Safe and Sustainable Transportation for All
My career in city planning began in transportation. I walk, bike and take transit around Oakland every day. District 3 is a vibrant transportation hub for the city with three BART stations, dozens of AC Transit lines connecting to the entire county, and a growing network of bike lanes. Yet, our city’s transportation system – especially the streets in District 3 – is undermaintained, disconnected, and often unsafe. With all this opportunity, our city’s leaders must act with urgency to keep Oakland’s residents, employees and visitors safe on our streets, traveling throughout the district and beyond.
There are zero excuses for people still being killed in traffic collisions when we have the funding that can be approved tomorrow, to turn our streets into safe places to drive, walk, bike and bus around. By supporting alternative modes of transportation, such as biking and walking, we can transform high-injury streets into safe, welcoming streets that our children and elderly can navigate with ease.
Here’s what we need to do:
- Prioritize traffic calming and traffic safety improvements on Oakland’s most dangerous roads (Oakland’s high injury network) to improve traffic safety for people traveling in Oakland.
- Support modes of transportation such as walking, biking and riding transit with complete streets infrastructure by working with transportation advocates, AC Transit, and BART staff.
- Invest in rapid-response life-saving traffic safety improvements like the award winning Slow Streets Program that I started and ran while working for the City in the beginning of the Pandemic.
- Pave Oakland roads and fill potholes quickly by expediting contracts for roadway maintenance and repair.
- Support a sustainable truck network that protects residential communities and encourages a thriving port economy that serves all of Oakland.
What does this look like?
Oakland is unique when it comes to transportation because, unlike many of our other challenges that can feel so sticky, the solutions for our city are straightforward. Oakland has the financing to improve many of our roads and sidewalks, so that they’re free of potholes, debris, and other damages but we lack the prioritization of City Council to make these improvements. I am not willing to wait for safe streets.
Ultimately, Oakland’s streets must be safe for everyone traveling around our city. A thoughtful, comprehensive transportation system is one where no one is treated as second-class because of their mode of travel and that everyone is treated with dignity, whether at the bus stop, in the bike lane, on the sidewalk or driving in the street. A cornerstone of my transportation plan is to improve traffic safety on Oakland’s roads and I am committed to reducing our traffic fatalities to zero. I have an unparalleled level of experience in transportation policy and plan to leverage the success of the Oakland Slow Streets program – an emergency network of traffic-calmed streets I helped create during the city’s COVID-19 response – to guide future transportation policy.
I’m also excited to bring my policy knowledge to the City Council to expedite Oakland’s ongoing paving program. Oaklanders are taxing themselves every year to pave our roads. So, there’s no excuse for delay when it comes to maintaining our streets in good repair.
