Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

On a long-neglected stretch of East Oakland, bulldozers are tearing gullies in the asphalt, clearing the path for a bus system that could breathe new life into the strip of auto body shops, taquerias and splashy murals.

If all goes as planned, the new fleet will arrive as soon as December: long, elegant, low-floored buses, big enough to carry dozens of passengers but light enough to glide quietly past the bridal shops and fruit stands on International Boulevard. Whipping by every seven minutes, they’ll shuttle people from the deep flatlands to office jobs downtown, pick children up from school and bring more business to the small shops.

AC Transit touts the $216 million system as a “renaissance in public transit.” But it would also be a hard-fought victory for the bus agency, after 20 years of painstaking community outreach and political standoffs. Those fights continue to flare up, even as workers lay concrete and repair drainage systems along the northern segment of the bus route.

“This is a story of why it’s so hard to deliver effective, problem-solving transportation, even on a corridor with good ridership and good density,” said Randy Rentschler, legislative director of the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

To him, AC Transit’s decades-long struggle is emblematic of larger dysfunction in the Bay Area: It seems that every community group, city council member and store owner has a say in how a big project turns out. Ambitious ideas get shipwrecked on the rocks of local control.

Officials at the East Bay agency are more optimistic. For them, the end is near: In the coming months, 21 canopied platforms will sprout from the middle of International Boulevard, allowing riders to board a hybrid electric-diesel bus that zips along in its own dedicated lane — a stylish replacement for AC Transit’s puttering 1 line. Equipped with technology to help them breeze through traffic signals, the buses will function as subway trains on tires, reducing passenger waits from the current 12-minute average to about seven minutes.

Some see the rail-like bus — known as BRT, for bus rapid transit — as transformative for an area where merchants ache for foot traffic and residents desperately need a quick connection to downtown. Others say it will attract new development and hasten gentrification, if the construction doesn’t kill off the mom and pops first.

“They’re going to put me out of business,” said Jose Espinoza, owner of the Playa Azul seafood restaurant, which he said has lost half its income since the street work started in 2016. The owners of a nearby wig shop and a store that sells sequined quinceañera gowns had similar fears.

“If this takes away parking, it will be more difficult for me,” said Enriqueta Soriano, owner El Palacio, the gown store.

“These concerns are warranted,” said AC Transit board Director H.E. Christian Peeples, noting that the agency has tried to minimize the disruption to businesses by reshuffling parking spaces and digging up the street in segments. Still, the project requires trade-offs: It will eliminate parking spaces and shave traffic lanes while altering the look and feel of the street.

Fury over these roadway changes has dogged the project for years. The original route was supposed to stretch from UC Berkeley to Bay Fair, but AC Transit chopped it back in the face of community opposition. Berkeley dropped out altogether in 2011, after merchants and residents warned that the bus system would ruin Telegraph Avenue. San Leandro lopped off the south end of the route when neighborhood groups balked at the idea of sharing the road with buses.

Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle

“As a community we were saying, ‘This is already a busy street, and then we’re going to take out a lane in each direction and give it to buses — and what happens when people want to parallel-park?’” asked San Leandro Mayor Pauline Cutter, who ran her first City Council race in 2010 as neighbors tussled with AC Transit over the bus rapid transit vision. She said she now supports the project and hopes it will eventually zoom through San Leandro and farther south, to Fremont.

To Peeples, the fights that vexed bus rapid transit show how hard it is to bring in a transit system that might force a change in habits. Though transit experts hail the new technology as fairly cheap and easy to build, politics have stalled bus rapid transit projects throughout the Bay Area.

“Even through the Bay Area is the home of revolution and good consciousness and that kind of thing, most people still drive,” Peeples said. “They get really freaked out if their ability to go everywhere they want to go is limited. The idea that you’re gonna take away a lane on a street makes people crazy.”

Santa Clara County opened a bus rapid transit system in 2017, a 7-mile line through San Jose’s Alum Rock neighborhood, connecting the east side of the city to downtown. Yet plans to build a similar system along the county’s busiest corridor, El Camino Real, have stumbled amid opposition to 10-mile transit-only lines from Santa Clara to Mountain View.

In San Francisco, a bus rapid transit project on Van Ness Avenue is limping along six years behind schedule: when the Municipal Transportation Agency wrapped up environmental reviews in 2011, it anticipated a 2015 opening date; that’s now pushed to 2021. Meanwhile, perpetual construction has forced businesses to close down as work crews dig under the street, striking pipes and utilities that aren’t marked on maps.

Photo: Michael Short / Special To The Chronicle

A long-anticipated bus rapid transit line on Geary Boulevard hit resistance from neighbors who dragged out the environmental review process, demanding changes in the design to preserve parking spaces. Now construction is humming along on the first segment from Market to Stanyan streets, and the bus line is expected to start service in 2021.

Transit-hungry Oakland is an exception — its reluctant neighbors notwithstanding. At the time its bus rapid transit plans began gestating, development was sparse in the area south of Lake Merritt and below Interstate 580. Residents living in that grid desperately needed transportation to jobs and grocery stores; the community’s appetite for a better bus system outstripped any concerns about displacing small businesses or preserving neighborhood character.

Twenty years later, bus rapid transit has become a symbol of Oakland’s economic boom.

“For the long haul, this is going to be extremely promising for the whole presentation of International,” said City Councilman Noel Gallo, whose district spreads through Fruitvale. He noted that workers will replace old, decaying sewer lines and repave the entire rutted artery of International to make way for the bus.

Yet the specter of major new infrastructure has caused fears to well up. Well-functioning transit, coupled with dense housing and retail, is essential to help a city thrive. But tearing up a street is complicated and painful, and some mom-and-pop businesses won’t stick around to see the change. Espinoza plans on selling the Playa Azul building, including six apartments he owns upstairs.

“Any investment, regardless of the outcome, is seen with trepidation because people are feeling so under siege with this exploding economy,” said Joël Ramos, an early supporter of bus rapid transit who in the 1990s lived next to BART’s Fruitvale Station, in the middle of the planned route.

For people who’ve spent up to 25 minutes marooned at a bus stop when the 1 line gets caught in a jam, bus rapid transit would be a major improvement.

“Well, that would be nice,” said a man who identified himself as Steven W who waiting at a bus stop near 23rd Avenue on a recent morning.

“Usually, if I have to be somewhere on time, I get up early to catch the bus, because you never know what’s going to happen,” he said.

Minutes later, a bus approached. Its side doors wheezed open, and he got on.

The bus continued northward, winding past a bulldozed section of roadway surrounded by orange traffic barriers. The neighborhood’s future is taking shape in those pits of shredded asphalt and gravel, where the first rapid buses will roll out soon.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan