Caltrain, unlike other transit operators that have been deprived of State Transit Assistance funds, does not enjoy a dedicated revenue source.  Rather, its operations depend mostly on farebox revenue and contributions from San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, the three member agencies that make up the Joint Powers Board.  It’s no small problem, then, that San Mateo has suggested it may reduce its contribution by 70%, which would trigger corresponding reductions from San Francisco and Santa Clara.  The end result, if that were to happen?  A roughly $30 million budget deficit off of a $97 million budget.  Caltrain has indicated that balancing the budget under those circumstances might require cutting all off-peak service — midday, nights, and weekends — by no later than June 2011.

It hardly needs to be said that this would be a fundamental change for the worst.  It would reduce rail service on this corridor to bare commuter operations, while decimating the utility of Caltrain for transit-dependent and recreational off-peak riders.  If such a deep service cut were approved, it would be a giant leap backwards, in the exact opposite direction from where Caltrain should be headed as it moves toward electrification.

It is not yet clear whether the situation will actually turn out to be that bad.  So far, all we have had to go on  is Mike Scanlon’s initial doomsday pronouncement at the April 1 JPB meeting.  Clearly, though, there will be an important discussion in the near future about Caltrain’s upcoming budget and the viability of its service.  In some sense, Caltrain has so far held on surprisingly well under the circumstances, since it was able to deflect an unpopular cut to weekend service when closing a $10.1 million budget deficit for this fiscal year.  But ridership has decreased as compared to last year, so there is reluctance to further depress ridership by increasing fares — and even a steep fare hike would not be nearly enough to close a $30 million deficit.  State funding, restored by the gas tax swap legislation, would also not be enough, providing Caltrain with just $5.1 million for this fiscal year and $4.5 million in FY12.  With the JPB’s three member agencies threatening to turn inward and reduce their financial support to Caltrain in these tough economic times, there are limited options available under the current governance scheme that would ensure Caltrain’s long-term financial sustainability.

Passenger rail on the Peninsula was almost laid to rest in the 1970s, but was ultimately saved.  It could be saved again (though the threat now does not look that severe).  But is there the political will to make the necessary changes?  Caltrain has come a long way even with minimal means, but it has been subject to the whimsy of its member agencies, who have other priorities.  Meanwhile, the progress that has been made on electrification has been sluggish, even though electrification points the way toward the promise of the future.  Since introducing Baby Bullet service, Caltrain has assumed a more prominent role in the Bay Area’s regional rail network, but it has outgrown its existing, primitive method of financing.  It is worthy of a three-county special district, along the lines of the BART district.  By reconstituting as a special district, Caltrain would be granted valuable taxing authority and dedicated funding.  Making this change will not be easy, because it requires enactment at the State level — but doing so would give Caltrain access to tax revenue, while ensuring the security of future service.

At the same time, BART will indulge in one of its favorite traditions since 2003: the seemingly endless rearranging of service for the Peninsula stations and the “Quentin L. Kopp Wye.” On weeknights after 7:00 p.m., and all day on weekends, only the Pittsburg/Bay Point line will serve stations south of Daly City; the line will stop at the Airport before terminating at Millbrae. Weekdays, the Richmond line will continue to terminate at Millbrae, and the Pittsburg/Bay Point line will continue to terminate at SFO. The Dublin/Pleasanton line will now always terminate at Daly City. Under this configuration, the routing of the three lines that terminate at Richmond or Fremont will remain the same as they are now, even off-peak.

This map depicts the service changes on the Peninsula:

San Mateo County service beginning September 14, 2009. Courtesy of BART.

Side remark for transit cartography enthusiasts: This map is different from the usual style, but it is official; BART has been tinkering with alternative system maps. The above image is excerpted from a file documenting the new schedules starting September 14 (PDF). But there is also a full version of the map, which includes other Bay Area rail lines, a separate diagram depicting three-line evening/Sunday service, as well as popular destinations served by BART. A sample of the full map has been on display at the west side of Montgomery Station.

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.

Creating swans out of ducklings of course requires money, but money is almost certainly on the way. Fast on the heels of the Workplan released by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has released its draft plan for the Bay Area’s high-speed rail stimulus application, which has been dubbed the Peninsula Corridor Investment Strategy.

MTC envisions a two-phase strategy. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has already prepared a programmatic EIR/EIS, which examined the environmental impacts and benefits of the high-speed rail project at a broader level. CHSRA is now preparing more detailed environmental documents that will assess environmental impacts and mitigation measures on individual segments of the HSR route, for example, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor. This will probably be completed sometime in the next couple of years and will shed light on various other HSR-related infrastructure projects, including: Caltrain stations that will need to be redesigned to accommodate high-speed rail, and various tunneled and elevated segments of track needed to separate the many grade crossings along the Caltrain corridor. These projects are deferred to Phase II. They are not ready to be constructed; indeed, it’s not even clear how much they will cost to build, so we will not pursue ARRA stimulus funds for them.

So what will we seek federal funds for? For specific projects that have already passed through or are exempt from thorough environmental review, or which will be cleared within a couple of years. These projects will be ready for construction, pending detailed design work. The funding allocations are as follows:

Transbay Transit Center, San Francisco: Constructing the above-ground portion of the Transbay Transit Center facility will cost $1.19 billion, and building the subway station box in the first phase of construction will require $400 million extra upfront, but TJPA projects this move will save $100 million over the course of the project. As such, the Bay Area will request $400 million of ARRA money to fast-track the train box. Moreover, $52 million will be requested for design of the 1.3-mile downtown rail extension (DTX), and an additional $205 million toward lengthening the platforms at the Transbay Transit Center, in response to the CHSRA’s demand for 1,312 feet of fully tangent platform (see schematic below, which shows the curvature on the western side of the platforms, and the platform extension eastward). The 250-foot extension increases station length to about 1,750 feet, so it is curious that this relatively short extension generates the need for a disproportionately high amount of additional funding (over half the total to excavate the rest of the train box).  This amounts to a total of $657 million ARRA money requested for Transbay/DTX.

Courtesy of MTC/TJPA.

4th & King, San Francisco: Pending alteration of the DTX track layout to allow trains to move efficiently in and out of Transbay, the platform track allocated to high-speed rail would provide sufficient capacity; but some Caltrain or high-speed runs may terminate at 4th and King as necessary. In any case, $98 million will be requested toward funding a $100 million reconfiguration of the existing Caltrain terminal at 4th & King.

San Bruno: $212 million (out of $275 million) will be requested to construct grade separations at San Bruno Station.

Corridor-wide Improvements: $230 million (out of $231 million) to be requested for positive train control, which, by federal mandate, must be implemented by 2015. $301 million (out of $785 million) will be requested for Caltrain electrification.

San Jose Diridon: This is a high-speed rail station that we have spent noticeably less time on than Transbay. $149 million (out of $150 million) will be requested to expand and reconfigure Cahill Str… ahem, San Jose Diridon Station, which will be served by high-speed rail, Caltrain, Capitols, ACE, Coast Starlight, VTA light rail, and maybe even BART one day. As we discussed several months ago when 2008 Measure B passed, the City of San Jose and SVLG are positively salivating at the idea of creating a Grand Central in the Bay Area, because it would place San Jose in conscious competition with San Francisco (which for years has informally referred to its planned Transbay Transit Center as the region’s approximation of Grand Central). The City of San Jose has partnered (PDF) with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to reimagine “the premier transportation hub of northern California.” The question is: which station, Transbay or Diridon, will be grander?

No, scratch that; the real question is, or should be: how are we going to plan, fund, and build a well-coordinated and efficiently-operated rail corridor?  At this point in time, our regional dollars should be directed entirely toward fulfilling this latter concern, because there is no shortage of engineering issues that lie ahead. To the extent that any of the requested Diridon money, if obtained, goes toward designing the functional layout of the station, that’s fine. But note that Caltrain already plans to reconfigure this station with two additional island platforms and four platform tracks, in addition to a fourth track between the station’s north end and CEMOF, Caltrain’s maintenance facility. As is true with certain other transportation projects planned for San Jose, this station seems to be more about glitz than effective transportation, and using stimulus dollars to design an architecturally grand structure is not really at the top of the list of regional priorities. It is, nonetheless, still unsurprising that this piece of the pie will be requested on San Jose’s behalf. The standard rendering and a diagram below:

Top: courtesy of Newlands & Company. Bottom: courtesy of MTC/City of San Jose.

All in all, these projects total to $3.378 billion, but the Peninsula Corridor Investment Strategy recommends that only $1.647 billion (49%) of that be directed to our high-speed rail stimulus grant application. Even so, $1.6 billion is a full 20% of the $8 billion that the stimulus has allocated to high-speed rail nationally, and many other states are naturally interested in pursuing new rail service. So it remains to be seen how much stimulus money we will actually get.

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.

Similar car-free experiments have been tried repeatedly in cities large and small throughout the United States and beyond — sometimes successfully, and other times not, although success does not necessarily turn on whether the pedestrian mall is in a suburban or urban area. Still, there are reasons to believe that pedestrian space, even if it did not extend the full length of downtown, could become a valuable civic amenity. University Avenue is not a major transit street (Palo Alto’s primary transit corridor is the pedestrian-unfriendly El Camino Real), but it is a relatively narrow, traditional main street that has active retail uses at the street level, with ample off-street parking tucked behind the storefronts that could absorb an estimated 120 displaced on-street spots. The street connects to the Palo Alto Caltrain station — a regional bus hub, and the second busiest station on the line — and it leads straight into the Stanford campus. So University Avenue generally enjoys a healthy level of pedestrian activity, but it is also subjected to considerable vehicular congestion, particularly at rush hour, when a long line of cars waiting to merge onto Highway 101 sometimes protrudes westward into the street grid. Merchants on Market Street in San Francisco have been slow to realize that closing off car access could actually increase traffic to their businesses, but even they are finally coming around. What will the learning curve be in Palo Alto? It just so happens that the students have already approached some Palo Alto city officials, merchants, and their customers. The response: “most of the merchants are especially enthusiastic.” You don’t say.

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.

High-Speed Rail: The controversy on the Peninsula over high-speed rail continues. Palo Alto has already demanded that trains run in a tunnel, and now Burlingame is following suit, though of course without offering suggestions as to how it plans to foot the bill. Palo Alto’s Vice Mayor Jack Morton is also calling for the High-Speed Rail Authority to be dissolved. But these Peninsula protests may be frustrated by Galgiani’s bill AB 289, which is making its way through the California legislature. AB 289 would exempt from CEQA review all grade separations carried out in connection with California High-Speed Rail. (Grade separations are of course what Palo Alto has already protested as being a divisive “Berlin Wall”, although it would increase safety to fully separate train traffic.) CEQA exemptions are often a thorny subject. CEQA, when placed into the hands of persistent NIMBYs, can be a powerful tool for indefinitely delaying projects, including very desirable projects like high-speed rail. But CEQA is, at its heart, about disclosure; so exempting any type of project from CEQA suggests that the lead agency will proceed without having as full knowledge of the situation as one presumably would have after preparing an EIR. It also sets a dubious precedent to establish CEQA exemptions on a project-by-project basis. In principle, it is preferable to exempt classes of projects, rather than individual projects, because individual exemptions that are not based on some sort of underlying rationale are a double-edged sword. Just one example of this: earlier this year, transit advocates were up in arms at the Governor’s budget proposal to exempt specific freeway projects from CEQA; but now, those same advocates may well relish the idea of fast-tracking high speed rail with a bypass of environmental review. It is indeed frustrating to watch CEQA — legislation whose purpose is to facilitate protection of the environment — be used in ways that delay or block environmentally-beneficial projects, like high-speed rail and the San Francisco Bicycle Plan. But simply exempting projects on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis does little to deepen our understanding of how to implement successful CEQA reform. That said, the AB 289 exemption is also not exactly ad hoc, because railroad grade separations are already exempt from CEQA; this bill explicitly extends that existing policy to construction undertaken by the CHSRA. Aside from the AB 289 CEQA bill, three other HSR-related bills are working their way through the state legislature: SB 783 (requires the CHSRA to prepare a business plan to receive bond funding), SB 451 (endows the CHSRA with certain eminent domain powers), and SB 409 (creates a Department of Railroads).

We have an election in two weeks: On May 19, Californians will vote on Propositions 1A-1F. Ideally, I would have a post for you on these propositions, but I’m not sure if I’ll get a chance to write it. To get up to speed, check out the running analysis at Calitics, the California Budget Project, and the Courage Campaign, among many other sources.

J-Get Me to the Church on Time? Not so fast: For those who ride the J-Church regularly (or who perhaps don’t ride it, instead hiking to BART because your J train never arrived), it may not be too surprising to learn that the J-Church is once again Muni’s worst performing line, with a 65% on-time rate. And yes, Supervisor Bevan Dufty is eyeing another pilot study of the line.

These are just some topics in the news recently. Posting will necessarily be sparse for the next couple of weeks, so please feel free to continue using this open thread as a forum to discuss these topics, or whatever else is on your mind.

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.

Update: For more details about the MTC meeting at which these numbers were revealed, please also see SF Streetsblog’s great write-up.

When Is Transit Service Redundant?

The numbers are grim, and they confirm that properly funding transit in the Bay Area will be a serious issue in the future, as operators struggle to produce a balanced budget each year. But looking beyond the latest set of numbers, the revised RTP does not constitute a substantial change in methodology. It does include a few new recommendations, but we believe that these recommendations — like many aspects of the RTP itself — fall short. In light of the regional shortfalls, MTC says we must investigate “transit sustainability,” carrying the implication that transit service must be cut until it attains a level that is “sustainable.” MTC suggests that such trimming is most natural in places that already enjoy “redundant” transit service. The Bay Area’s approach to transit operation and management has resulted in certain service inefficiencies on the regional level, in that each operator resembles an independent kingdom that cooperates only occasionally and reluctantly with neighboring kingdoms. Some areas receive too little service, while other areas receive more robust service than is arguably necessary. Sometimes, transit services do not quite connect; other times, they awkwardly overlap. At first blush, the idea of regarding the Bay Area’s many transit agencies as components of a larger network, in order to promote efficiency throughout the region, has underlying merit — particularly if it addresses uncoordinated fare policies. Then again, if MTC is so interested in investing money efficiently, then how are we to explain the agency’s longstanding commitment to projects like BART to San Jose and the Oakland Airport Connector? And if MTC is so interested in avoiding redundancy, perhaps it could also have guided us toward a superior regional vision in the first place, instead of scrambling to correct mistakes after the fact when the redundant infrastructure has already been built.

MTC has provided little in the way of precise detail about its regional study — but it did suggest a few initial examples of “redundant” inefficient transit service that it intends to scrutinize. The corridors that the agency has chosen as exemplars of “redundant” service are themselves a cause for concern, in that they either overlook or misunderstand the different roles fulfilled by various transit services. For example, MTC suggests that the Peninsula currently enjoys “redundant” service because SamTrans, Caltrain, and BART all operate in this area. BART and Caltrain between Millbrae and San Francisco do not serve identical corridors, but if you were going to make a redundancy argument on the Peninsula, that would be the place to start. But the purpose and reach of SamTrans bus service should not be perceived as being redundant to BART and Caltrain, which both function as commuter rail on the Peninsula. Even long-distance bus routes that parallel the rail corridors and feed into rail stations carry short haul trips that give those routes a fundamentally different purpose and ridership than the rail corridor they ostensibly duplicate.

MTC also considered the Bay Bridge/Transbay corridor, pointing out that BART, AC Transit’s Transbay buses, and ferries all provide redundant service between San Francisco and the inner East Bay. The Transbay corridor is the highest demand transit corridor in the Bay Area, capturing transit share that well exceeds the regional average. This is not surprising, in light of short headways, and the fact that BART’s Transbay Tube is one of very few places in the Bay Area where a transit trip is legitimately faster than its equivalent trip by automobile. The high demand means that “redundant” service is actually advantageous. We should remark that BART and the Transbay buses are not precisely duplicative, because AC Transit serves many East Bay neighborhoods that are distant from any BART station, thus allowing residents of those neighborhoods to travel to and from San Francisco via transit without driving and without suffering the time and fare penalty associated with transferring to BART. To the extent that BART and AC Transit actually do provide duplicate service in the literal Bay Bridge corridor, the duplicate service is an advantage. AC Transit provides additional seats that supplement BART’s strained capacity at peak commute hours, and many riders actually prefer the bus over BART for its comfort and wireless Internet connection. The services are complementary, rather than competitive. Particularly because the design of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge precludes reintroducing surface rail on the bridge itself, the portfolio of Transbay bus service is one that we would ideally grow, or at least maintain at its current levels — not cut, based on a cursory perception that the service it provides is redundant to BART.

The BART to San Jose Fund

In this sense, MTC’s standard methodology, which prioritizes big-ticket suburban BART extensions above more cost-effective solutions, has not changed. MTC posits that the Bay Area must trim “redundant” transit service. This almost certainly refers to bus routes, which are crucial lifelines for the the transit-dependent — rather than, for instance, underutilized midday BART runs to Pittsburg/Bay Point and Millbrae. One of the great ironies of MTC’s redundancy analysis is that the revised RTP is in part geared toward providing additional funding for BART to San Jose — a project that itself involves constructing grade-separated BART infrastructure that directly duplicates miles of existing standard gauge track through Fremont, Milpitas, and San Jose. Santa Clara County projects a $2 billion shortfall in 2000 Measure A funds. How should this shortfall be filled? The proposal is to use $2 billion of revenue gathered from MTC’s planned network of High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes (click here and scroll down to read more about the HOT network). This is a problematic suggestion on its face, because it is unclear that the HOT lanes will even generate the revenue that MTC has alleged.

Furthermore, applying HOT revenue to fill the Measure A shortfall would constitute a rather startling reversal of policy. MTC itself has articulated an equitable principle that should guide funding choices for HOT revenue: the money that comes from toll lanes in a given corridor should be applied toward transit and other related improvements within that same corridor. For instance, HOT revenues could potentially fund better transit or bicycle/street improvements parallel to the freeway corridor from which those revenues were collected. It could also fill the transit operating shortfalls, which MTC has suggested could be reduced by cutting redundant service. However, many of the HOT lanes planned for Santa Clara County are not in the corridor of the proposed BART extension — for example, the lanes on Highways 85, 87, and 101 (south of Interstate 280 and Downtown San Jose). So there is a danger that HOT lane tolls collected on freeways that are distant from the BART alignment will nonetheless be appropriated in order to deliver the $2 billion necessary to fill the Measure A shortfall, which VTA has devoted primarily to BART. It is not enough, then, that VTA plans to either downscale or indefinitely delay on its promises to construct a full portfolio of transit improvements, all in the name of bringing BART to the South Bay. Now, even HOT revenues — which could nicely supplement efforts to remake the greater Valley into a more transit-oriented place, by investing in local transit and streetscape improvements — have now instead been proposed to shore up Measure A and the BART extension.

MTC has given the public a two-week window in which to comment on its proposed revisions to the Transportation 2035 plan. Comments will be received until 4:00 pm on Thursday, April 8, 2009. You can send a comment via mail to 101 Eighth Street, Oakland, CA 94607, Attn: Public Information; via E-mail to info@mtc.ca.gov; or via fax to 510.817.5848, Attn: Public Information.

Posted in AC Transit, BART, BART to San Jose, Caltrain, Ferries, Freeways, Golden Gate Transit, High-Speed Rail, MTC, Muni / SFMTA, Peninsula, Regional Rail, Regional Transportation Plan, SamTrans, South Bay, Transit Funding, VTA ]]> http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/26/shifting-funds-shifty-priorities/feed/ 8 transbay http://transbayblog.com/2008/10/06/bart-to-san-jose-volume-2-the-shadow-of-the-past/ http://transbayblog.com/2008/10/06/bart-to-san-jose-volume-2-the-shadow-of-the-past/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:22:37 +0000 Eric http://transbay.wordpress.com/?p=1124 Continue reading »]]> 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.

The unnervingly empty platforms at Millbrae (not to mention San Bruno and South San Francisco) are a testament to the pain of unfulfilled ridership projections. Because of its terminal location and immediate transfer opportunities to Caltrain, SamTrans, and the Airport, Millbrae was predicted to host a high level of passenger traffic comparable to that enjoyed by stations in San Francisco. But for a combination of factors — including the superior time travel times of Caltrain Baby Bullet service, fare expense, improper service coordination, and the lack of traffic-generating destinations — the station has not come close to meeting its inflated projection. As a result, the expected surplus (which was to be applied toward the Warm Springs extension) did not appear, and Peninsula service was consolidated into a single route through both SFO and Millbrae. Then, when the rest of the Peninsula extension stations were given a service boost after the BART-SamTrans divorce, direct Millbrae-SFO service was completely eliminated, because only a few hundred riders had used the former Millbrae-SFO shuttle each day. Indeed, surveying performance on the entire extension five years after its opening, it appears that the station ridership projections for 2010 will only be reached long after 2010:

¹ Assumes an equal number of entries and exits at each station.

The San Mateo County extension to Millbrae and SFO is a planning mistake that the Bay Area cannot afford to make twice. Including the older Daly City and Colma stations, the 2010 projection for all six San Mateo County stations predicted almost 100,000 riders each weekday. Now, with BART to San Jose, we are being asked to believe that six new South Bay stations will generate over 100,000 riders each weekday. BART to San Jose ridership has been projected over a longer time scale, thereby making it more difficult for skeptics to directly compare the planned San Jose extension to the under-performing San Mateo County extension. But this issue still deserves more attention, and the upcoming installments in this series will attempt to substantiate the problems inherent in the inflated ridership projections for the San Jose extension.

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.

But the intangible effects of electrification may be equally compelling. Right now, BART is the only Bay Area agency providing service that could all-around be legitimately named “rapid transit,” and its 15-minute headways (or better, where multiple lines share track) are just good enough to allow riders to drop in spontaneously on stations without first consulting a schedule. This level of convenience has engendered the public perception that a BART extension is the superior, most natural way to expand the reach of Bay Area regional rail, and that any other technology will fall short of excellence. But BART’s broad gauge demands custom, segregated infrastructure, the extreme expense of which siphons funds from other worthy projects and prevents the Bay Area from reaping the full benefit of its transit expansion dollars. So it is unfortunate that this attitude should prevail, at all levels — starting with members of the public and going right up to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

In contrast to the perhaps sleeker (but aging) BART trains, Caltrain largely maintains the image of a more antiquated railroad, despite recently acquiring Bombardiers in connection with implementing Baby Bullet service. The contrast is perhaps especially emphasized in San Francisco: while BART serves Market Street directly in a subway, Caltrain gets no further than a yard one full mile from from the heart of downtown. But run frequent service on lighter electric vehicles — even throw in the downtown extension for good measure, assuming funds are found to pay for it — and suddenly Caltrain starts to look a lot more like BART. If service as frequent as BART’s can be provided with infrastructure that costs a fraction of BART infrastructure — and it can — for how much longer should we continue to flat out ignore common sense, all in the name of realizing the original idealistic vision of BART planners, in which BART trains would cross each bridge, run in the median of every freeway, and circle the entire Bay? As long as intermodal connection points between BART and Caltrain are made seamless, particularly in terms of fare integration and minimizing wait times, there is no reason why two different systems should not exist side by side. Easier said than done, but we can do much better than Millbrae. BART is best suited to the metro-style service it currently provides to San Francisco, Oakland, and nearby inner-ring suburbs. Electrified Caltrain could play a similar role for the Peninsula and South Bay, if only we’d let it. Both electrified Caltrain and high-speed rail would provide the Bay Area with real-life, up-close and personal examples of rapid, high quality rail service. Rapid, high quality — and yet, not BART. Imagine that.

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.

Courtesy City of Union City.

Efforts have been made all around the Bay Area, with varying degrees of success, to transform rail-accessible downtowns into greater and denser places, including at BART’s Richmond, El Cerrito del Norte, Hayward, and South San Francisco stations. A 450-unit TOD with retail just broke ground today at Pleasant Hill BART, and still another phase of the project will add about 300,000 square feet of office and conference space. Meanwhile, one station south of Pleasant Hill, a transit village at Walnut Creek BART proposed by BRE Properties would include a mixed use development featuring about 600 residential units, office and retail space, fourteen bays for County Connection buses, and the implementation of market-rate pricing in the BART parking garage; the project, which the City Council has greeted with some skepticism, is up for environmental review. San Leandro has compiled a strategy for transit-oriented development, and one of the largest transit village plans — including about 75,000 square feet of retail and commercial space and close to 2000 units of housing — will crown a confluence of BART, commuter rail lines, and bus routes at an intermodal Union City Station, a rendering of which is pictured directly above. On the Peninsula, Redwood City has grand plans of downtown renewal centered on its Caltrain station, but despite plans to add about 2500 homes, residential development has been somewhat slow to trickle in. Further east, along the congested Interstate 580 corridor, a few projects in the pipeline will add hotel rooms, retail space, and close to 900 rental and condo units near the infill West Dublin/Pleasanton BART station currently under construction.

