Transportation for the Point may be an unsolvable conundrum until the entire planet gets serious about “de-emphasis on the auto” big time. It’s too bad that what it will take to push that agenda is really ugly, but one way or the other it’s coming.

Al Gore was talking on morning TV yesterday and his answer about what we are doing with global warming was essentially “Iraq”. He had just told Matt Lauer that everything bad that has happened in Iraq was known before we wnet in but we ignored it and now we are in deep shit. Ditto for global warming if we don’t wake up.

One thing I like about Cityscape is that its publisher is not afraid to think big. For example, as part of its updated Urban Bay Area Rapid Transit Vision, Cityscape dared to imagine what form the City Of Alameda General Plan’s talk of “de-emphasis of the automobile” might take — if we really meant it, that is:

In version one [of the Urban Bay Area Rapid Transit Vision], we allowed that an Alameda light rail line might be better left as BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] because “ridership probably wouldn’t be very high on the island” and rail would require “an expensive new tube under the Oakland Estuary.” Well, we were wrong on at least one count. Turns out (and if we’d read more carefully, we’d have known this) that the 51 bus is one of AC Transit’s busiest, and a high priority for upgrade. As for access to the island: Can anyone think of any reason trains couldn’t run through the Posey and Webster tubes? Neither can we, actually.

Given the boldness of its earlier proposal, I was just a tiny bit disappointed that Cityscape’s piece on Alameda Point and Alameda Landing approached the transportation issue with joyless resignation:

Two one-way tunnels, a handful of bus routes and the occasional ferry, however, remain the only ways on or off the island’s western half; rapid buses are a possibility, but anyone waiting around for trains or aerial trams may be waiting awhile.

Granted, this is probably a much better reflection of political and economic realities, but I do miss the big dreams. Maybe running trains through the tubes is a non-starter politically, but the Alameda Point and Alameda Landing developments are so huge that I think we should at least consider some bolder transportation solutions, especially if we can view them in a regional context, as part of a larger system.

Even if all development in Alameda could somehow be halted, the freeways and streets of the East Bay are only going to become more and more congested as time goes on. Unless we plan on becoming a completely self-contained and self-sufficient island, we would do well to consider ways to build up and connect into alternative networks for regional mobility.