March 04, 2001

By Suzanne Bohan
STAFF WRITER

OAKLAND -- At the First Unitarian Church in Oakland Saturday, a grinning man in a suit held all the money bags, but not for long.

The skit helped an audience of 300 understand how a coalition of transportation advocates has succeeded in the past two years in adding $186 million to Alameda County's $1.4 billion, 20-year transit budget, shifting focus from highway construction and into alternative transit projects.

At the annual summit of Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition (BATLUC), the coalition's exultant leaders described their ambitions to etch a similar policy shift into a new 25-year, Bay Area-wide transportation plan that's being completed this year. The coalition represents about 60 Bay Area community groups.

That blueprint, called the Regional Transportation Plan, has an estimated $130 billion behind it for an array of transportation projects, from highways to rail expansion to local bus service, and up to $12 billion is still up for grabs. The RTP is administered by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which establishes transportation policy for the nine-county Bay Area region. The commission will finalize the RTP by November.

"So $12 billion is about the amount of money that we're going to be arguing over," said Rebecca Kaplan, a BATLUC coordinator. "Twelve billion dollars is a lot of buses, it's a lot of bike lanes, it's a lot of paratransit, it's a lot of transit-oriented development, and we really have a chance to make that happen."

Paratransit is public transportation for seniors and the disabled, and transit-oriented development focuses on building housing and workplaces along transit lines.

A tough fight over the extra cash is imminent.

Tom Goff, deputy director of the California Alliance for Jobs, which represents contractors and workers in the heavy construction industry, said the extra money is needed for road maintenance for starters, not more transit. Goff said his group will ask that the Bay Area's $5.6 billion backlog in road maintenance be handled first.

"We're not anti-transit," he added. "We think it's very valuable. It's just some of these plans are transit overkill."

BATLUC's proposals for the extra $12 billion include an express bus system which relies on using commuter lanes. The problem, Goff said, is that gaps in commuter lanesrender the express bus plan ineffective.

"You just have to ask anyone who's ridden the (ACT) Transbay bus if it's ineffective," said Jeff Hobson, East Bay coordinator with BATLUC. "Certainly we need to find ways to close the gaps in the commuter lanes, but we can do that with small changes to the existing infrastructure."

The California Alliance for Jobs also will be asking that transportation funding be equitably distributed between transit and highway projects, Goff said, citing a recent MTC study that found that most transportation growth in the Bay Area will come from automobiles.

But Hobson said a new approach is needed.

"I think anybody who has been sucking congestion can see that the last 50 years of trying to build our way out of congestion just doesn't work," he said.

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