Two meetings last week focused on mass transit. One was the update to the City Council on the Climate Action Plan and Resilience. The other was Councilmember Taplin’s proposal, at the Facilities, Infrastructure, Transportation, Environment and Transportation Committee (FITES), to reconfigure University from 6th Street to Shattuck and Shattuck to Durant to create dedicated bus lanes, transit-signal-priority elevated platforms for AC Transport’s 51B, and dedicated bike lanes from 6th to Oxford and Oxford to Durant.
When I can’t walk to where I want to go, I mostly drive unless BART will get me there. I admit my bias.
Saturday, I volunteered to assist with the Point Molate Park Now! Photography Exhibit at the Point Richmond Gallery, 145 West Richmond Avenue, Point Richmond. The photography exhibit of birds and wildlife at Point Molate was fabulous. As for volunteering, it was so well organized I definitely was not needed.
I drove to Point Richmond (9 miles) and even with driving (heavy traffic), parking (several blocks away) and walking from the street parking space, the entire trip took under 20 minutes.
What would that trip look like if I took mass transit instead? The map program gives that trip with a combination of BART, bus and walking, 1 hour and 9 minutes, and there was an alert: “Canceled AC transit bus may affect route.”
Getting us out of our cars requires reliable, efficient (rapid) and frequent mass transit. Then there is mass transit getting us to where we want to go, and feeling safe while we’re getting there. The alternate of bicycling this route, if you’re able, would be 55 minutes.
Today, I watched one of those double body buses turn onto University from Sacramento. I counted eight passengers. Usually, the bus I see is the one that goes north on MLK and turns west on University by Trader Joe’s. Whenever I see that bus it has only one or two passengers.
The question that I am left with is, “Will spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bus lanes and platforms entice people to get out of their personal cars or Uber and Lyft to switch to the bus?”
Is it enough, if we haven’t solved the requirements of being reliable, efficient, frequent, safe and most of all getting us to where we want to go?
Taplin’s proposal for the 51B comes with a $600,000 funding request for the “studies” for the “Complete Street Corridor” project. Taplin split the project into two studies of $300,000 each.
All the enthusiasm for the project likely comes from turning University Avenue into a corridor of eight and ten story mixed-use buildings of student housing like the proposal for 1598 University, which is under appeal to City Council on October 3, 2023.
The June 21 article “These S.F. Muni lines are more popular than they were pre-pandemic” in the SF Chronicle credits the express lane and boarding platforms as making the difference for the two successful Muni lines, the 22-Fillmore and 49-Van Ness/Mission, but there is more to the story. The buses don’t go to the downtown San Francisco which has vacant office buildings (now at 31.8%), and the 22 and 49 run every six minutes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-bus-public-transit-18157146.php
The report to the City Council on climate action declared that Berkeley made significant progress, though there is still work to do to become a Fossil Free City. The report is based on the 2020 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory, which places transportation as 46% of GHG emissions and touts a 31% decline from the year 2000 baseline. The report does acknowledge 2020 was the year most of us stayed home.
It is hard not to put a damper on the whole thing. Councilmember Harrison got it right when speaking on the Bird Safe Ordinance. She said “There's a cost to doing the right thing in the environment. Everyone wants to solve the climate and diversity problem. They want to solve with other people sacrificing. We are the problem…”
I’ve picked up the book Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape our World by Gaia Vince. I’ll have more to report next week when I’ve finished it. The book opens painting a picture of what the future looks like with a warming planet of 4°C. It is not a pretty sight, with drought, super storms, heat making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable, and food shortages, all of which will force migration. There is more of course, but the reality of what is coming hasn’t really sunk in, at least not enough to make any significant change in our behavior. We are still acting as if what we do is tweaks here and there, and maybe if we have enough Teslas, which seem to be everywhere in Berkeley, we’ve done our part.
