This week on Talking Headways, we chat with transportation and planning expert Warren Logan, who is running for Oakland City Council in the 3rd District. We discuss the differences in how people perceive government to work, the need for more flexible streets, and share our thoughts on housing policy.

Scroll down below the audio player to see an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here to see an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.

Jeff Wood: You’ve noted in the past that Oakland and the City Council seemed to place a high value on transportation projects to improve safety. But as you just mentioned, the timelines are off, they’re taking too long. So the question is: what’s slowing down that pace of implementation? What do you think is holding the city back from moving faster?

Warren Logan: Oakland is in a really interesting position. I think a lot of your listeners are more likely to know council members, board members or politicians who are resisting transportation improvements and saying, “Let me water down this project because somebody yelled at me,” or “I’m going to lose a parking space,” or whatever.

What’s interesting in Oakland is that this council, I think, for the first time actually said traffic safety was a priority. So that was held in very high regard in the last budget cycle, which starts in 2022. And a lot of transportation advocacy groups said, rejoice, we won. And I had a really challenging, let’s call it a campaign, before I actually announced it and told people that wasn’t enough.

It’s not enough to just be about transportation safety and equitable mobility in name, because that’s when the real work begins. And that’s not just about pushing for stronger, more effective, protected bike lanes or wider sidewalks or friendlier bus stops and so on. It’s about getting into the details of what’s stopping a city like Oakland – which, despite its budget problems, is very well funded when it comes to transportation improvements, particularly road building – from moving forward with the things that we all care about and have the money for, because usually, dear listener, there’s either political resistance or there’s no money.

In this case, at least on the face of it, there’s no political opposition, and we actually have the money to do the work. So what’s holding us back? And as it turns out, we are. It’s the process. So I’ll briefly describe the number of times you have to go to the city council to request permission to do basically a major capital improvement. Many of your listeners are probably familiar with grants like Active Transportation Program Grants, which fund major projects to make things safer for pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, etc.

We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars here. Just to get that money into a city account, you have to go to the city council and have them say, “Yes, please, we’ll allow you to give us that money.” Most people don’t realize that you have to do something just to accept millions of dollars from another agency.

That alone can take months because you have to plan it, then you have to present it to a committee, and then it needs two votes in the city council, right? Just the process of getting the money accepted takes several months. We haven’t even started the project yet. Then the staff comes back and says, “Mom, can I please spend some of this money to hire a consultant to design the project and handle the communications with the community.”

Again, it has to be planned, it has to go to committee and then to council. Again, it takes several months before you’ve even started planning the project. And God forbid there’s any kind of change there, right? So we’re not even building anything. We haven’t even started. And now it’s been six to eight months since we took the money and then said we’re going to spend it.

By the time you finally get a final design – and everybody knows there’s a lot of hand-wringing and political process and community process involved – you have to do another contracting process to spend the money on workers to build the project. And that’s where a lot of resistance comes in. Not because your local council might say, “Oh, I don’t want to build this project,” but because we’re having a labor debate now.

Which contractor should get $10 million for a construction project? And now we’re not talking about transportation, we’re talking about political support. We’re talking about spending millions of dollars on a union that you really care about, or some other group that you care about more.

Again, we haven’t built anything. And we’re several years into the process now. The solution I’ve really been pushing for is to shortcut that process by having the council say that by accepting this money, we assume we’re going to spend the money. So go ahead and do that. Please keep us updated on the design and the engagement, but at least work in parallel with the city council, don’t stop the work to come back to me and ask permission to continue, because otherwise there’s no point in accepting the money in the first place if you’re going to delay the project for four to five years, only to have people ask and say, “Is it OK if I go ahead?”