OAKLAND — For seven decades, California has banned heavy trucks from driving Interstate 580 between Oakland and San Leandro, a rule upheld by public officials even as it diverted industrial pollution to some of the area’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
But state transportation officials are now diving into the precise details of what removing the longstanding ban on vehicles over 4.5 tons — or 9,000 pounds — would mean for the region’s environment, including its air quality and noise pollution.
The undertaking is expected to study traffic patterns, examine racial equity and conduct health assessments to understand how the ban affects community life. There is no timeline for completion. Beyond the new research endeavor, there isn’t yet much political momentum around lifting the ban.
“We will ensure this study looks beyond mere traffic analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of what a removal would look like,” Kelsey Rodriguez, a senior planner at Caltrans, said Wednesday at a meeting where the state transportation agency sought public input on possibly lifting the ban.
The rule was established in 1951 and applied to an 8.7-mile stretch of MacArthur Boulevard that eventually gave way to I-580. State officials extended the ban in 1967 amid a fierce lobbying effort, including by Oakland’s then-Mayor John Reading.
In the ensuing decades, industrial activity in the city has largely concentrated on the highways around the Port of Oakland, where air pollution and reported asthma rates are higher than elsewhere in Alameda County.
The question of public health inequities has also played out in East Oakland, where I-580 runs along the base of the wealthier Oakland hills. No such ban exists for Interstate 880, which cuts parallel through the southern flatlands that include some of the city’s most disadvantaged communities.
In a 2019 report titled “A Tale of Two Freeways,” the Environmental Defense Fund determined, among other findings, that black carbon and nitrogen dioxide levels were higher on I-880 than I-580.
Broadly, the ban was among the government policies that “contributed to a system whereby people of color were and are continuing to be disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and pollution,” Rodriguez said at Wednesday’s meeting.
In 2021, a group of East Bay elected leaders held a virtual town hall to review the rule, while students at Life Academy — a middle and high school that sits squarely between the two East Oakland highways — also took up the cause.
But the renewed attention did not seem to immediately lead to any tangible change. Eventually lifting the ban would require state legislation.
Caltrans officials said Wednesday they would examine in their study if alternate highway routes may emerge around the city’s port if the ban were lifted.
Trucks have relied almost exclusively on I-880, a freeway that often experiences heavy truck congestion and has led to a legacy of environmental disparity in West Oakland.
“Overturning a law where your opposition is affluent people living in the hills? No one was able to take that on until recently,” said Brian Beveridge of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, a local activist group.
Before the 2019 report, he said, “no one was thinking about the data around the two highways — because that’s just the way things were.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.