In Oakland, transportation officials are gearing up to transform the far-left lane westbound Interstate 580 into a carpool lane next week.<\/p>\n
The transformation will begin starting Monday. The carpool lane will cover a 2.3-mile stretch of westbound I-580 and will run from Piedmont Avenue under crossing to the MacArthur Maze where Diamond Lane currently begins.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hope that more people will ride the bus and more people will carpool. We\u2019ll be able to get more people to the Bay Bridge and across the Bay Bridge, but do so in fewer cars,\u201d said John Goodwin, with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could lead to some congestion sure because if people aren\u2019t carpooling, there will be more congestion, but I think it\u2019s a small price to pay to get more cars off the road in general,\u201d said Jona Finger, carpool advocate.<\/p>\n
Finger acknowledges taking away an existing lane and turning into a carpool-only lane may initially lead to more traffic, but he hopes it will be the nudge people need to start riding sharing.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe this is something that will help people look at the alternatives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Finger is a huge advocate for casual carpooling. He hopes the addition of a new car pool lane will help revive casual carpooling, which was a popular alternative before the pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just an informal system where we stand at certain curbs by BART stations and people pick us up and take us into the city,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
River Murillo and his buddy said they\u2019ll definitely take advantage of the new carpool lane. They added it\u2019ll save them time and money.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s more affordable on us. It cuts down on gas and right now. If you look at the gas prices, they\u2019re not cheap,\u201d Murillo said.<\/p>\n
The lane will take six months to complete. Transportation leaders hope for it to be ready in October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Oakland, transportation officials are gearing up to transform the far-left lane westbound Interstate 580 into a carpool…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-271809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}