Transbay Blog

Most streets in North Oakland — lined as they are with trees, bungalows, and low-rise apartment buildings — have been built out on a comfortable and pleasant scale. But the shopping center located north and east of the intersection of Broadway and Pleasant Valley Avenue stands apart as, well, anything but pleasant. It is an uninspired 1960s autocentric strip mall, featuring a collection of low-slung buildings centered on a mighty surface parking lot. The shopping center has housed a large Longs Drugs; a smaller but still sizable Safeway; and a collection of smaller retail spaces. But some changes are afoot for this shopping center. The Longs will close, and Safeway will covet the larger space, even while it moves forward with plans to expand another of its stores at College and Claremont, just one mile north of this shopping center. Safeway’s proposal for the Broadway & Pleasant Valley shopping center would relocate an expanded Safeway (65,000+ square feet) to the northeastern corner of the site, which currently houses an 87,220 square foot Longs. Here is a picture and diagram of Safeway’s initial proposal for the site:

Aerial of Safeway proposal, courtesy of Eric Fischer (link to community mtg. photo set).

Courtesy of Safeway. Click here for a packet of diagrams and drawings (external link).

The design is, unfortunately, flawed. It basically perpetuates the current design, by maintaining long, squat buildings that surround the surface parking lot. It does add office space, and it fills in the perimeter of the site. But buildings remain set back from the street, offset by landscaping, and the prominence of the central parking lot is maintained; moreover, additional parking is added to the roof of the Safeway. In other words, the design remains wholly suburban. Pedestrian access to the shopping center is currently pretty miserable — sidewalks at the entry and exit points break off for the convenience of automobile navigation, or are omitted altogether. Based on these sketches, the new design does not completely address that problem either, except for including a few colored crosswalks.

Safeway’s proposal is a misstep in an urban setting. Indeed, a quick glance at a Google satellite image makes it clear that the current suburban layout is an anomaly in North Oakland. So why should it be carried forward any longer? This site presents a special opportunity to fill a vast hole with a development pattern that is more fitting for a city. We would encourage Safeway to take the time to think this through carefully, rather than rush into unimaginative proposals like the one above. Here is our (more ambitious) concept for this site.

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Land use is famously about local controversies. Neighborhood groups, often brandishing long, unwieldy names like “Citizens For A More Responsible” something-or-other, fill up municipal legislative chambers demanding justice; other distinctly local personalities may also emerge into the forefront of the discussion. In addition, land use decisions are often based on a context made up of such fine microscopic detail that it would unproductive or impractical for the state or federal government, both presumably inexpert in those details, to intervene. A local government thus enjoys relatively complete autonomy over how land within its domain is used, subject to only limited requirements issued at the state or federal level.

But one major exception to that general rule is housing. The State of California requires that General Plans contain a set of elements, which lay out a blueprint and policy direction to guide future development. Among those elements, the Housing Element is singled out as special, in that it must be updated every five years in accordance with the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). The state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and ABAG will project the number of housing units that the Bay Area will need to accommodate for the next several years, at four income levels (very low, low, moderate, and above moderate), and then will assign a housing share to governments throughout the Bay Area, ensuring that the region, as a whole, meets the required total. Each local government then updates its Housing Element every five years, specifying how it will accommodate its share of the regional housing need. Cities throughout the Bay Area have been engaged in this process this year.

This process ensures that local governments plan to accommodate housing units that are accessible to a range of income levels. Without such a procedure in place, it’s easy to imagine what could happen. Many cities — whose elected officials might simply translate the parochial demands of a local NIMBY group into something resembling legislation — would shirk on their obligation to ensure the production of housing units, particularly affordable units. They might, for instance, amend the zoning code to contain a set of requirements that are a proxy for wealth, ensuring that only affluent citizens can afford to live there. Other cities might freeze growth altogether, thinking only of what will happen within their city limits and ignoring what the effect would be outside. The point is that without a state mandate prohibiting that sort of behavior, it would be difficult or impossible for California to accommodate, in a just and equitable fashion, a population that is projected to increase to 60 million by the year 2050. The state has an enormous interest in ensuring that all of its citizens, of all income levels, are safely housed; but accomplishing this goal requires the cooperation of local governments, who, after all, are empowered to control land use through zoning.

