(Becks has been watching BART like a hawk in her posts here and at Living in the O. I had a chance to meet her the other day, and boy, she knows her transportation issues. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)
Yesterday, the Airport Area Business Association (AABA) sent an email to its membership asking them to write to the BART Board in support of the Oakland Airport Connector and to speak at tomorrow's meeting. My first thought was that this is incredibly short-sighted (or naive) of them because the OAC is going to do nothing for businesses surrounding the airport, since there are no intermediary stops. A free rapid bus, in comparison, would do a lot for the area businesses by making transit cheaper and by adding an intermediary stop.
But once I stopped banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what reasoning AABA could possibly have for supporting the OAC, I quickly found my answer by reading some of the contents of the email: (EDIT by Brian for space, see the flip)
GO GREEN – The Oakland Airport Connector is a critical GREEN project. Currently, less than 10% of the people who travel to the Oakland Airport each year use the bus that connects the Colisium BART Station to Oakland Airport. BART Studies show that the public is eager for a plane to train connection and will use it. The alternative – a bus rapid transit project – could be fueled with dirty diesel gasoline, attract the same low number of riders as the current bus system, be less reliable and some advocates are talking about purchasing the busses from Belgium!
JOBS – The Oakland Airport Connector Project (OAC) has been embraced in the region as a premier economic development project as a part of the President Obama Stimulus Package. The Oakland Airport Connector will create 200-300 local construction jobs over the next several years, and create 30 permanent jobs operating and maintaining the system. The project is poised to break ground in early 2010…
ATTRACT – The Oakland Airport Connector will attract millions of additional transit riders to the BART System each year. How do we know? Because the SFO train to plane connection is doing exactly that – attracting thousands of daily non-transit riders who hop on board for the convenience and reliability. The SFO connection, opened in 2003, carried almost 4 million riders last year (more than 10,000 average daily riders) and the future looks bright. Even in a tough economy, ridership on the system has expanded at an astounding rate of 20% each year.
What's so odd about this email is not just the multiple spelling errors, exaggerations, and blatant lies throughout, but that it's essentially a replication of an email that Kerry Hamill sent to the Oakland City Council last week. You probably know Kerry Hamill from her race against Rebecca Kaplan for the at large Oakland City Council seat, but she's also the Manager of Local Government and Community Relations for BART. My guess is that Kerry called up AABA and asked them to send out this email, without bothering to tell them that there was another option on the table and they just went along.
It gets even better. Attached to the email that AABA sent out is a sample letter to sent to BART directors. If I was an AABA member, I'd probably assume that someone at AABA had drafted this letter in the interests of the group. Well, I would be wrong. Because this is what the properties of the document show:
This is a clear case of BART staff indirectly lobbying BART directors via advocacy groups. Some might call this astroturf, but whatever it is, it's not right. Taxpayers and BART riders pay Kerry Hamill's salary (and the salaries of other staffers that might have been involved in this), and it looks like they're using their staff time to lobby BART.
Pissed off yet? Well, it gets even better. Today someone left a comment on one of my blog posts about the OAC from “Mark from Oakland”, saying that buses would be slower, blah, blah, blah. When I looked into it, I saw that it came from a BART IP address, during work hours. So BART staff members are reading the blogs and posting as if they're community members. Fun stuff.
Well, transit advocates don't need to use astroturf tactics to turn out our base. Let's show Kerry Hamill and the rest of BART staff that reason can win out over internal lobbying. Please join me tomorrow in asking the BART Board to move forward with a rapid bus project instead of this wasteful OAC project:
What: BART Board Meeting on the Oakland Airport Connector
When: Thursday, May 14th @ 9am (TransForm recommends showing up by 8:30 if you’d like to get a seat in the Board room; if not, there is an overflow room.)
Where: Kaiser Center – Third Floor, 344 20th Street in Oakland
If you cannot make it to the meeting, but want to tell the BART directors how you feel, please send an email via TransForm’s action page. You can find a pre-written message there, but I encourage you to take the time to personalize the email, as non-form letters are always more effective.
Previous posts on the Oakland Airport Connector:
If memory serves, you’ve written on this general topic before. I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I’ve lived in places where the equivalent service went right up to the airport. This is now things work at Washington National or at Boston Logan, and it makes it practical for people for those entire metropolitan areas to get to the airport with minimal trouble transferring. This is a good thing.
What’s your problem with that? Why is this not a good idea? What are your organizational affiliations? Do you have a dog in this fight?
this is going to be a huge waste of money ,and the idea people will pay 12 bugks for some stupid air connector is insane. a brt solution would have saved money.
the republicans will use this kind of waste of federal dollars when running agsint the Obama administration in 2010. this is stupid as stupid as the Central Subway in SF. Wastes of billions of dollars!
Advocates, including myself, are not advocating for no airport connector. We're advocating for a rapid bus, using queue jump lanes, signal priorities, and dedicated lanes. This alternative could be built for about 10% of the cost of the overhead airport connector.
TransForm, an Oakland based transportation advocacy group, created an excellent proposal in just two weeks for this rapid bus project. Please read the full report or my summary for more information.
Unfortunately, after four hours of public testimony, BART directors voted 7-1 to approve this wasteful project. Director Tom Radulovich casting the dissenting vote, calling the Oakland Airport Connector municipal bling or blingfrastructure. Fortunately, there are going to be many more opportunities to stop this from moving forward.
Also, I spoke at the BART meeting and presented the research from this blog post. The BART directors seemed shocked and people in the room gasped. The board directed the general manager to look into my allegations (we'll see if that happens).