By Wendy Fry
CalMatters

A new select committee in the California Legislature will explore ways the state can reconnect neighborhoods that decades ago were torn apart by interstates and highways.

During the nation’s interstate highway construction boom in the 1950s and ’60s, numerous urban neighborhoods were sliced through, often isolating residential areas largely populated by minorities and low-income residents from surrounding communities — and from economic opportunity.

More than 1 million people lost their homes, researchers have estimated. Federal transportation officials noted that in the first 20 years after the 1957 Federal Highway Aid Act launched nationwide highway construction, more than 475,000 households were displaced.

Now local and state governments across the nation are exploring ways to undo some of that harm by finding ways to re-link some of those neighborhoods. On Thursday, California’s Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon appointed Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from San Diego, to chair a new Select Committee on Reconnecting Communities.

“Many communities, like Logan Heights and Sherman Heights, were devastated by the superhighway system,” Alvarez said in an interview, referring to San Diego neighborhoods. “I intend to focus the committee’s work on reconnecting neighbors and creating new opportunities, like park space and affordable housing.”

Roadways vs neighborhoods

While the superhighway system connected cities and metro areas across the nation, allowing drivers and shippers to more efficiently traverse the country, communities of color and other under-resourced neighborhoods experienced fewer of the benefits from that system — such as interstate exits and transit hubs — while suffering the greatest harm, including isolation from job centers, more air pollution and the devastation of local business areas, experts say.

Gustavo Dallarda, Caltrans district director for San Diego and Imperial counties, said the state transportation agency is seeking new ways to make transportation part of the community “rather than something that runs through it.”

“Caltrans is evolving from prioritizing transportation efficiency to a people-first organization,” he said in an interview. “We have a heightened awareness of the impact our infrastructure has had on communities throughout the state …  including those in underserved neighborhoods.”

Federal money is on its way. U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla on Tuesday announced California will receive nearly $36 million from a pilot program aimed at reconnecting communities on a national level.

The federal program will fund planning, design, demolition, and reconstruction of street grids, parks and other infrastructure to reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure.

Removing barriers

Projects already slated for federal funding include:

• $30 million for the City of Long Beach to reconfigure West Shoreline Drive to remove a roadway barrier and improve access and connectivity between Downtown Long Beach and a public open space;
• $2 million to the City of Pasadena for future redevelopment of the I-710;
• $2 million to the City of San Jose to convert Monterey Road from a motor highway to a “grand” boulevard with dedicated bike lanes and “urban greening.”;
• $680,000 for a Caltrans Project in Oakland to explore alternatives for reconnecting communities along the I-980 corridor;
• $600,000 to the City of Fresno for a pedestrian bridge that would cross California State Route 99 and connect Parkway Drive and Roeding Park.

Across the nation, some cities are considering ripping up parts of aging highway systems to make room for open spaces to reconnect once-separated neighborhoods. In California, state officials said they are looking for ways to reconnect neighborhoods by building parks and community spaces along freeways.

Activists nationwide are urging that such plans include input from the community members most affected.

“The benefits unlocked by taking down an expressway must be channeled to the members of the current community. As more and more state and local agencies take up these projects, it is essential that they achieve the best possible outcomes,” according to Congress for the New Urbanism, a national nonprofit group.

In San Diego a groundbreaking in early March will provide an example. The project will become a community space and park along Interstate 5 at Boston Avenue, in the Barrio Logan neighborhood. The mostly Latino community is already known for its extensive collection of large Chicano murals painted on pillars of the Coronado Bridge, which bisects a key community park.

In coming months, the state’s new select committee will hold public informational hearings in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego to discuss how local and national actions damaged communities. The committee will use these hearings to develop legislative and budget proposals to address systemic injustices and inequality, according to Alvarez’s office.

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WendyFry/CalMatters0735a03/01/23

EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: This story was originally published by CalMatters. Please use the original link when sharing: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2023/02/reconnecting-communities/

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By Ben Jealous

The racial divisions that have split our country for centuries don’t just live in people’s hearts and heads. Some of them exist in concrete and pavement running right through certain neighborhoods. They are structural racism in the most tangible sense.