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Some of you will have already noticed that the sidebar on this blog has had a bit of an overhaul. This has been on the to-do list for awhile, because I noticed that many people come here searching for information about a certain project or plan — but, depending on the query, the search tool was sometimes worse than useless in connecting readers to old posts that have been pushed off the main page. The site statistics indicate that some people gave up altogether before finding the right post. So that has been replaced with a collection of pages, some old and some new, that cover the broad themes and topics that we turn to again and again in different ways. The pages are intended to be complementary to the posts — they will hopefully prove useful as a navigation tool to find older posts, but they will also have newer and separate content.

Another reason why I wanted to go this route with a handful of pages is so that I can keep these pages up-to-date as information changes, which would be very cumbersome to do for old posts. The TOD page at the top, in particular, will eventually feature more content not included in the posts. Other pages will develop over time, as more posts appear on the blog that fills out one of these categories. The pages will be kept updated as projects change; small updates will be made without notice, but I will announce larger updates, either on the sidebar itself or somewhere in a post.

The sidebar newsfeed that started up again a few weeks ago will continue, with about a half dozen daily links that may be of interest to readers. Some people requested awhile back that the newsfeed have its own RSS feed, and that’s now in place. The blogroll has been revised, expanded, and included in a separate links page. Posts are also archived into smaller, more finely-divided categories that are listed on a separate page. Anyway — have a look around, and feel free to offer suggestions in the comments.

It’s funny how things sometimes turn out. In terms of funding, BART has long been the Bay Area’s favorite son. Year after year, BART is allocated a major piece of the region’s transit funding pie, a piece that is disproportionately large for the number of people it moves. Meanwhile: slow, antiquated, dirty, screechy Caltrain has played the ugly duckling. Chronically underfunded, Caltrain has only gotten to pick at the leftovers passed onto it from its three component counties. In the early days, BART was originally planned to take over the Southern Pacific right-of-way, operating service as far south as Arastradero Road in Palo Alto, even in the system’s then-planned initial phase — and then eventually to San Jose, extending south on both sides of the Bay from Fremont and Palo Alto. In 1961, San Mateo County, which was already served by Southern Pacific trains, withdrew from the BART district. This decision resulted in at least a temporary moratorium on BART’s southward expansion on the Peninsula — though, as we know, planned southward expansion on the east side of the Bay remains alive and well. Caltrain has been the proverbial thorn in the side of those who dream of unifying Bay Area regional rail under the BART brand, even though electrifying and upgrading Caltrain could provide comparable service for a fraction of the cost.

But like the Ugly Duckling, this story also looks like it will have a happy ending. For high-speed rail will soon sweep into the region, transforming and re-energizing interest in the ex-SP corridor. BART’s gauge, unlike Caltrain’s, is incompatible with high-speed rail; so, when all is said and done, BART’s once-futuristic technology will be exposed as the dinosaur, while the ugly duckling Caltrain will at last transform into the swan.

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The Bay Area Council Economic Institute (BACEI), in response to a request from the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, has released its Bay Area Economic Recovery Workplan. This is essentially a compendium of regional priorities and projects (submitted by MTC and local governments) that strategizes potential targets for ARRA stimulus money. The proposals fall into several categories — transportation, housing, water, energy/climate, workforce, business, and science/innovation — generally emphasizing projects of regional or multi-jurisdictional significance that will update the Bay Area’s infrastructure to promote future economic prosperity and sustainability. Some $31 billion of stimulus funds will be allocated to California, of which some of these Bay Area projects will certainly receive a share. California is also positioning itself to receive up to $20 billion more, factoring in awards coming in through discretionary grant programs.

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UPDATE (3 June 2009): Caltrain has announced that it will not eliminate weekend service to close the budget deficit, nor will it increase fares on individual passes. Instead, it will pursue other measures to close the gap: raising the Go Pass fee, raising parking fees, and reducing midday service to 60 minute headways.

Tonight, May 27, Caltrain will hold meetings to receive public comment on its proposals to increase fares and cut service, in order to close a budget shortfall that is projected to expand to $10.1 million by next fiscal year. Caltrain, along with the SFMTA and AC Transit, may declare a fiscal emergency, both to reflect the shortfall and to exempt service cuts from environmental review under CEQA.

We discussed Caltrain’s proposed service cuts briefly here before. Since that time, the proposed $1 bicycle surcharge has not been moved forward as a potential avenue to increase revenue. But different configurations of fare increases and service cuts are still up for discussion. This table (PDF) charts the possible schemes for fare and fee increases:

• For individual fares: (i) an across-the-board 25-cent increase in base fare, (ii) a 25-cent increase in fare for each successive zone of travel, or (iii) both.
• Increase Eligible Discounts and other fares by a similar proportion as above.
• Increase fees for the Go Pass. (Companies with at least 70 employees currently pay an annual fee to give their employees a Go Pass, which provides the employee with unlimited rides on Caltrain. That annual fee is the same price as a monthly pass within two travel zones. A proposed increase would raise the Go Pass fee to the price of a three-zone monthly pass.)
• Increase parking fees.

