one great metropolis so that its land use options can be properly prioritized in terms of transportation and commerce, as opposed to continuing on with the mass myopia our crisscrossing, turf-tangled, and always-at-odds multiplicity of agencies, commissions, and municipalities seem inalterably addicted to.

Next, analyze the true needs of the maritime facilities serving said megalopolis: are they well-functioning now; will their needs be met over the next quarter century and beyond; is land available for expansion wherever that need exists?

Third, consider what Jane Jacobs, author of The Economy of Cities has to say about the city of Athens when facing a similar land use crisis back around 300 BC and it was decided that building walls around the route down to Piraeus might help keep the Spartans from meddling with Athenian commerce. They didn’t rename that road I-880 or engage in a seven-year planning process for a decommissioned Army Base, but they got the message and acted on it.

I guess they must have overridden a few of the local priorities of those who, for whatever reason, weren’t aware of the crisis the rest of the region was facing, but the surgery went forward nevertheless, and the heart of their commerce kept pumping.

And they all lived happily ever after–at least until they got a little overconfident and went off to attack Sparta itself, but that’s another story of doofus politics, and we needn’t go there.

If there were adequate space on Oakland’s Army Base to take care of all the truckers in West Oakland, then they could all be moved out there, en mass, and at least part of the problem would be solved almost overnight. But it’s not that simple because the truckers and other maritime support services (the guys who repair dinged containers, maintain yards for transloading, etc.) are out of space now–and more’s the pity, can’t even invest in newer, more efficient facilities because the land they are leasing is on a month-to-month basis.

So why should any of this strategically critical land be given over to yet another Wal-Mart, Costco, or Target when there’s obviously a higher and better use in maritime-related usage that needs to be addressed?

Any number of fingers could be pointed to missed guesses and off-kilter planning that depended on one or another of yesterday’s priorities, but, as they say, that was then and this is now, and now is the very moment we need to seize an opportunity to free ourselves from the congestion of both our highways and our kid’s lungs.

If we can dispense with partisanship for just awhile and take a breather, we’ll see that other city-states around the world have already pretty much done what lies before us yet to do. Will the Bay Area remain forever locked into its Balkanized mindset? Will there be within the next 100 years a Regional Port Authority like the immensely successful Bi-State Port Authority in New York/New Jersey to help better coordinate the Bay Area’s maritime traffic and land resources?

Or, will we remain on our knees forever, praying to this or that future governor to help us from the next crisis? A plan to get us from here to there, complete with a realistic critical path is what we need now; it’s well past time for finger-pointing and pussyfooting. The governor can, for starters, simply request that the State Lands Commission not lift its maritime priority from any Bay Area properties, particularly lands adjacent to, or can be of service to, the Port of Oakland, our own Pireaus.