In Milwaukee last month, local activists told me about their fight against that kind of division. Wisconsin’s transportation department wants to expand a crumbling 3.5-mile stretch of Interstate 94 running through the state’s largest city at a cost of $1.2 billion and about 49 acres of land in the neighborhoods adjoining the roadway.

Like Overton in Miami, East Los Angeles and West Montgomery, Alabama, those neighborhoods, home to poor black and brown residents, were subdivided 60 years ago when I-94 was built. The highway continues to cut them off today.

It’s disingenuous to make plans today that don’t consider the history of these highways in places like Milwaukee. The cost to locate interstates, built as courts were ordering desegregation of public schools and housing, was borne by communities of color whose residents were barred from home loans that would have let them move to suburbs that got disproportionate benefit from faster commutes. Planners used code words like blight, renewal, and efficiency to confuse that reality.

A highway project like this creates an actual intersection between creating more equitable communities and protecting the planet. Public works projects that encourage more traffic increase air pollution that impacts our climate, increase noise pollution, and add to flooding and contaminated run-off that damage swimmable, fishable rivers. Those who live closest breathe the most exhaust and live with the constant drone of traffic, but the environmental impact unquestionably stretches far wider.

The estimated cost of expanding I-94 is about $40 million more than fixing the existing six lanes. That’s the same amount that a 50% cut in the current state budget cost mass transit systems in Madison and Milwaukee. Most Milwaukee mass transit riders are workers riding to a job or the disabled and seniors who no longer drive. While black and brown riders make up a disproportionate share of the total, most riders are white.

When we see these fabricated divisions, the question we should ask is who benefits from creating them? We know from troubling experience that the self-interested find ways to separate us even when our interests are the same. Who benefits from a wider interstate? It’s clearly not its neighbors. Not the Milwaukee City Council who opposed the plan. Not drivers today or in years to come as updating the current highway without adding lanes will improve safety and reduce congestion. And not millennials that Wisconsin has spent millions to retain and attract who say they want to live in places that don’t demand driving.

A local issue like this one in Wisconsin matters even if you live three states away because one like it may be coming to where you live soon. We’re on the cusp of many more in every state. Historic federal funding in 2021 and 2022 to repair infrastructure and invest in a cleaner economy must be spent place by place. We need to follow the example of the folks I met in Milwaukee — stay vigilant, never assume that decisions will be made in the best interest of everyone or the planet, build the biggest coalitions we can, and hold officials accountable when we vote.

Ben Jealous is the incoming executive director of the Sierra Club, the oldest and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the country. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January

By Kathy Chouteau | Post News Group

As supply chain issues put a stranglehold on the plastic Clipper card inventory, BART and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) are encouraging riders to put the card on their mobile phones via Apple Pay or Google Pay. The shortage is expected to continue for several months, per the transit agencies.

There’s a bonus for riders who select to use the mobile option for their Clipper card —the usual $3 new card fee will be waived through the end of this year. Customers who opt for a plastic card instead of the mobile option will be charged the fee.

Setting the Clipper card up on a mobile device is easy-peasy, according to the MTC and BART. Apple customers — who have an iPhone 8 or later model or an Apple Watch Series 3 or later — can add the card directly through Apple Wallet and load cash value with Apple Pay. Those who have Android phones running Android 5 or later can add the Clipper card via Google Wallet and load cash value.

BART, which is by far the largest distributor of new plastic Clipper cards, has installed signs near ticket vending machines at its stations to let customers know they can save $3 by putting Clipper on their mobile phones. BART has also reprogramed ticket vending machines at the San Francisco International Airport station to distribute paper tickets rather than plastic Clipper cards, per the transit agency. While Clipper cards can still be refilled and utilized at the station, only paper tickets will be sold.

Riders utilizing fare-discount cards — i.e., those for seniors, youths, the Clipper START® program for lower-income adults, or the RTC Clipper card for disabled riders under age 65 — don’t need to be concerned about falling inventories, said the MTC and BART. This due to those special purpose cards being directly distributed by Clipper and produced on an alternative card stock.

Per MTC, it serves as the transportation planning, funding and coordinating agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area and also operates the Clipper system on behalf of the region’s transit agencies.