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So I was thinking about redoing the layout of Transbay Blog eventually. I had not planned on doing it so soon, but this weekend, things on the site went haywire. For a quick fix, I reloaded the site with this new theme, which is plain but functional. It will have to stay more or less like this for the time being. The sidebar is missing some features (the blogroll, among others), which will be fixed. I will also probably restore some sort of header image. In the meantime, if you have strong feelings about aspects of the old/new designs that you like or dislike, please feel free to leave a comment and I will take that into consideration when fixing up the new layout.

University & Bryant, in downtown Palo Alto. Courtesy of Flickr user ikkoskinen.

Has the new 17th Street pedestrian plaza in San Francisco’s Castro District set off a spark? San Francisco is not the only Bay Area city that dreams of creating bustling new pedestrian open spaces, nor is it the only one that isn’t quite satisfied with the current state of its main street.  But of all places, Palo Alto, which has of late gained more of a reputation for NIMBYism than for embracing progressive city planning? Well, sort of. Not surprisingly, this latest push for pedestrianization is of local collegiate origin, coming from students in a class at Stanford University’s design institute, but the idea seems to be catching on fast; the Facebook group created just this week has added on average more than 100 new members each day.  Right now, it is basically a brainstorm to close off several blocks of University Avenue, Palo Alto’s main drag, to cars — specifically, the blocks between High and Cowper streets, accounting for most of the downtown commercial strip. The plan, which is of course only a sketch at this point, suggests initially allowing cross traffic through the pedestrian zone, but then later transitioning to a bona fide car-free zone in which motorists navigate a counterclockwise loop around the zone using side streets.

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Dear Readers: apologies for the sudden dropoff in posting. I’ve received email inquiry asking why the recent silence, despite all the mischief afoot (pedestrian plazas, transit operator budgets going haywire, and so forth), so an explanation is owed. I haven’t had any time lately to post — but truth be told, I haven’t had much heart for it, either. For awhile I had considered upgrading the site and redoing its design. But right now, I’m weighing if it’s worth putting in the time to do that, or whether it’d be better to take a vacation, or maybe just stop altogether. Posting will continue but probably remain slow until it all gets sorted out.

BART survey data (2008). Top: rider home locations; bottom: rider employment locations. Courtesy of BART.

BART has released its 2008 Station Profile Study, updating its last study from 1998. The data, which is collected from rider surveys, is BART’s version of the census. It reveals the demographic profile of BART riders, and it provides valuable information on how riders use the BART system: where they are coming from, where they are going, how they travel from their home a nearby station, and how they travel to their destination after riding BART. The data, which is available both system-wide and for each individual station, confirms what we know anecdotally about the role of urban vs. suburban stations: 81% of riders at 16th/Mission walked to BART, while merely 3% walked to Orinda; 72% of riders drive to North Concord/Martinez, but a miniscule 1% drive to Powell. I plan to do some number-crunching on the data in the future; but for now, I wanted to share some interesting results and initial impressions. In addition to clarifying how BART riders currently make use of the system, the survey data reveals how the Bay Area could better take advantage of this critical regional asset than we do today. The lesson we learn from the data is the lesson that we already knew: we need to do a better job of linking transit and land use, particularly along BART’s heavy rail metro lines. This is something that we are always talking about, and the BART surveys do suggest that the region is moving in the right direction in terms of promoting transit-oriented development. Bicycle trips from home to station bumped up from 3% to 4%, while transit trips declined from 23% to 15%. Nearly half (49%) of riders access stations by car (34% solo, 10% dropoff, 5% carpool), the same as in 1998. However, more people are now walking to BART stations from their home than they were a decade ago: 31% in 2008, compared to 26% in 1998. More people are also walking from BART to work or other destination: 74% in 2008, compared to 67% in 1998. Furthermore, at 6 major CBD stations (12th St, 19th St, Lake Merritt, Berkeley, Montgomery, Powell) and 5 other mostly urban stations (Ashby, North Berkeley, El Cerrito Plaza, Colma, and Balboa Park), home origin points increased by 10% or more, while car and transit origins decreased. More home-based pedestrian trips at downtown stations reflect a trend toward urban/downtown infill housing, epitomized by Jerry Brown’s 10K housing initiative in Downtown Oakland and San Francisco’s Rincon Hill plan.

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