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:

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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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I have been too busy lately to post regularly, but there is still plenty going on in the world of Bay Area planning and transit. My guess, and hope, is that people will still want to discuss the news, even though I am unable to pull enough time together to prepare full posts on these topics. Others may want to initiate topics, rather than simply respond to prompts in blog posts. Many websites fill in this niche by setting up open threads. I haven’t tried that yet, because I was not really sure if there would be enough interest, or if there was a critical mass of people commenting and checking in. I am also testing the waters with removing comment moderation, despite ongoing problems with managing spam comments. So this is an experiment with open threads. If it looks to be well-used, it could be made into a regular feature. Please feel free to leave any feedback on the open threads if you feel so inclined.

The last post discussed the SFCTA report on Geary BRT, so here is a roundup of other recent news:

SFMTA Budget is up for debate: To close a $128.9 million shortfall, the SFMTA Board adopted a budget that raised the adult and paratransit individual fares to $2 and adult fast passes to $60 on January 1, 2010. The budget also raises some parking fees, but it eliminates several lines altogether and institutes considerable service cuts on many other lines. As promised, Board President David Chiu will introduce a motion (PDF) at today’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting to veto the MTA-adopted budget. If you’d like to attend, the meeting is in the Board chamber, 2nd floor of SF City Hall, at 1:30 pm.
Update: At the Budget and Finance Committee, the vote was 4-1 (Carmen Chu dissenting) against the MTA’s budget, and Chiu has the seven votes needed to overturn the budget at the full Board.

New parking lot in Oakland defeated: Last night, I learned via Twitter that the Oakland City Council rejected the Redevelopment Agency’s proposal for a temporary surface parking lot on Telegraph Avenue in Downtown Oakland, next to the Fox Theater. The City Council requested that staff investigate the possibility of art installations instead, which would be a considerable improvement over a parking lot. Whatever use is ultimately installed will be temporary, to be dismantled in 2011 when construction will begin on the second phase of Forest City’s Uptown project.

Caltrain to declare a fiscal emergency: Despite ridership gains in 2008 and already having raised fares 25 cents on January 1, Caltrain is scrambling to close its budget shortfall, in light of the lost STA funds; it plans to declare a fiscal emergency in order to exempt service cuts from environmental review.

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When Westfield Centre opened in Downtown San Francisco in September 2006, no new parking structure was built to accommodate the approximately 25 million people that were expected to visit the mall each year. Instead, the basement level food court was physically connected to the concourse mezzanine of Powell Street Station, to emphasize that transit was the most natural travel mode to access the mall; and nearby parking garages, such as Fifth and Mission, have proven sufficient to absorb additional motorists. Oakland’s Uptown District boasts a similarly extensive list of transit options that reach both locally and regionally. So why does the Revelopment Agency, along with Oakland City Councilmembers Brunner, Kernighan, and Reid, support, of all things, a new surface parking lot next to the recently-opened Fox Theater? Especially when there is already ample (in fact, probably excessive) parking in the surrounding area, and when the proposed parking lot will not even prove lucrative during the span of time it takes for Forest City to ready itself for construction of the mixed-use development that will eventually occupy this vacant parcel? Given plans to develop the site in the year 2011 with about 220 housing units and 20,000 square feet of retail, it does not really make sense to spend money to construct and maintain a use that will only have to be dismantled in a couple years, especially if people grow attached to that particular use. The provision of any additional open space ought to be coordinated in conjunction with the planned development, and there is open space nearby in any case, built as a component of the first phase of Forest City’s Uptown project. But that does not justify resorting to a parking lot — even one billed as “temporary” — whose presence will disrupt the pedestrian experience and damage an urban fabric that is in the process of being made whole. Uptown has become increasingly vibrant in recent months, so perhaps the City Council has already forgotten the blighting effect of the vacant lots that existed in years prior. Our humble advice to planners, councilmembers, supervisors, and the like? When in doubt, turn to Ms. Jacobs. She remarked: ” … parking lots … are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction.” Any Oaklanders reading this post who happen to feel perturbed by this flash of 1950s-era suburban planning transported to the East Bay’s urban core are encouraged to write to their Councilmember, or to speak against the parking lot proposal at this week’s City Council meeting.

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.

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Alameda Harbor Bay; courtesy of etthekid.

Prior to the construction in the 1930s of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, Bay Area citizens crossed the Bay by using the once-thriving ferry service. The completion of those bridges and the rising popularity of the automobile greatly affected how people moved throughout the region. Since then, ferry service has been profoundly reduced, now serving a fraction of the riders it once did, generally tourists and a small share of transbay commuters. But as we know, the next big earthquake is not a matter of if, but when; and when it does hit, any damage sustained by BART and the bridges may require that we go back to the basics, by moving people via ferries. The Water Transit Authority (WTA) was established in 1999 to plan an eventual expansion of Bay Area ferry service and terminals, and WTA finally produced a plan in 2003. Then, in October 2007, the Governor signed SB 976 into law, which established the Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA), a new agency that would absorb the WTA. The goal of the legislation was to create an agency that would manage and expand Bay Area ferry service in a way that would make ferries a central component of the region’s response to earthquakes and other emergencies. SB 976 required that WETA adopt a transition plan by January 1, 2009, and an emergency management plan by July 1, 2009. Local concerns about the ferry takeover prompted SB 1093, which took effect in September 2008; that latter bill extended the adoption date for the transition plan to July 1, 2009, and assured Alameda and Vallejo that the transition would be informed by a public process. WETA has since produced the two required draft plans, and the agency now seeks public comment on those plans before adopting final versions.

