Lyft gift aims to improve transit in East Oakland
The ride-hail company Lyft — which recently got into the bicycle business — said Monday it’s donating $700,000 to help transit-hungry East Oakland get free car rides and bike-lending stations.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf called the move by John Zimmer, Lyft’s co-founder, “absolutely an incredible gift — one that East Oakland deserves, to make up for systematic
“Mobility is not just about getting around. It’s about social and economic mobility.” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf
neglect that this part of Oakland has seen for generations.”
The flat grid that stretches from Lake Merritt to the San Leandro border stands as an example of how the city often fails to serve its poorest residents. East Oakland’s two BART stations are far apart, and traffic clogs its main boulevards. Bike-rental docks end at the southern border of Fruitvale. Drivers are forced
to negotiate a maze of potholes.
The donation is seen by some as a benefit for the company as well as for East Oakland. Not only could it help transform a forgotten area of the city, but it can also add shine to Lyft, which now operates a large Bay Area bikerental program.
The $700,000 will be split among Oakland nonprofits, including TransForm, which focuses on transportation policy, and Scraper Bikes, whose founders build twowheelers with big colorful wheels resembling the muscle cars that tool around East Oakland. Among the programs the money is expected to help fund are new parklets to beautify sidewalks, a bike-lending library, subsidized AC Transit passes, discount bike and scooter rentals — and the free car rides.
Schaaf announced the plan Monday in the courtyard of the East Oakland branch library on 81st Avenue, where blocks of working-class, single-family homes line a district of warehouses and truck stops. She and Zimmer, who said little at the event, had decked out the yard with chic electric bicycles, electric scooters and the Scraper bikes.
Such seemingly incremental efforts could be transformative, particularly in neighborhoods where people depend on cars or unreliable city buses, said Clarrissa Cabansagan, new mobility policy director for TransForm.
“Out here it’s much less transit-rich than a city like San Francisco,” she said.
An uneven transportation system has deep social consequences. It limits where people can work, makes it difficult to go grocery shopping and prevents kids from getting to school on time. In Oakland, the lack of transit connections has segregated the hills above Interstate 580 from the poorer flatlands below, while also separating the area north of Lake Merritt from the southern neighborhoods.
“Mobility is not just about getting around,” Schaaf said. “It’s about social and economic mobility.”
Tyrone “Baybe Champ” Stevenson Jr., who invented Scraper Bikes with his cousin, Avery Pittman, echoed those sentiments.
“Living in deep East Oakland, we see, too often, potholes,” Stevenson said. “We see, too often, homeless people sleeping in cars. We see, too often, illegal dumping. Me, as a child, I had to navigate around all of that to get to school.”
Not everybody sees a partnership with Lyft as the answer. City Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan was skeptical, noting that ride-hail companies add to congestion and compete with mass transit for riders.
Schaaf deflected those concerns.
“When you’re in partnership with a company, you’re in a better position to talk to them about modifying their less beneficial behaviors,” she said. “This is an opportunity for us to really create together what equitable mobility looks like. And I do believe this CEO generally cares about that issue.”
Officials are slowly making changes to spread transit infrastructure more evenly throughout the city, though it won’t be easy. Oakland’s Department of Transportation is preparing to release a comprehensive bike plan to connect routes from the more gentrified hills to the city’s outskirts, and a bus rapid transit route will start running through East Oakland in December.
In the meantime, city leaders are leaning on smaller forms of mobility to fill in the gaps. Bikes are getting a new cachet, Cabansagan said, even though the dearth of protected bike lanes forces many people to ride on the sidewalk. Oakland residents have also embraced e-scooters, a new hightech craze that city officials saw as a social equalizer — last year the City Council enacted a policy that required each scooter company to drop half its fleet in low-income “communities of concern.”
To Stevenson, the scooters and the expanded bicycle networks are heartening. Ultimately, he wants to see the roads repaved and the sidewalks cleared of debris.
“These potholes will be fixed,” he declared in the library courtyard, over a wave of applause.