Transportation in the Bay Area - a Yodeler special issue

Transportation affects every aspect of our environment.

Cars and trucks are important consumers of energy and major sources of air and water pollution.

The placement of roads and transit stations is one of the main determinants of development patterns - to shape compact cities or to spread sprawl into our open space.

Roads harm wildlife in many ways, including through roadkills, disturbance, and fragmentation of habitat.

Transportation is a great shaper of quality of life. Noisy polluting freeways wreak havoc on adjacent communities. Transit availability can enable people to get to the places they need to go - or can isolate people in inaccessibility. Poor and minority communities have often received the greatest harm and the least support from transportation policy.

And so the Sierra Club takes stands on many aspects of transportation policy:

• achieving greater support for transit, bicycles, and walking, rather than for cars and highways;
• seeking the most cost-effective use of transit funding among different modes and locations;
• integrating transportation with land use;
• improved automobile gas mileage;
• environmental justice in transportation services.

In this Yodeler, Chapter activists examine many aspects of local transportation issues.

The big determinant of transportation policy is money. John Holtzclaw tells of the current struggles over renewal of the federal transportation bill: how much money will be included, and what shares will go to transit versus highways (see article)?

In the Bay Area the Metropolitan Transportation Commission allocates most transportation funds, and two articles critique MTC's allocation strategies: Roy Nakadegawa discusses the extremely expensive BART extensions to Warm Springs and San Jose (see article), and Pat Piras questions MTC's allocations in terms of environmental justice (see article).

Marin County is voting this November on Measure A, a transportation sales tax, and the Sierra Club urges all Marin voters to give it their support (see article).

Here in the Bay Area, getting hundreds of thousands of people across the Bay daily is one of the key transportation problems. Bob Piper explains congestion pricing, the charging of higher tolls during peak hours, as a method to both raise needed funds and to discourage peak-hour driving (see article). Norman La Force discusses the pros and cons of ferries on the Bay (see article).

Howard Strassner tells the chequered history of San Francisco's Transit First policy (see article) and of promising changes in the city's parking policies (see article). Michael Kiesling describes the current status of the rebuilding of the city's Transbay Transit Terminal (see article).

Sherman Lewis tells the history of the Foothill Freeway, and how activist efforts over decades have kept it from being built in Hayward (see article).

No one mode of transportation is equally appropriate for everyone, and a set of articles describe new options. Elliot Dobris of the Bay Area's City CarShare writes about car-sharing (see article), and Steve Roseman of the Electric Bike Network writes about electric bikes (see article). Michael Kelley tells about the overlap of bicycling as transportation and as recreation (see article), and Lesley Hunt tells of the Iron Horse Trail, Contra Costa's 25-mile-long pedestrian and bicycle trail, where recreation and transportation really do overlap (see article).

Karen Rosenbaum writes of volunteer-of-the-month Kathleen Nimr (see article), an activist on transportation (as well as a host of other issues).