The orange line was in place along this corridor by the early 80s. Each station and its surrounding area was to have a particular focus…government (Courthouse), education (Virginia Square), urban village/retail (Clarendon), etc. Over the course of two decades development grew organically around these stations, rather than dozing a 2-mile swath and putting up towers and condos. It took a while for the empty lots to disappear. Today, there are still some empty patches, but the flow from Rosslyn to Ballston is mostly uninterrupted.

On the flip side, the development around Potomac Yards pales in comparison. There is no metro station within walking distance (the plans for a privately-funded Potomac Yard station fell through several times). Most people rely on the auto to get around as bus service on Route 1 is slow and unpredictable because of high traffic volume. The center attraction is a huge suburban-type strip mall surrounded by condo towers. As a result, the county has to backtrack to figure out how to incorporate better means of public transit to this area.

Back to the Bay Area…what I’ve noticed with transit villages around the BART stations is that they don’t assimilate into the existing neighborhoods. At Fruitvale you have this behemoth structure that adjoins the commercial district on Intl., but it feels like it doesn’t want to associate with the rest of the neighborhood. The dismal development at EC Plaza earlier in the decade showed the lack of vision of creating a sustainable commercial/residential addition to the community. So much promise for that area and all you got was a strip mall with styrofoam architectural detailling. Very auto-focused. Does not blend in with the community along San Pablo Ave. ZERO housing built.

There are lessons to be learned throughout the process. The most important ones are learned from others’ mistakes.

Re: 30th/Mission, it’s in limbo until we make it a priority. BART and MTC are wrapped up in extension projects (BART to Warm Springs, BART to SJ, eBART, Oakland Airport Connector), and aren’t making the urban core a priority. This philosophy is actually changing, but it’s somewhat embryonic and theoretical at this point. And so much prior planning has already been done on those extensions that we aren’t seeing real steps being taken yet to step up urban service to where it needs to be. Basically, the suburban projects are the ones being funded (or vying for funding) right now, while the urban improvements are being postponed until the next generation of projects. This is why you see the sort of backwards approach, in which all the expensive rail projects are in the suburbs, while the high-ridership urban corridors are basically only getting cheaper BRT projects (Van Ness, Geary, and Telegraph/East 14th). The Central Subway is the notable exception … but then, you probably already know my thoughts on that. And then there’s Caltrain DTX, which is the rare gem in the bunch.

The 30th St station is gathering dust pending the political leadership to put it forward

@david vartanoff

The Van Ness/Potrero line is the old Muni H streetcar. I completely agree that this should be brought back and connected via C Chav or Evans to HP

Infill? yes, And fgar better cost benefit than even a mile of the the SJ boondoggle. Along w/ a station east of LM, there is fallow land there for a mini yard/telay track installation to hold OOS trains, lay up trains to serve events @ Coliseum–which needs to be three tracks two platforms.

BTW, does anyone know what ever happened to the 30th St and Mission Station? I read parts of the study from the BART website, but there is no indication as to whether they are moving forward with this project or simply have it eternally on the back burner.

As for your comment about a smaller pool of riders, I think this also depends on how you design a neighborhood. This is the exact point of what BART’s survey data shows, and this was the exact reason why I went through the trouble of excerpting those maps and including them in the post. Ridership at 16th/Mission is several times higher than what’s at North Concord, even though most riders at 16th/Mission are coming from within one-half mile of the station (see the map in the post). This implies that the way to increase ridership is exactly by creating dense neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of stations. Providing lots of parking is by no means an guarantee of ridership (see, e.g. tons of empty parking at Millbrae). Density, on the other hand, is a far surer guarantee. In the long-term, the system will be better-used if we prioritize urban density near stations.

I would really suggest you click that Arlington link that eddo provided above. WMATA and BART are similar in many respects — about the same miles of track, similar age (WMATA is just slightly younger and learned from our mistakes). Two big differences between BART and WMATA? WMATA has way more stations, and it has essentially created urban downtowns next to its metro stations — and this is critical — even where the surrounding area is suburban. (Cross-reference: I also wrote about this topic last year on this post.) The point is: this approach, which we have mostly not followed in the Bay Area, creates a much larger pool of riders than a parking lot. And for doing that, WMATA’s ridership is about double BART’s, for about the same number of track miles. We have a long way to go on this.

Completely backwards. This means that the only people who are willing to take BART are people withing walking distance of the station, UNLESS a parking facility near BART is built. If you get rid of the parking, you will change the pattern of BART users around the station, but you will draw on a smaller pool of customers.