East Bay Bus Rapid Transit

NEW! AC Transit Releases the Final Environmental Impact Report for their East Bay Bus Rapid Transit Project!

In compliance with CEQA guidelines, AC Transit has worked with community stakeholders to address comments made to them about the East Bay BRT project as defined in the DRAFT Environmental Impact Report, released around this time last year.

The Final Environmental Impact Report (or FEIR) includes a project that runs from Oakland to San Leandro BART, bringing bike lanes, new stations with lower impacts to parking, more landscaped median and other changes that we feel are for the better for local stakeholders, and which reduces the total cost of the project to reflect the funding that is currently available.

The next steps for BRT will be for a series of community meetings to be held, which we will list here on this page as soon as they become available.

If you are interested in the upcoming community meetings let Joél know at JRamos@TransFormCA.org

The community meetings will be held from 6PM to 8PM at the following locations:

OAKLAND

Fruitvale Senior Center–Thurs., February 23rd 

3301 E. 12th Street, Suite 201Oakland, CA 94601

Eastside Arts Alliance–Mon., February 27th

2277 International Boulevard

Oakland, CA 94606

Havenscourt Campus–Wed., February 29th

1390 66th Avenue, Auditorium

Oakland, CA 94621

Oakland City Hall–Mon., March 5th

1 Frank Ogawa Plaza, Hearing Room 3

Oakland, CA 94612

Faith Presbyterian Church–Wednesday, March 7

430 49th Street

Oakland, CA 94609

Allen Temple Arms–Mon., March 12th

8135 International Boulevard, Multipurpose Room

Oakland, CA 94621

 

SAN LEANDRO

San Leandro City Hall–Thurs., March 1st 

835 East 14th Street, South Offices Conference Room

San Leandro, CA 94577

After the community meetings, AC Transit will take the project before several committees, commissions and city councils and the AC Transit Board of Directors over the next several months, seeking their approval to continue on with the final engineering of the project.

Bringing Bus Rapid Transit to Life

For the past six years, TransForm has worked in Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro to build community awareness of AC Transit's proposed East Bay Bus Rapid Transit project with the goal of supporting the cities and AC Transit in ensuring that the east bay gets a model BRT that delivers great service and meets the community's needs.

Traveling along Telegraph Avenue, International Boulevard, and East 14th Street, BRT is proposed to reduce current trip times along this corridor by 39%, and will attract over 9,000 new daily passengers.  AC Transit's BRT service will also reduce operating costs while increasing ridership, enabling the transit agency to better support the rest of the system!

Establishing model Bus Rapid Transit service in the Bay Area is an essential part of TransForm's strategy to create a reliable, frequent, affordable, comfortable, safe, efficient and interconnected regional public transportation network.

Stay tuned for more information!

East Bay BRT Status: City by City

In May 2010, San Leandro and Oakland supported the study of creating dedicated BRT lanes.  This gave the green light for AC Transit to move forward in looking at the impacts and benefits of a full BRT system with dedicated lanes, stations, proof-of-payment system, and other amenities that will greatly improve service along the heavily used 1/1R line.

Center-running dedicated lanes would keep BRT out of traffic, allowing for reliability that current "Rapid" buses cannot deliver, while still allowing for the creation of bike lanes, and preserving most of the parking that some merchants have expressed concerns over.

TransForm applauds Oakland and San Leandro's City Councils for their efforts to help find a way to improve the comfort, safety, frequency, reliability, and affordability of bus service.

Check out the details on the decisions made in each city:

AC Transit has also recently announced that they will be purchasing state-of-art BRT vehicles that would have doors on both-sides (like BART), allowing for left-side door boarding. By allowing north and southbound passengers to board from the same platform, dual-side door BRT vehicles minimize the amount of parking that would need to be relocated to accommodate BRT platformed stations.

Ongoing Community Planning

TransForm is currently reaching out to community groups, residents, businesses and other stakeholders in an effort to ensure that their concerns about BRT are being addressed by AC Transit by time the final proposal. So far, our efforts have resulted in better parking mitigations, station location, and pedestrian infrastructure improvements.

Resources:

Learn more about the project during this three-minute AC Transit video and at AC Transit's BRT website.

Questions about TransForm's work to shape and win Bus Rapid Transit in the East Bay?  Want to get involved?  Contact Joel Ramos.

You can make TransForm an even stronger advocate in 2011 by donating now.

East Bay BRT illustrations courtesy of FMG Architects and Cambridge Systematics.