SHELTER SKELTER

Bus shelters are not something you’ll generally think about, unless you’ve gotten caught at a bus stop in the rain, or unless you have kids who regularly take the bus to school. But if you wanted to teach a class on the inequity in the workings of Oakland government in these latter days, you couldn’t go bad using the city’s new bus shelter policy as your example.

If you and I were sitting down to figure out where to put bus shelters, and we could put up, say, only 256 of them around the city, the process would be pretty simple. We’d go to AC Transit, ask for the 256 stops where the most people get on buses, and that’s where the shelters would go. The City Manager’s staff can do some weird things sometimes, but you could even make a case that this is the way they’d do it, if they were making the decision.

But city finances in California being what they are these days, it’s neither you nor I nor the City Manager’s staff that’s deciding where to put Oakland’s bus shelters. Instead, for a fee of $75,000 a year, the City is contracting out to the Adshel division of Clear Channel Corporation to put up at least 256 bus shelters in Oakland. And what does Adshel get for this annual fee? The right to put up ads on the bus shelters. Oh, and the right to choose where the bus shelters are going to be located. And corporate finances being what they are, always, Adshel’s bus shelters are going up in the places where it can get the most money for its ads, not necessarily in the places where the most people get on the bus.

In Oakland…as in most cities…the heaviest bus use is in the less affluent areas. In Oakland…as in all cities…the place where businesses most want to put their ads is in the more affluent areas.

Last week, Adshel put out their list of some 550 bus shelter locations, to be built in three phases, and the results were pretty predictable. Generally speaking, the shelter locations are going to be heavily weighted in the more affluent areas of Oakland.

I did some rough calculations based upon Adshel’s list, and came up with a figure…by council district…of the average number of people using the bus stop that are getting bus shelters. (The calculations are really rough because AC transit bus use figures weren’t released for all of the bus stops). If the shelters were being put out equally all across the city, the averages would be about the same from district to district. They’re not.

I kept District 3’s (Nancy Nadel) average out, since this district includes all of the downtown area, so it has both the places where the most riders transfer from one bus route to the other, as well as the area where advertisers most want to put their ads. That makes it very different from all of the other areas of the city.

That aside, the most affluent district in the city (District 4, Dick Spees) actually had the highest average number of bus users (that is, people getting on or off the bus) per bus shelter proposed. But that may be misleading. Adshel proposed putting one of District 4’s least-used (and more affluent) bus stops (Moraga Avenue and Medau Place) in its first phase of construction, while it put one of District 4’s most-used (and least affluent) bus stops (Fruitvale and MacArthur) in its last phase of construction. Since the contract only calls for "at least" 256 shelters, those shelters listed in the last phase of construction (such as at Fruitvale and MacArthur) may never actually get built.

After that, the placement of Adshel’s bus shelters pretty much flows downhill, with the more affluent, uphill districts getting the better deal. District 2 (Danny Wan) and District 1 (Jane Brunner) are getting more bus shelters for each rider getting on or off the buses in those districts, according to my calculations. District 5 (Ignacio De La Fuente), District 6 (Moses Mayne), and District 7 (Larry Reid) are getting less bus shelters for each rider getting on or off the buses in those districts.

Don’t seem quite fair. Does it?