Could Treasure Island go carfree? That was the intriguing question that Gus Yates, president of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Carfree City USA, posed during a thought-provoking presentation he gave last week at the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland.
The question goes to the heart of whether U.S. cities are prepared to take more than baby steps toward reducing automobile dependence. Treasure Island, which is being redesigned almost from scratch, is close to the urban core and faces significant challenges to accommodating thousands of new motorists. If not there, where?
The question wasn’t simply an abstract exercise, but a serious proposal that Yates formally presented last year to Kheay Loke, senior project manager with Wilson Meany Sullivan, the lead developer for Treasure Island, which is proposed to include about 6,000 new housing units.
The compelling arguments that Yates makes – and the reasons that Loke offered for turning Yates down – shows how, in the minds of current decision-makers, capitalist imperatives still trump the need to seriously wrestle with global warming, traffic congestion, declining public health, and other byproducts of automobile reliance.