Archive for the ‘Contra Costa’ Category
April 2009 BART Budget and Project Updates
UPDATE (24 April 2009): At its April 23 meeting, the BART board decided to postpone approval of the Oakland Airport Connector, but nonetheless approved the transfer of $50 million of seismic retrofit funding and $70 million of ARRA stimulus funding to the project. Meanwhile, the FEIR for eBART was approved 8-1, with Tom Radulovich dissenting. More details on those projects below.
My apologies for the slow posting schedule lately. I will be very busy in upcoming weeks, so posting will be on the slow side by necessity, and may have to go on hiatus. I have not yet forgotten about the promised posts on the Delta; but for now, here is a post on tomorrow’s BART board agenda.
BART’s $54 million FY10 budget deficit — which it is projected will enlarge to a $249 million deficit over the next four years — has already gotten quite a bit of publicity. To close that deficit, BART is considering several measures, including additional parking fees at East Bay stations, and a 10% fare hike starting July 1, 2009. BART may also reduce evening and weekend headways from 15 minutes back to 20 minutes, restoring the pre-2008 timetable; also under consideration is a reduction of service to the Peninsula stations from two lines to only one. Even if these changes were implemented, there would still remain a $23 million deficit for this fiscal year. To deal with that remaining $23 million gap, some combination of additional fare hikes are possible, including: a $2 increase to the SFO station fare, a 25-cent increase to the minimum fare, a 10-cent increase for transbay trips, or increasing the proposed 10% fare hike to 15%. Further service reductions are also a possibility, although raising fares would bring in considerably more revenue than the amount of money that would be saved by cutting service. Midday service between South Hayward and Fremont may be reduced from two lines to one line, and direct service between Richmond/Fremont and San Francisco may also be eliminated during midday hours.
On Walkability, Density, and Transit Villages
It’s official: according to the WalkScore.com rankings, San Francisco has been determined to be America’s most walkable city, as reported by the Chronicle. Our fair city’s score of 86 out of 100 just edged out New York’s 83, Boston’s 79, Chicago’s 76, and Philadelphia’s 74. The WalkScore algorithm does have some shortcomings (which the site frankly admits) — pedestrian conditions on Stockton Street in SF’s Chinatown could be much better than they are now, but that did not stop Chinatown from receiving a top score of 99 out of 100, a score largely based on the high density of a large variety of shops and services in a very compact area. But for anyone who has strolled through San Francisco’s downtown or neighborhood commercial districts, this news does not really come as too much of a surprise. Check out the complete listing of neighborhood scores here.
But the most revealing part of the article was not the part glorifying San Francisco, but rather, the part indicating that the Bay Area, taken as a whole, could be much more walkable than it is now. The Bay Area region fell in third place, “well below the greater Washington, D.C., and Boston regions,” according to the Chron. This reflects the fact that while the Washington, D.C. area has allowed Metro to shape dense land use patterns near stations (even for stations outside of the central core), the Bay Area has been slower to allow BART to have the same effect. We should be careful about discussing density and walkability in the same breath, as they are not equivalent. An older suburban downtown whose buildings front directly onto the street is quite walkable, if not particularly dense, and on the flip side, high-rises alone cannot make a neighborhood truly walkable if the street level fails to provide safety and amenities for pedestrians. But well-planned density that is sensitive to the street provides the extra bodies that make a walkable district that much more bustling and successful.
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| Courtesy Beyond DC. |
Consider Bethesda, Maryland, pictured at right. Located on the D.C. Metro Red Line, Bethesda is a great example of how dense, walkable districts can bloom around rail nodes, even in an otherwise suburban setting. (Check out this Google satellite map of Bethesda. It shows how the densely urbanized streets that are within easy access of a Metro station are very clearly delineated from the suburban neighborhoods further from the line.) The Bay Area, by contrast, is adamantly low-rise, not just in the suburbs, but also in most neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland. In general, only the urban downtown districts make any attempt to reach for the sky — so we have not truly leveraged the potential inherent in most of the rail nodes scattered around the Bay Area. The idea of mid-rises or even shorter high-rises at places like San Leandro and Millbrae BART stations might seem unthinkable — but the Bay Area’s conception of cities, walking, and transit would be quite different if even suburban cities had permitted miniature skylines to sprout at their rail stations. It is also interesting to note that the different development patterns have given rise to contrasting effects on transit ridership. Both BART and Metro are slightly over 100 miles long, and the two systems are of comparable age (Metro is just a few years younger). And yet, while BART reported an average of 367,570 daily riders last quarter, Metrorail set a record last Friday, July 11 of 854,638 riders — a higher ridership than BART can even support as long as its service patterns require operation of four routes through a single transbay tube. What explains the pronounced difference? The fact that Metro has twice the number of stations as BART for approximately the same amount of track certainly goes a long way toward making the system accessible to more people. But another factor (though certainly not the only other factor) that explains the difference must be that Metro has helped give rise to dense, walkable cities, which feed the system with a natural ridership base that is largely missing from BART because the land use around BART stations (already too few to begin with) is often not that intense.
June 2008 Election: State Legislature Roundup
This post will provide some information on the Democratic primary for the California legislature campaigns. The blurbs that follow are essentially endorsements, but I hesitate to use the word “endorsement” here, because to my mind, use of that word ought to be supported by a fuller discussion, drawing on a large range of issues. Because this blog has a relatively narrow topical focus, I wasn’t sure what the interest level would be outside of that focus; in any case, there did not turn out to be time to put together a more complete discussion.
It probably goes without saying that my that my opinions about these these candidates are based on more than just their records on transit and planning issues — in fact, that may have only been a small part of the equation. But I figured that if you are reading this blog, you are probably interested in the candidates’ perspectives on these topics — particularly because in campaigning, these issues often get lost in the shuffle, even though some of us find them to be extremely important. So that is the focus of these blurbs, as a starting point; readers are of course encouraged to research other issues they care about. This post does not pretend to be a thorough or equal discussion of all candidates campaigning for the same position — nor is this a complete list of all races. Candidates are after the jump.
