Bay Area

Sign the Petition: Stop the Oakland Airport Connector – Demand a Better Connector!

(Cross posted at Living in the O.)

Disclosure: I am working on a part time, short term basis for TransForm on the Oakland Airport Connector campaign. However, the thoughts expressed in my posts on this subject are my own and should not be construed to be those of TransForm.

The fight to stop the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) has not been easy, and as you can see from the list of posts at the bottom of this post, it has been a long one. But it’s not over yet. The Oakland Public Works Committee will be voting on the project on Tuesday, September 15th, and the issue will likely go to full Council after that. BART will also be voting on the project again in the coming months.

We’ve showed up at every meeting, generated hundreds of emails and phone calls, and expressed our concerns about the project to the press. But now it’s time for something much simpler. We’ve set up a petition asking BART, the Oakland City Council and the region’s transportation funding agencies to review the significant changes that have occurred in this project immediately and to halt movement forward until alternatives are studied.

Until September, this petition is the best way to voice our concern about the OAC so please do the following:

  1. Visit http://oaklandairportconnector.com/sign-the-petition now and sign the petition.
  2. Send an email to your friends asking them to sign the petition.
  3. Post the link to Facebook, Twitter, your blog, or anywhere else you can think of to get the word out.

And if you need one more reason why you should oppose the OAC, I have one: It’s even slower than we had intially thought!

In its RFP, issued in April, BART had set the minimum speed for the OAC at 35 miles per hour, which is already really slow, and significantly slower than the initially proposed 45 mph. But on July 31st, BART released an addendum to their RFP that sets the minimum speed even lower, at 27 mph!

The speed limit on Hegenberger is 30 miles per hour, and while there are stop lights, at some points, traffic will be moving faster than the OAC. Then, on the airport road, the speed limit rises to 45 mph, which means that cars and buses will be speeding past the OAC. Even without considering the less seamless connection of the OAC (going upstairs at BART; going downstairs and across a parking lot at the airport), with these new lower speeds, I can’t imagine many scenarios in which the OAC would make the trip in less time than the current AirBART bus.

So if you don’t want our region to spend half a billion dollars for a slower trip to the airport, sign the petition and get all your friends to sign it too.

Previous posts on the Oakland Airport Connector: