Archive for the ‘Peninsula’ Category
Peninsula Investments
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.
The Pedestrianization Fever Moves South
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| 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.
Open Thread and Early May News Roundup
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.
Shifting Funds, Shifty Priorities
First, A Few Numbers (and Acronyms)
Regular readers may recall our previous discussion of Transportation 2035, the latest update to MTC’s ongoing efforts on the Regional Transportation Plan. Earlier this year, we wrote a special feature that describes the multifaceted plan, fleshing out how MTC has proposed to allocate $226 billion of local, state, and federal transportation funding that was expected to become available to the Bay Area over the next quarter century. However, changes in the economy and funding climate have necessitated that MTC revise a few aspects of the RTP. The State of California yanked away STA money that funds transit operations; in the Bay Area, this means that local transit operators will lose access to over $55 million that they were relying upon for the remainder of this fiscal year, and no STA funding at all will be provided in upcoming years. Assuming that the state reinstates STA funding in five years, the Bay Area will have lost $1.2 billion of STA and spillover funds in the interim; MTC also projected a $4.5 billion loss in TDA revenue over the 25-year RTP timeline. Another change is VTA’s recent announcement that it can only afford to build the BART extension to San Jose as far as Berryessa Station, postponing the construction of the downtown subway alignment. This, in turn, is connected to the issue of declining transportation sales tax revenue; this is potentially problematic throughout the region, not just in Santa Clara County, although it is not yet clear just how problematic. Considering the new forecasts for transit revenue, the region’s transit operation shortfall will increase from $3.2 to $8.5 billion. This includes a $283 million shortfall for AC Transit, a $442 million shortfall for Golden Gate Transit, a $1.6 billion shortfall for SamTrans, a $1.9 billion shortfall for Muni, and a whopping $3.2 billion shortfall for VTA, which is the worst operation shortfall in the region. Meanwhile, the transit capital shortfall will increase from $16.1 to $17.1 billion. It also takes into consideration that the cost of the BART extension to San Jose has increased from $6.1 billion to $7.6 billion (year of expenditure). Overall, the $226 billion plan has been reduced in size to a $218 billion plan. The plan adds $1.3 billion of revenue: about $280 million in connection with AC Transit’s Measure VV parcel tax, and $1 billion of VTA joint development revenue. It also anticipates $3 billion of funds for high-speed rail, with half coming from Proposition 1A, and the other half coming from the federal stimulus package’s $8 billion allocation to high-speed rail.
BART to San Jose (Volume 2): The Shadow of the Past
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| Dashed dreams at Millbrae Station. |
Buried in the middle of the introductory post about BART to San Jose was the project’s ridership projection for the year 2030: about 104,000 riders. That number was settled on in 2006, but in 2005, the official projection had even gone as high as 111,500, before the two downtown stations at Civic Plaza/SJSU and Market Street were consolidated into a single station under Santa Clara Street. If it sounds like we’ve been here before, it should. The cavernous Millbrae Station and its gigantic five-story parking garage opened on June 22, 2003 to much fanfare, hailed the greatest intermodal station west of the Mississippi River, thanks to its cross-platform transfer between BART and Caltrain, including BART ticket machines and maps coexisting side-by-side with those of Caltrain. Unsurprisingly, at the time, the $1.5 billion, 8.8-mile San Mateo County extension received unstinting praise from San Jose BART obsession-aries Diridon and Guardino — but notwithstanding the attempted fanfare in 2003, the extension has yet to see true fanfare.
Celebrating a Milestone and Biding Time
Hey, Caltrain: nice work. This past fiscal year, the underappreciated regional rail corridor linking Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco Counties has enjoyed the highest annual ridership in its history (now 145 years and counting): close to 12 million riders, or an average of almost 38,000 each weekday. The average weekday ridership in May 2008? 41,892 riders. In June 2008? 44,079 riders. It may not seem like much compared to the ridership of Muni, BART, or AC Transit, but exceeding the 40,000 mark is a notable milestone for Caltrain, which even during the dot-com boom enjoyed an average maximum of about 35,000 daily weekday riders. Ridership declined after the bust, once again dropping below 30,000 — but since 2004, when Caltrain completed the Caltrain Express (CTX) project and introduced Baby Bullet rush hour express trains that travel between San Francisco and San Jose in just under an hour, ridership has increased 48%. We should celebrate this milestone, but to be fair, this success must be qualified. Caltrain’s diesel operation is subject to the whims of rising fuel prices, and fare hikes are once again on the table, to go into effect January 2009. One proposal would raise only the base fare, by 25 cents. The other proposal would raise the base fare by 25 cents in addition to raising the fare for additional zones by 25 cents. Meanwhile, the surge in ridership since 2004 makes it clear that unmet demand exists for rapid, high quality rail service on this corridor. Augmenting the fleet is more of a short-term fix to accommodate increased demand, biding time until the complete array of funds necessary for Caltrain electrification become available.
Electrification, and grade separations, station improvements, and upgrades constructed in connection with high-speed rail, could transform Caltrain into a much more robust, higher capacity system — and would pave the way for a northward subway extension in San Francisco from the current terminus at 4th and Townsend Streets to the Transbay Transit Center. Besides reducing pollution, electrification of Caltrain will shorten travel times by permitting trains to brake into and accelerate out of stations more quickly (of particular relevance for Caltrain, where stations are often rather closely spaced). Service would be quieter and much more frequent: electrified Caltrain service could operate every 15 minutes or better. For 2020 electrified service, 132 weekday trains were studied (compared to the 98 weekday trains in 2008), but still more could be added to achieve five-minute headways at peak. Midday and weekend trains notwithstanding, Caltrain is still at heart a commuter rail line. But with shorter headways, San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties would enjoy service levels closer to that of BART — plus the express service that BART’s limited track cannot accommodate. Revenue service with electric Caltrain could start in 2014. At what cost? The most recent estimate to rehabilitate the 52-mile route between San Francisco (the current terminus, not Transbay) and San Jose is $626 million, which includes the overhead catenary and ten power substations distributed throughout the route, but not the rolling stock. That’s about $12 million per mile; even adding in the rolling stock, the cost is a fraction of the $170 million per mile cost for the 2003 BART extension to Millbrae and SFO.
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.
A Ferry for Oyster Point
The San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transit Authority dreams of a bright day in the future when many points all around the Bay will be accessible via an expanded ferry network that would carry many more passengers, make more effective connections to buses and rail, and generally be regarded as a serious alternative to land transportation. Among its several proposed additional routes is a direct link between the East Bay and Oyster Point in South San Francisco. Two weeks ago, the South San Francisco City Council unanimously approved the construction of a landmark ferry terminal at Oyster Point, which would be served by ferries running to and from Oakland’s Jack London Square, possibly as early as next year. This ferry ride would not only be more relaxing and scenic than taking BART or driving, it could also be faster than either of those alternatives, at least before you factor in a bus ride to or from the terminal. One note: although this Examiner article reports a 25-minute trip, the EIR estimated about 35 minutes from Oyster Point to Jack London Square, with trips several minutes shorter to either Harbor Bay or Alameda Point. Those travel times seem to be based on three different East Bay terminals rather than multiple stops; I do not know the source of the 10-minute discrepancy, but the 35-minute trip to Jack London Square seems more likely, to allow for passage through the Oakland Estuary.
The Oyster Point location is of course nowhere near BART’s hillside Peninsula route, but it also misses Caltrain’s South San Francisco station, which is located just south of where Oyster Point Boulevard crosses over the tracks. Walking near “scenic” Highway 101 is unpleasant in any event, so SamTrans feeder buses and company shuttles will be necessary to facilitate connections to local destinations. The ferry route is estimated to have just 700 daily riders (increasing to about 1000 by the year 2025), most of which would be employees commuting from the East Bay to the growing concentration of biotech offices located in South San Francisco. Genentech, for instance, estimates that about 10% of its workforce lives within ten miles of Jack London Square and will include the new ferry service in its incentive plan that provides employees with $4 a day to use on alternative transportation.
Best Wishes for 2008 from BART: Extra Service, Higher Fares
Okay, let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Starting January 1, 2008, BART fares will increase 5.4%, between 10 and 30 cents, depending on the trip. The minimum fare will rise from $1.40 to $1.50.
The good news is that also starting January 1, we’ll be seeing substantial service increases. The previous squabble between BART and SamTrans forced a reduction in service to the newer stations, but now that the two agencies have parted ways, BART will reintroduce more frequent service to the Peninsula extension. Rather than routing all trains through both Millbrae and San Francisco International Airport (SFO) stations, Millbrae and SFO will each be terminal points, a switch that will shave 5-6 minutes off of trips between Millbrae and downtown San Francisco. Also, at all times, there will be two lines serving Colma, South San Francisco, and San Bruno, instead of just the single line that we have now. As the above map suggests, the lines will run as follows:
