Neighbor's Video Reveals Problems at City Yard
William Brand, Oakland Tribune, March 19, 1995

For years residents around the city's maintenance yard on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley have complained about the noise and traffic created by hundreds of official cars and trucks zooming in and out to refuel, for repairs and just to park.

But the situation never changed until L A Wood, who lives across Bancroft from the yard, and his friend, Carolyn Erbele, made a video.

Neither are professional filmmakers, but the 12 minute production, filmed by Erbele and narrated by Wood, tells its story effectively. It traces the history of the city's 4.9 acre corporation yard from the day it opened in 1916 to accommodate Berkeley's first truck. It was a time when the city staff numbered 150, including a blacksmith and many horses.

Today, Wood says in the video, there are more than 500 city vehicles (and 1,500 employees) and a 24-hour fueling station. The video graphically shows city trucks belching smoke and turning the adjacent quiet residential streets into noisy corridors. "Traffic in Transit"

The videomakers solutions: reduce trips, extend a West Berkeley electric bus route to include the yard so employees can ride to work and move the fueling station to the more isolated Second Street transfer station.

Out to lunch

So far, the video has been played to the City Council and many times on the community cable access station, Channel 25. And the situation has started to change.

First, 40 gardeners, who used to drive their trucks out of the yard, every morning, come back every noon for lunch, then drive out again for the afternoon's work, stopped coming back for lunch. Now, according to Berkeley Public Works Director Vicki Elmer, drivers of several of the yard's largest trucks have stopped coming back for lunch.

Elmer confesses than when she first heard about a video being made about the city yard, she was nervous. "But it wasn't hostile. It was very supportive to us," Elmer said. "We had been thinking about ways to improve productivity in the face of tight budgets," she said.

The videomakers' idea of reducing trips meshed perfectly with the city's effort to be more efficient.

Got their attention

By cutting out the trip to the yard for lunch, the city saves 45 minutes of transit time per gardener, Elmer said. That's between a 12 and 18 percent improvement. And, of course, we cut out more than 40 trips a day in and 40 trips out of the yard. So that's a help to the neighborhood.

Not bad for out of pocket costs of $300, Wood and Erbele say with sly smiles. The video was their third; the first covered storm water runoff, the second took a shot at UC-Berkeley's now-abandoned plan to put a toxic waste storage facility in Strawberry Canyon.

Wood said they decided to do the video out of frustration. I talked 'til I was blue in the face about this at open mike at the City Council," he said. "They don't really want to hear from anyone."

"When we showed the video, Mayor (Shirley) Dean even said, 'This is the most innovative use of open mike time.'"

"That's why we did it. We got their attention."

Video

Traffic in Transit ...a west Berkeley neighborhood traffic plan for the SUDS area, (Sacramento Street, University Avenue, Dwight Way and San Pablo Avenue) (1995) 12:00 TRT Transportation plan for Berkeley's Corporation Yard, Public Works' fleet operations, and trip reduction. Examines the existing burden on the surrounding neighborhood of 450 vehicles fueling at the Corp Yard and the high cost of such a policy.