Oakland’s Open Streets Programs Are Still a Work in Progress. That’s a Good Thing.
Photo via City of Oakland.
In the first couple months of the coronavirus pandemic, cities across America rethought their streets and who enjoys the luxury of ample public space. Programs to close or restrict motor vehicle access to some streets in favor of extra space for people on foot or two wheels, or sidewalk seating for local businesses, generated huge buzz.
This excitement among transportation advocates was followed, in urbanist media and on social media platforms, by a pronounced backlash and then an ongoing tendency to temper optimistic visions with critical reality checks. The sharpest critiques have come largely from people who support the goal of safer streets for non-drivers, but raise questions like “Whose priorities are we actually serving, and whose are we sidelining? Why is now the time we can get something done without a million years of process and delays, and why is it this thing?” In short, has the pandemic become an excuse to indulge a wish list of urbanist priorities with little connection to urgent community needs? And if the latter, are we just deepening existing disparities in our transportation systems?
A few months into this, Oakland, California has emerged as something of a model for doing it right. And a lot of that has to do with the city’s commitment to modifying and iterating on its early efforts based on real community feedback, recognizing that the work is never done.
Two in-depth pieces on how Oakland’s program has evolved over the past six months are essential reading for anyone thinking about how to do planning better, and in ways that are more nimble, iterative, and actually responsive to the communities affected. One is a deep dive interview that Nate Storring of the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) conducted in June with Warren Logan, who is Policy Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations for the City of Oakland, and is overseeing the streets programs. The other is an excellent October article by Rikha Sharma Rani called “How Oakland Got Real About Equitable Urban Planning.” It is from We Are Not Divided, a new journalistic project by Reasons to be Cheerful.
From Slow Streets to Essential Places: Lessons From Oakland
Find out what’s actually essential for people’s lives: what are their urgent struggles?
In early April, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf announced an “emergency” Slow Streets program that would close 74 miles of streets, or 10% of Oakland’s street network, to through automobile traffic. Temporary, removable barricades would allow access for residents and emergency vehicles, but discourage other drivers.
This first draft of Oakland’s program came during the period of mass shelter-in-place orders and business closures designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus, and so, like similar programs elsewhere, it emphasized creating space for socially distant outdoor recreation and travel like walking and bicycling. And initial survey results were extremely positive. But they were also extremely unrepresentative: two-thirds of survey respondents were white, even though only a quarter of Oakland’s population is white. And high-income residents were also overrepresented.
Photo via City of Oakland
When the city reached out to residents of low-income areas, they heard a very different story. These neighborhoods were populated by “essential” workers who were still going to their jobs, not white-collar employees whose offices had switched to telecommuting. Residents of these areas largely did not see street space for outdoor recreation as a priority, but rather access to essential destinations: community members in East Oakland identified a list of them that they wanted to be able to safely walk and bicycle to, including health clinics, testing facilities, and a community market. These were often located where residential neighborhoods meet busy, dangerous arterial roads.
Don’t be afraid to pivot.
In response to this feedback, the city pivoted. In May, Oakland launched an Essential Places component to its Slow Streets program, using a similar toolkit of cones, bollards, prominently marked crosswalks and the like, but with a different emphasis informed by residents’ stated needs: safe access to these vital locations.
Since then, Oakland has added Flex Streets: a program through which businesses (notably including food trucks and pushcart-based street vendors) can apply for a permit to make use of public right-of-way including sidewalks, parking lanes, and vehicle lanes. The city continues to look for ways to expand and iterate these programs: a recent press release announcing Phase 2 mentions such goals as ongoing context-specific changes, neighborhood-level traffic calming and pop-up slow streets.
A bias toward action is a good thing.
The wrong lesson to take from the criticism of the first phase of open-streets programs—that they were rolled out with inadequate community consultation, and privileged the demands of wealthy and politically-engaged residents as a result—would have been to stop doing anything. Equally bad would be to resort to such long, deliberative processes that urgent needs go unmet.