While we sat comfortably in somewhat chilly Berkeley (a heat wave was promised), the South was cooking under a heat dome affecting 69 million people, and in the Midwest and East, 87 million people in 17 states were living in a blanket of unhealthy air from the fires in Canada. This present mess is a taste of the future. Vince warns in Nomad Century that if we aren’t the ones migrating, we will be on the migrant-receiving end. Maybe that is what the developers are hanging on to in case they run out of UC students to fill the multitude of projects that are about to open in Berkeley.
So far Vince has barely touched on biodiversity and nature. If I hadn’t watched Fareed Zakaria’s interview on CNN of French President Emmanuel Macron, who organized and led the summit of world leaders in Paris that just closed, I would not have known that the thrust of the summit was poverty, biodiversity and climate. The big press, (the NY Times, Washington Post) listed it as a climate conference; biodiversity was not even mentioned.
Biodiversity is also missing in another group, the local chapter of the Sierra Club Conservation Committee. I attended my first Sierra Club Conservation Committee meeting with others in order to request support for the Berkeley Bird Safe ordinance and then stayed on as a regular attendee. I’m not sure how housing took center stage. While I agree that we can’t survive as a nation or on this planet if we continue to cover land with housing, I keep going back to Christopher Ketcham’s article “Addressing Climate Change Will Not Save the Planet.” Biodiversity and habitat need to be written into the plan; it is not an either/or. In fact, in planning cities, including this city, just as we have maps of city streets, there should be maps of corridors connecting habitat for wildlife.
We would be in a better spot in supporting biodiversity if Mayor Arreguin hadn’t referred the “rights of nature” to the Peace and Justice Commission back in 2021 where with lots of misdirection and a little help from his appointee. It would be sure to die, and it did.
The Climate Action Plan did include sea level rise and groundwater rise, but left out the part about rising groundwater and toxins seeping into living and work spaces. Tree Canopy earned three paragraphs, with the mention of grants and selecting species which fit into sidewalk growing spaces.
I’m not sure we would have any native trees planted without continued pressure from the community. Native trees are going into the parks, according to Scott Ferris, Director of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront, but street trees so far are non-native, a lost opportunity, which means for decades to come they won’t support local biodiversity.
Biodiversity is not taking imported plants from different parts of the planet and sticking them in the ground in Berkeley or some other place. Supporting biodiversity comes from recognizing the inter-relationship of species.
The “host plant relationship” with native species is lost on so many people. Monarch butterflies don’t exist without native milkweed for caterpillars. I didn’t understand it myself until I started taking walks with Erin Diehm and she pointed out yard after yard filled with imported exotics, which are essentially dead spaces for birds and insects. Diehm is responsible for the pollinator gardens which earned a paragraph in the Climate Action Update.
There were two other items on the FITES agenda. Harrison recommends updating the Climate Action Plan to include short-term and long-term costs, e.g. raw materials, manufacturing, production, use, clean-up, acquisition, disposal cost and short-term environmental and health impacts along with alternatives. It is a big bite, when the Climate Action Plan Update at this point for that 46% of GHG attributed to transportation comes from a google app:
https://insights.sustainability.google/
As Harrison pointed out at the Climate Action Plan presentation to City Council, the Office of Energy & Sustainable Development runs on a shoestring.
It often feels like Sustainability is the unwanted stepchild. The money maker for the Department of Planning and Development is development. If the mayor and more councilmembers were reading the stuff I’m reading, I doubt climate and biodiversity would be pushed off in a corner except when the Climate Action Plan update comes due. As for biodiversity that barely got a whiff of attention in the paragraph on Pollinator Gardens.
The other Harrison item at FITES was Deconstruction and Construction Materials Management. Councilmember Robinson had never heard of deconstruction. A number of years ago the Zero Waste Commission showed a film on deconstruction. I couldn’t find that video (there has been a complete turnover of staff and commissioners and then there is the deconstruction and reconstruction of the City website), but here are two.
