Walking the Talk, Avoiding the Freeway Onramps

Let's get this party started right.  Normally I bike to work, but I left my bike *at* work over the weekend, so today I traveled the 1.2 miles from home to office by foot.

I'm pretty lucky to live right up next to Lake Merritt - Oakland's Central Park, if you will - so at least half the route is free of stoplights and endowed with views of the lake and its cormorants.  Not a bad way to start the day, although usually I choose my bike because it's speedier.

Another bonus of my location is that I don't have to cross under or over any freeways.  Recently my partner and I began casually investigating the possibility of homeownership in Oakland.  We have discovered that our limited financial resources are going to make it difficult to afford anything sufficiently distant from Oaktown's many freeways.  It's kind of tough to include "too close to freeway" on your deal-breaker list with the 580, 880, 980, 80, 13, and 24 running through the center of the city.

Okay, I'll be honest: this was originally my partner's rule, and it took a little disagreement over a particular condo to clarify that freeway proximity was a deal-breaker not only because of noise, but because of air quality.  He dug up studies on air quality and health, and found that living closer than 1000 feet to a freeway significantly increases the risk of impaired lung development, asthma, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

While real estate sites like Zillow are starting to include "WalkScore" and other measures of livability, the freeway proximity metric doesn't yet seem to be on anyone's radar screen.  There are definitely some pretty fancy houses in Oakland (for example, in Rockridge and Montclair) that look down on one or more of our plentiful stretches of freeway.  And while California does have a law prohibiting the siting of new schools within 500 feet of freeways, the research shows that that's not really far enough away, and it doesn't help schools like Lakeview Elementary that was foolish enough to already exist right next to the preferred alignment for the 580 freeway.

Why isn't freeway proximity a common concern for us in Oakland?  Probably because there's not a lot we feel we can do about it.  I've often fantasized about putting the 580 underground, but the Grand Lake neighborhood is in much better shape than, say, West Oakland, which is ringed by freeways (580 to the north, 980 to the east, and 880 to the south and west).  There, however, residents are fighting back against the factors which can be changed - diesel exhaust, the source of the ultrafine particulates that are the greatest contributor to health impacts of freeway proximity.

Nonetheless, for those of us with more limited financial means - whether we are low-income folks living in the neighborhoods that the traffic engineers were willing to sacrifice to the freeway gods, or moderate-income home-seekers suffering from the "first world torture" of trying to break into the outrageous Bay Area housing market - the freeways are a problem.  At the very least, we owe it to ourselves and our community to recognize the harm inflicted upon us by the Maze and its tendrils throughout Oakland.

Okay, so this isn't the most uplifting place to begin.  But I've been thinking about freeways a lot lately, and the immense compromise to our health and our community vitality that we have made by prioritizing car-oriented transportation.  I salute my fellow Car-Free Challengers - whether you are cutting back this week from a high mileage lifestyle or whether you rarely get behind the wheel - for helping make near-freeway neighborhoods more healthy and livable this week. 

I will close with my three-step plan for addressing the problem of freeway pollution in Oakland:

1. Acknowledge the health, community, and environmental impacts of urban freeways. Require landlords, businesses, and homeowners to include "freeway proximity" metrics in their ads and contracts along the lines of Prop 65 warnings for cancer-causing agents in consumer goods.  Do more studies of the health impacts from living near freeways and identify solutions that address the causes, not just the effects.

2. Make urban freeways irrelevant. Ride your bike, walk, take transit, and work together to make walking, biking, and transit infinitely more efficient, affordable, and attractive than driving on any of our freeways.  To that end, use the data collected in #1 to justify tolls or taxes on urban freeway use to compensate for the pollution - especially ultrafine particulates - that impairs public health.

3. Dismantle freeways in cities. Take 'em down!  Better than undergrounding the 580 would be eliminating it, and the 980, and even the 24.  Get freight out of trucks and onto rail so we can do in the 880 as well.  Sure, it sounds crazy, but if we never ask for what we really want, we're never gonna get it!  And this is what I really want.