Oakland didn’t do this, to its credit. Logan and his team understood something important: we won’t get it right immediately, but we can move fast anyway, as long as we do so in an iterative way, instead of patting ourselves on the back and calling the work done.
Logan told PPS that ongoing engagement is crucial for the program’s success:
I think that’s the special sauce, if you will, of the program. We receive feedback almost in real time. We have a weekly call with our advocacy groups to check in and ask, how are we doing? Where can we improve? It’s not so much a matter of doing a community survey at the end and finding out how people felt about it. We’re having a regular conversation with people on an ongoing basis to understand how we can continuously iterate on the program. And so far so good.
It’s not appropriate anymore to rely on this byzantine way of doing business where you expect people to travel to one central spot downtown in the middle of the evening and stay until 1:00AM to share their two minutes of an opinion. That’s ridiculous, and people who work in government know it. It’s time for us to move on.
When you think you’re done listening, listen some more.
Too often, those in local government jump to conclusions about what members of the community want or what they’re trying to convey when they give feedback—especially negative feedback. Rani’s article shares an extremely telling anecdote that reflects this issue (boldface emphasis mine):
At least one community leader from East Oakland told Logan, essentially, pick up your barricades and leave. But Logan said he kept pressing. “I said to her, ‘I’m going to repeat back to you what I just heard so that we can be really clear about what you’re telling me to do. You said you don’t like this program. So, if I were to take your point, I’m going to ask all of my staff to pick up every single barricade in the entire neighborhood and leave all of the barricades in [more affluent] North Oakland. What do you think that might look like if I were to go through with that?’ And she was like, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t say get rid of the program.’”
That extra prodding revealed the community leader’s real concern, which was that the barricades weren’t doing enough to stop people from driving dangerously. A better solution, she told Logan, would be to fully close short segments of streets to through traffic during certain times. “What came across initially as, ‘We don’t like slow streets’ transformed into, ‘Hey, this program isn’t strong enough to accomplish the thing that you say you’re trying to accomplish,’” Logan recalls.
…. While there is still a long way to go, the city doesn’t believe it could have gotten that result if it had, as residents had initially demanded, simply packed up its barricades and left. “There are two different types of tendencies,” says Logan. “The first tendency is to not even ask Black and brown communities what impact you’re having on them in the first place. The second is… transactional engagement: We heard negative feedback, so we’re just going to quit. We’re not even going to try and ask, ‘What would make it an improvement? You just said you don’t like it, so I’m going to stop.’ I say that that’s not real equity.”
The things we do now come with historical baggage that must be respected.
In the PPS interview, Logan explains reasons for some of the negative reactions East Oakland residents had to closing streets that might not be obvious to outsiders. Among them are that there is a history of governments closing off access to majority-nonwhite neighborhoods during times of protest or unrest. In addition, these neighborhoods have often borne the brunt of disruptive construction projects with insufficient concern for their effects on quality of life—so the deployment of a-frame barricades to neighborhoods created unwelcome associations.
The city has responded to this concern about the barricades by adding a public art component to the next iteration of Slow Streets, using it as an opportunity to further engage the community and let them take ownership of the program. Local artist Jonathan Brumfield discusses the initiative in a video clip here.
Oakland has also avoided using police to enforce the traffic restrictions, mindful of the negative reaction of many communities of color in particular to the prospect of increased police presence in their neighborhoods that might have accompanied street closures.
The Work Is Never Done
Local governments are stewards of public space. If members of the community have unmet needs that can be met through how this space is designed or used, the urgent question should always be, What is the next, smallest thing we can do to meet those needs? We need to have a bias toward action over deliberation. But that bias must be tempered by deep, humble listening; and a willingness to accept that we’re going to get some things wrong, and that’s okay—as long as we don’t ever decide that we’re done.
Incrementalism is an important element of the Strong Towns approach—both in theory and in practice.