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This Wednesday, February 25, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission expects to approve its proposed allocation of the federal stimulus money that will be made available to the Bay Area for transportation purposes. The stimulus package that was ultimately approved changed since our last post on this subject, and so MTC has accordingly made changes to its plans. What follows in this post is a more complete description of the altered proposal.

According to the most recent estimates, the Bay Area will receive approximately $490 million of transportation stimulus money, which MTC has discretion to allocate within defined categories. $340 million are FTA transit formula funds pursuant to Section 5307/5309, and $150 million are FHWA/Surface Transportation Program funds.

Of the $340 million for transit, $270 million will be allocated to operators for transit rehabilitation: AC Transit ($25.7 million), BART ($65.3 million), Caltrain ($10.3 million), Golden Gate ($9.4 million), SFMTA ($67.2 million), SamTrans ($7.9 million), VTA ($47.2 million), and $36.4 million for the smaller transit operators.

Rendering of Coliseum BART station; courtesy of BART.

And as for the rest of the FTA funds? MTC plans to allocate the remaining $70 million to the Oakland Airport Connector. In November 2000, Alameda County voters approved by an overwhelming 81.47% Measure B, a 1/2-percent sales tax for transportation that rejuvenated 1986 Measure B. The proceeds from 2000 Measure B were to be allocated to many projects, including highways, BART to Warm Springs, ACE improvements, and the Oakland Airport Connector: a 3.2-mile automated guideway transit system that would connect Oakland International Airport to Coliseum BART, the closest BART station; this function is currently filled by AirBART shuttle buses. The people mover, which would complete the trip between BART and the Airport in under ten minutes, is expected to increase transit share to the Airport — to about 13% (13,540 daily riders), increased from 9% in 2007 — and it could accommodate any future market growth at the Airport. And yet, while it seems like it would be a good idea to improve BART access to Oakland Airport, this particular project is in a sickly state. The cost has ballooned to $529 million, and a large funding gap remains. The project was intended to be a public/private partnership, but the private partners who might have filled the funding gap are no longer interested in pursuing the project. $288 million of public funds are allocated to the project, but $241 million more are needed. Some of that additional money might eventually be obtained from other sources: including $71 million from BART and $50 million saved from seismic retrofit of the Transbay Tube. MTC would now like to apply $70 million of FTA stimulus funds to rescue the people mover and close the funding gap.

This would be an unwise allocation of the money. We literally just got through lamenting that the State of California has yanked five years of State Transit Assistance operating funds from transit agencies; these agencies must now put fare hikes, service cuts, or a combination of the two on the table to close their own deficits. To the extent that MTC can help agencies in need, it should, by allocating the money directly for agencies to use for purposes of rehabilitation and preventive maintenance. The plan to withhold $70 million of valuable stimulus money — only to insert it into the funding pot for a project that is basically a luxury item, at a time when we can scarcely afford necessities let alone luxuries — is frivolous. In any case, we have long believed that the sensible course of action would be to at least revisit the less glamorous option of a rapid bus system with signal priority on the amply wide (6-8 total lanes) Hegenberger Road and Airport Drive. This would provide a link between BART and the Airport that is quicker and more reliable than current AirBART service, at a fraction of the cost of the proposed people mover.

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Downtown Oakland has been in the news a lot in recent weeks, and not in altogether good ways. The Oscar Grant riots, although properly directed at BART and not the City of Oakland, certainly did not boost the city’s reputation. Meanwhile, a few Downtown projects (901 Jefferson, the Ellington, and 630 20th Street) have gone in default, and construction of a new 23-story high-rise, 601 City Center, is on hold. And although we mind these developments, we should not lose sight of the prize. Many components to Downtown revitalization were lined into place as part of former mayor Jerry Brown’s 10K initiative to attract 10,000 new residents to Downtown Oakland. Now, years later, Brown’s efforts to transform Downtown have finally begun to bear fruit in the form of new apartments and a burgeoning retail, restaurant, and nightlife district to support them — and, in the process, create a destination unto itself. Downtown’s day is not quite here yet, but it marches ever closer. And finally, after four decades, one piece of utmost importance will fall into place: the restoration of Oakland’s Fox Theater is complete, and the doors of this Uptown District jewel will, at long last, open to the public once again. The opening gala is planned for February 5.

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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.

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.

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The Safeway and 76 gas station, at the northeast corner of College and Claremont Avenues in Oakland, together occupy a site whose layout is entirely inappropriate for an urban setting, particularly for the intersection of two major avenues. The large parking lot, which fronts directly onto parts of both College and Claremont, is a (sub)urban design error I have long hoped to see corrected — particularly in the Rockridge commercial district, which features a mostly uninterrupted frontage of buildings that open onto the street and contribute to a pleasant pedestrian experience. (Unfortunately, the Highway 24 overpass, which is the neighborhood’s most intrusive interruption, is much less easily corrected than this Safeway parking lot.) Good thing, then, that Safeway has released its latest plans to transform the current site, which is essentially a strip mall. The new plan has more parking (212 spaces) than ideal for a supermarket a few blocks from BART and located in an eminently walkable neighborhood — Safeway’s newer lifestyle stores are not quite farsighted enough to attempt changing the lifestyle of driving. The first floor will feature several small retail spaces (totaling 16,000 square feet) fronting onto College and a small section of Claremont. The 59,000 square foot grocery store will be located on the second floor, so that the parking would at least be hidden behind the retail and under the grocery store. The plan’s weakness looks to be the Claremont frontage, which will feature little retail. All in all, the plan is an improvement over the current auto-oriented store and gas station. Constructing the new building right to the property line will make this wide intersection more attractive by emphasizing its non-perpendicular angularity. For more design images and renderings like the one pictured above, check out the project website.

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