Many in the East Bay may not know it, but it was once the home of bustling streetcars that connected the many cities this side of the bay. From Richmond to deep East Oakland, streetcars made the cities and neighborhoods of the East Bay much closer and less fragmented than ever before, perhaps even closer than they are today. Along with 8 different streetcar lines, the Key System opened a line on the lower level of the Bay Bridge that connected to San Francisco. It was said to take only 30 minutes to get from the Alameda Court House to the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco. Pretty good for 1935.
A sensational video showing off the Bay Bridge extension (1945)
The inevitable dawn of mass produced, cheap automobiles in the 40's and 50's and the eventual buyout from the General Motors Company led to the unfortunate dismantlement of the Key System in 1958. The publicly-owned AC Transit formed in 1960 which operates the buses to this day. Although there is a tasty conspiracy about why the streetcars in Oakland were removed (along with about 50 other cities), it seems to just boil down to a cultural and technological shift in the minds of Americans.
The automobile set people free in many ways. It unbound people from transit lines, allowed longer distance travel, had an overwhelming social appeal, and was a symbol of that sweet, sweet American Dream coming true. Along with millions of people buying into this private single-person vehicle came other devices like the Interstate Highway System, which included such beauties as the MacArthur Maze and the elevated I-580 (which happened to win the prestigious "Most Beautiful Highway in America" award in 1964).
We now know how wasteful, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive it is to live out our own vehicular individualism. The whole bay area is saturated with cars making even the shortest commutes painfully long. The highways have polarized parts of the city and proved to be historical eyesores.
Now yes, we do have BART and we have AC Transit. These are both viable modes of transportation but both have their limitations. Bart is fast, however expensive and not widespread. AC Transit is widespread and cheap, but unpredictable and incredibly slow for long cross city travel. Coming from a long line of conductors and train workers, I do have a special nostalgia for the ways of the rail. And looking past my own personal attachments I can see that there is a missing link in Oakland. If you strictly depend on public transit, Downtown is detached from most of East Oakland, Jingletown and Laurel are separated by two highways, Alameda is... well, It's Alameda and you're not welcome there.
Living in the area without a car for the past two years has taught me to either ride the slow and fragmented AC Transit lines, get a car, or ride a bicycle everywhere. I've chosen the latter as it's the cheapest and most convenient when combined with BART. I feel when the Key System was ripped from the ground, something deep in the roots of Oakland was also taken with it. I do want to better argue the cultural benefits of having streetcars over buses but I'll leave this post as a brief history of those simpler times... when people were together.
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