AC Transit Sends BRT To Davis Street BART

After more than a decade of planning, the AC Transit Board of Directors has approved a bus rapid transit system that will stretch 9.5 miles from 20th Street and Broadway in downtown Oakland to the Davis Street BART station in San Leandro.

The project will cost an estimated an estimated $153 million and create about 300 jobs. Construction is scheduled to run from 2014 to 2016.

The main route will run along International Boulevard in Oakland, which turns into East 14th Street. In San Leandro the BRT will turn west at Davis Street to the downtown BART station.

The BRT is a bus that runs on a dedidated lane, with elevated stations that make the experience more like a trolley or light rail system.

As originally conceived, the BRT would have run from the downtown Berkeley BART station to the Bayfair BART station.

But Berkeley objected to the program and San Leandro city officials decided in the past that running all the way to Bayfair along the narrow section of East 14th Street would be a problem.

But the revised plan to end the BRT at the Davis Street BART station has still aroused opposition in the Broadmoor neighborhood which is most affected.

, Broadmoor activist Peggy Combs objected to a loss of parking along East 14th, problems with deliveries to local merchants and effects on the bus stops that currently serve seniors in the area. She also worries that the BRT will hurt existing bus riders who take the 1R line from Bayfair.

City Councilwoman Pauline Cutter recently told Broadmoor residents that AC Transit has made changes to the San Leandro route to mitigate some of these concerns. But the plan still calls for four blocks of bus-only lanes along East 14th Street between Georgia Way and the city limit -- which is one of the problems cited by Combs.

Opponents have argued that these few blocks of bus-only lanes could be eliminated without hurting the overall project.

But whether north end residents can persuade the city and AC Transit to eliminate that four-block stretch is questionable, Combs said.

"It may be a done deal," she said, adding that the north end of San Leandro "got thrown under the bus."

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