Oakland city officials hoping to rip up Interstate 980 should be careful what they wish for. And commuters from throughout the East Bay should be concerned.

Related Articles Report: Oakland’s I-980 on national ‘top 10’ list for teardown The city’s fantasy of replacing the 2-mile freeway with a street-level boulevard will likely push more traffic onto city streets and choke an already overtaxed regional freeway system.

Just two years after Alameda County voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase to, among other things, improve traffic flows, this plan would likely do the opposite.

Before anyone goes too far down this road, regional traffic planners should determine how the plan would affect commuters from as far as Walnut Creek and Hayward.

The 2-mile freeway, opened in 1985, links Highway 24, from the intersection with the MacArthur Freeway to the Nimitz Freeway. Unlike surrounding freeways, I-980 traffic usually flows freely, providing a critical route for those headed for downtown Oakland or the Oakland airport.

Take away the freeway and replace it with a boulevard and some 90,000 vehicles a day will be affected. How much worse traffic would be is uncertain because there haven’t been any studies. Before city officials pursue this, they should get some hard data.

And they should get real about the cost. Where do they expect the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars this would require to come from? Raising property taxes? Heck, they just went to that well to fund basic street repairs. Asking voters to pay more to rip up a 31-year-old freeway should be a non-starter.

Moreover, the city doesn’t own the freeway; the state does. It’s hard to imagine Caltrans giving its blessing to this but stranger things have happened in Sacramento.

Grass-root backers of the I-980 conversion idea seem well-intentioned. Construction of the freeway separated West Oakland neighborhoods from downtown. Backers see an opportunity to right a wrong and convert land from the overly wide freeway right of way into public uses.

They also look across the bay at San Francisco’s teardown of the Embarcadero Freeway after the Loma Prieta earthquake and see a successful model to emulate.

But there’s a key difference: The Embarcadero Freeway was essentially a dead-end. The teardown only affected where cars entered that city. And there’s still plenty of room on the exit ramps for traffic to back up.

In contrast, I-980 is a thoroughfare with no alternate freeway route for drivers going from, say, the airport to the Caldecott Tunnel or Walnut Creek to the Oakland Coliseum. Tearing it down would back up traffic on surrounding freeways.

At a time when we’re trying to improve traffic flow, this would seemingly do just the opposite.