OAKLAND — For seven a long time, California has banned heavy vehicles from driving Interstate 580 between Oakland and San Leandro, a rule upheld by public officers even because it diverted industrial air pollution to a number of the space’s most deprived neighborhoods.
However state transportation officers are actually diving into the exact particulars of what eradicating the longstanding ban on automobiles over 4.5 tons — or 9,000 kilos — would imply for the area’s setting, together with its air high quality and noise air pollution.
The endeavor is predicted to check site visitors patterns, look at racial fairness and conduct well being assessments to grasp how the ban impacts neighborhood life. There is no such thing as a timeline for completion. Past the brand new analysis endeavor, there isn’t but a lot political momentum round lifting the ban.
“We will ensure this study looks beyond mere traffic analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of what a removal would look like,” Kelsey Rodriguez, a senior planner at Caltrans, mentioned Wednesday at a gathering the place the state transportation company sought public enter on probably lifting the ban.
The rule was established in 1951 and utilized to an 8.7-mile stretch of MacArthur Boulevard that finally gave strategy to I-580. State officers prolonged the ban in 1967 amid a fierce lobbying effort, together with by Oakland’s then-Mayor John Studying.
Within the ensuing a long time, industrial exercise within the metropolis has largely focused on the highways across the Port of Oakland, the place air air pollution and reported bronchial asthma charges are greater than elsewhere in Alameda County.
The query of public well being inequities has additionally performed out in East Oakland, the place I-580 runs alongside the bottom of the wealthier Oakland hills. No such ban exists for Interstate 880, which cuts parallel by the southern flatlands that embrace a number of the metropolis’s most deprived communities.
Vans go away the Ben E. Nutter Terminal on the Port of Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015. (D. Ross Cameron/Bay Space Information Group)
In a 2019 report titled “A Tale of Two Freeways,” the Environmental Protection Fund decided, amongst different findings, that black carbon and nitrogen dioxide ranges had been greater on I-880 than I-580.
Broadly, the ban was among the many authorities insurance policies that “contributed to a system whereby people of color were and are continuing to be disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and pollution,” Rodriguez mentioned at Wednesday’s assembly.
In 2021, a bunch of East Bay elected leaders held a digital city corridor to evaluation the rule, whereas college students at Life Academy — a center and highschool that sits squarely between the 2 East Oakland highways — additionally took up the trigger.
However the renewed consideration didn’t appear to instantly result in any tangible change. Ultimately lifting the ban would require state laws.
Caltrans officers mentioned Wednesday they might look at of their research if alternate freeway routes might emerge across the metropolis’s port if the ban had been lifted.
Vans have relied virtually completely on I-880, a freeway that usually experiences heavy truck congestion and has led to a legacy of environmental disparity in West Oakland.
“Overturning a law where your opposition is affluent people living in the hills? No one was able to take that on until recently,” mentioned Brian Beveridge of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Venture, a neighborhood activist group.
Earlier than the 2019 report, he mentioned, “no one was thinking about the data around the two highways — because that’s just the way things were.”
