This evening’s conversation at the bar turned to the terrible state of the Emery Go-Round. One friend of mine who takes it regularly bemoaned the delays and the lack of seating. Another former rider recalled watching multiple buses pass him by because they were too full.

It seems most people taking Emery Go-Round are traveling between Oakland’s MacArthur BART Station and a job, or maybe shopping in the nearby small city of Emeryville. It’s free, and subsidized by Emeryville businesses who want to provide access for their employees and/or customers. It’s a noble idea, but sadly the experience of riding it is not too good.

I propose instead a public transit replacement for Emery Go-Round, and more!

My idea below is a light rail line serving communities between Oakland’s Grand Lake district and the shopping and employment options of Emeryville. It has a prominent stop at the MacArthur BART station in the middle of the line, and the Emeryville terminus is the Amtrak station, allowing for important transit connections.

I don’t want to get too in-the-weeds about the minutia of such a project. I mean, it’s a three-mile fantasy transit map made by an obsessive dork who should be using his time more wisely. Let’s not be too ridiculous!

Having said that, here are a few notes notes on my MacArthur Light Rail:

• The map shows only the most important stations. Certainly there would be more stops along the route, though hopefully fewer than many bus lines.
• Speaking of buses, an even more ambitious version of this project could continue east along the MacArthur Freeway corridor past Grand Lake, and all the way to the Eastmont Transit Center in East Oakland. This would basically replace the AC Transit 57 bus. Maybe someday I’ll add that section to the map, but since I live in Grand Lake and work in Emeryville, I am very selfishly focusing on that stretch.
• The rail right-of-way in Emeryville at the Amtrak and Bay Street stations would need to be negotiated with the stakeholders there (Amtrak, Union Pacific, etc.). Looking at satellite maps it seems doable.
• The Bay Street Station would need to be configured with appropriate pedestrian overpasses both east (towards Horton Street, Novartis and Pixar) and west (towards the Bay Street Mall and IKEA).
• Continuing South, the satellite views make it look relatively trivial to bring the line down through some underused industrial property, and onto Sherwin Avenue near Horton Street. Hopefully something could be worked out with the property owner, or there’s always the last resort of eminent domain.
• The next section, between Best Buy and Office Depot, and behind Home Depot is interesting. It’s mostly a parking lot, and an access road. Again, hopefully the property owners would play ball. There’s also a very lightly used 580 freeway onramp back there, which is fed by MacArthur Boulevard, via a tunnel under San Pablo Avenue. I think that closing that onramp, and re-designing the whole area for a light rail line would serve the public immeasurably better than the current lightly-used infrastructure.
• The MacArthur BART stop should be designed with ease-of-transfers between the two systems as the top priority.
• If this truly replaced Emery Go-Round and the 57 bus line, traffic congestion on 40th Street would lighten up significantly, which is a nice bonus since it’s a major bicycle route.
• Adding this kind of light rail would probably increase the desirability of housing along it, which could lead to the combined improvements and challenges of gentrification along this stretch of MacArthur.
• In general the three-lane MacArthur Boulevard between San Pablo and Broadway is underused. It used to be a highway between Castro Valley and Oakland, but was replaced by the MacArthur Freeway (the 580) in the 60’s. Adding light rail traffic would probably entail the removal of two lanes of traffic, but would not be very burdensome because of the underuse.
• Congestion on MacArthur increases between Broadway and the Grand Lake area. It gets tricky because the geography of the area forces the road to narrow and parallel the freeway. There don’t seem to be many good solutions to getting light rail through this area. One possibility would be to underground the line, but that is obviously very expensive. In my map you’ll see that the light rail line leaves MacArthur and heads onto the residential street of Santa Clara as it approaches Grand Lake. It seems like the most realistic route all things considered.
• Despite my claim that this light rail could replace Emery Go-Round, I should note that Emery Go-Round’s three lines cover far more ground than what I’ve proposed. I still think my proposal is totally awesome, but if it truly replaced Emery Go-Round some small number of citizens currently being served by those lines would be getting shafted.

As you can see I get pretty obsessed about these kinds of notions. In a couple of my legacy posts from a few years ago I argued for a huge overhaul of all the Bay Area transit districts which included the creation of a single massive rail line between San Jose and Santa Rosa. I still think there’s a lot of merit to that kind of big picture reworking, but probably future posts will be more like this one: smaller and more focused. Hopefully it will allow me to post more of them without getting overwhelmed by the many moving parts to such complicated systems.