Andrew Guzman was late for work nearly every other day last winter. During the monthslong deluge that soaked the Bay Area, his train to the downtown Berkeley BART station was often delayed. Frustrated, he clocked in late to work shift after shift.
The biggest problem last winter was that wet weather led to wheel spots or wheel flats, which can occur during braking and force a car out of service. Though wheel spots occurred more frequently on the newer Fleet of the Future cars, the root cause of last season’s problems wasn’t the cars themselves, but the complexity of BART’s control system, Allison said. BART has corrected the control system errors which caused wheel spots.
However, BART‘s project to replace the 50-year-old, unpredictable control system software is still a decade off. BART and its riders are depending on the transit system’s short-term fixes to avoid another chaotic season. Riders need reliable service just as BART, after years of declining ridership and revenue, needs to keep those riders scanning their clipper cards this winter.
Oakland Chinatown is one of the communities deeply bothered by illegal dumping, even though the city has seen a nearly six-fold increase in the quantity of trash cleared from its streets in the past seven years. Liao Shen, an employee at D&K Market in Chinatown, said the store pays about $800 a month for trash services and then has to deal with trash overflow from illegal dumpers. “It is very frequent,” said Shen. “It happens all the time.” Businesses in…
About 130 people showed up at International Community School Thursday for an Oakland Unified School District career fair, where recruiters were trying to fill 97 teaching vacancies, particularly for bilingual and special education teachers and paraeducators. “We have strong dual language programs, especially in Spanish and English. We want our students to be multilingual and we want to honor their multilingual backgrounds,” said Sarah Glasband, director of OUSD’s recruitment and retention team. “So we really want to cultivate multilingual educators…
Record rainfall last winter mitigated California’s severe drought and brought a slow start to fire season. But the wet weather hasn’t reduced the threat. The heavy downpours that bombarded the Bay Area and the relatively cool weather that followed kept vegetation from drying out in the spring and early summer. But as the summer wears on, that vegetation will become fuel for fires, said Ranyee Chiang, director of the Meteorology and Measurement Division at Bay Area Air Quality Management District. …
The Oakland City Attorney’s Office is about to become more powerful, if the City Council passes an ordinance on July 18 that would enable City Attorney Barbara J. Parker to enforce all municipal laws. Currently, Parker, who was first elected in 2012, does not have the authority to enforce approximately half of Oakland’s 164 municipal ordinances. This makes Oakland an outlier compared to other large cities including San Jose, San Diego and Los Angeles, whose city attorneys are able to…
For nearly 20 years, the Oakland Unified School District has paid the consequences of relying on the state to bail it out of financial trouble. During that time, it has slashed the budget, cut salaries, laid off staff and closed schools, as it tries to repay a $100 million emergency loan it borrowed in 2003, when the district fell under state receivership. And the cuts keep coming — with 11 schools set to close, merge or downsize in the next…
Around 60 people attended a town hall meeting Monday at Parker K-8 to discuss ways to save that school and six others that the Oakland Unified School District board has decided to close in the next two years. Most of the parents, teachers and students at the meeting were from Parker, which is set to close at the end of this school year, and La Escuelita TK-8, which will lose its middle school grades in 2023. A divided school board…