The Unbuilders at a little over 12 minutes gives the most detail. If you do your own search be sure to include “building” with deconstruction or you will get lead down other bizarre paths. https://www.google.com/search?q=building+deconstruction&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS706US707&oq=building+deconstruction&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDY0NTJqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:098f2efc,vid:SLvYRKw4HHw
Here is a shorter 4 minute version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejjd6E_7SsQ
I think of all the beautiful hardwood floors from Hinks Department Store that are being demolished for 2065 Kittredge. Do we ever think about the forests that are being denuded to give that wood finish in new buildings?
I was told how back in 2018 when the news got out that the developer United Commonwealth Business Holdings destroyed three redwoods, that were supposed to be saved with the construction of 1698 University, Mike Hudson offered to mill the Redwood trees into usable lumber. According to the story, the developer couldn’t slow down for three days for the redwood trees to be milled, so instead they were ground up. That building is still unfinished five years later. As for the continuing removal of trees and grinding them up into mulch instead of usable lumber, that is something contractors seem to do under the auspices of the City, supposedly to reduce fire risk and make way for construction.
Of course, there is always the discussion of cost and whether deconstruction slow down construction of housing. The cost is really short-term profit versus the long-term cost of destruction that is occurring elsewhere, like deforestation. Watching the 12 minute video in the link above addresses both costs.
The Economic Dashboard Update to Council touted the success of weathering the pandemic and recovering. Retail was down, which would be expected with what feels like a steady stream of Amazon Prime trucks in our neighborhoods. The report is worth a scan. https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06-20%20WS%20Item%2001%20Berkeley%20Economic%20Dashboards%20Update.pdf
Thursday, I attended an hour-long webinar on the program Bird City that started in Wisconsin in 2009. The young speakers from North and South America bubbled over with enthusiasm. Becoming a Bird City requires local government buy-in and support and addressing each of the four categories of best practices, 1) Create, protect and restore bird habitat, 2) Address threats to birds, 3) Engage people in birding and conservation and 4) Encourage sustainable practices. https://birdcity.org/
Berkeley has no chance of becoming a Bird City without turnover of the mayor and the majority of the City Council. On June 6, the evening of the Bird Safe Ordinance, Mayor Arreguin lowered the required height of bird safe glass from 100 feet to 75 feet, when there was no apparent citizen pressure to do so. Even the near-useless supplemental from Councilmembers Kesarwani and Wengraf left the requirement for bird safe glass at ground to 100 feet. Let’s keep in mind, even 100 feet is a compromise.
By the time Arreguin and the City Council finished gutting the Bird Safe Ordinance only about 40% of it was left. The other reminder from that evening was from Wengraf, stating that bird safe glass would impact the quality of life of her constituents. Consideration of the quality of life of the youth who came to speak and future generations never entered her comments. For them the collapse of nature is real and their answer to the view was, “go outside.”
Why does this matter so much? It goes back to the Audubon moto, “Protect Birds & We Protect the Earth.”
Thursday, the Zoning Adjustment Board met and finished in an hour. There were no big projects on the agenda; it was all alterations to single family housing, including one appeal on an outside deck on a house in the hills, 1524 Campus Drive. The appeal was denied and everything else was approved.
I missed two meetings I wanted attend, the Environment and Climate Commission and the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission, so I can’t give a report. There are just too many meetings running simultaneously.
At least the presentation to City Council and their vote on the Waterfront Plan is moved to the fall. I expect there will be development dollars written all over it. After all, the City has been busy with shifting funds around for years to break the Marina so development can move in and fantasy projects can take hold.
The Civic Center presentation and vote will come on July 11 with a price tag of somewhere between $125,000,000 and $158,000,000. Then comes how the Mayor and Council plan to sell us into paying for it , including building new council chambers for them. These things always cost more than estimates.
Daylighting Strawberry Creek is up against stiff opposition from the consultants. Anyone who doubts the delightful impact of freeing creeks from culverts should spend a little time at Strawberry Creek Park. Every time I’ve gone to the park, there are always children exploring the creek. It is lovely. At least daylighting the creek comes with State grants.
