Divisive Oakland freeway may be demolishedhttps://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/06/divisive-oakland-freeway-may-be-demolished/As Brown laid out ambitious plans to revive Oakland, he sharply criticized what locals called the Grove-Shafter Freeway — formally known as Interstate 980 — for dividing poverty-stricken and largely Black West Oakland from the shabby downtown he hoped to resuscitate, and suggested that it should be demolished.
As Brown railed against the freeway as a quasi-segregationist wall, one journalist interrupted to ask, “Didn’t you build that freeway?” Rather sheepishly, Brown acknowledged that he had, indeed, sanctioned its construction as governor two decades earlier.
Oakland’s business and political leaders of the era saw I-980 as a conduit that would bring affluent suburban shoppers into the city and as an approach to a long-planned (but never built) bridge that would connect Oakland’s airport to San Francisco’s airport across San Francisco Bay. Even West Oakland’s leaders supported the project after winning promises for more housing and other civic improvements that Brown incorporated into his construction order.
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The city’s current political cadre, led by Mayor Libby Schaaf, wants it to go. “It represents an injustice,” Warren Logan, a policy director in Schaaf’s office, told the San Jose Mercury News. “And frankly, the city doesn’t need a freeway bisecting downtown and West Oakland.”
I-980 is a short segment of freeway that directly connects I880 to I580 and SR-24. It can be done in a less direct way, but it will increase traffic on that less direct way. SF Bay Area traffic has not been reasonably accused of being light in several decades, so I suspect that tearing down this freeway would make bad worse in that area.
As for "dividing" Oakland, I counted at least 16 streets that cross from one side to the other over or under that less than 2 mile long freeway. There are also a couple of parks that block potential crossings that might have predated the freeway. IOW, the "dividing" is in activists' imaginations (or bongs).