Transit villages have also been planned at Oakland BART stations, but here I am more critical — in part because the potential is greater, but also because when discussing these developments in Oakland, the conversation is at least as much about urban revitalization as it is about TOD. At the 19th Street Station in downtown Oakland, a couple thousand new homes (provided through several projects discussed on this blog in the past) will help breathe new life into the neighboring Uptown and Valdez downtown subdistricts — but such a transit-rich downtown location would ideally support much denser housing than the collection of Forest City low- to mid-rises currently under construction. Meanwhile, at the Fruitvale BART station, plans to build retail and over a thousand combined units at Fruitvale Gateway and Phase II of the transit village project — both of which would supply some of the new residents and additional vitality needed to fulfill the historical prophecy of the Fruitvale District as Oakland’s second downtown — have not moved forward, leaving just the 47 residential units and a substantial amount of commercial space included in Phase I of the transit village. At MacArthur Station, plans have long been in the works to build densely over BART’s surface parking lots, but they have morphed from the originally envisioned 800 units, including a 20-story tower and a 22-story tower — to 675 units in four- to six-story buildings, joined by retail and a seven-story parking garage. Here is a rendering of that project:

Courtesy MacArthur Transit Community Partners.

In the past couple of years, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has done a better job of encouraging cities to pursue dense growth near transit nodes — although these plans, as the above discussion indicates, have not nearly risen to the level of my personal dream of miniature skylines dotting the Bay Area, linked by high-quality, frequent rail transit service. But there has been some progress, and some mixed results as well. Increasing density within walking distance of BART and Caltrain stations will make central downtown districts more walkable, successful public spaces, and ultimately, we should go further than we have to date toward maximizing the potential of these rail connections. This whole discussion began with the announcement that San Francisco proper is America’s most walkable city. We certainly can and should celebrate this fact, but let us not stop there. Regional problems have regional solutions — and we cannot overlook the importance of reproducing San Francisco’s success, to the extent that we can, in cities across the Bay Area.

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.

Senate District 3 (Eastern San Francisco, Marin & Sonoma Counties): MARK LENO. Leno’s record demonstrates a commitment to environmental and transportation issues. Most notably, in 2007 he authored the Complete Streets bill (AB 1358), which would require the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research to create guidelines for safely accommodating the movement of all users of the street, including pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and the disabled — and in turn, when cities and counties revise the circulation element of their general plans, they would do so in accordance with the updated OPR guidelines. He also co-authored the Safe Routes to School bill (AB 57). Leno has served as a member of the Assembly’s Smart Growth Caucus, and the SF Bicycle Coalition has noted Leno’s support of other transportation proposals, including SMART, congestion pricing, and the Bay Bridge bicycle path. As to Carole Midgen: she has done some fine work in the Senate, but her substantial noncompliance with campaign finance rules is more than a little worrisome — and seeing as how this three-candidate race has basically boiled down to a two-candidate Mark Leno v. Joe Nation race, the progressive vote should unite behind Leno. Leno is upbeat, smart, passionate about his work, blends idealism with pragmatism, and is simply a stand-up professional. I would be very happy to have him represent District 3 in the Senate.

Senate District 9 (Northern/Eastern Alameda County, West Contra Costa County): WILMA CHAN & LONI HANCOCK. A race between Wilma Chan (former Assembly Majority Leader, 16th District) and Loni Hancock (Assembly, 14th District), for Don Perata’s seat. This race is not in my district, so I admit I have not been following it as closely, at least not since Chan made campaign finance violation allegations against Hancock — and this is actually one of Hancock’s pet issues, since she authored the California Clean Money and Fair Elections Act. (And for whatever it’s worth, Chan has been sending out suspect mailers that misleadingly imply a Barack Obama endorsement.) Chan has been endorsed by Jerry Brown, and Hancock has been endorsed by Barbara Lee, each of whom I respect for different reasons. Both Chan and Hancock have served as members of the Assembly’s Smart Growth Caucus, and both have worked on the environment, e.g. by co-authoring AB 32, the greenhouse gas cap bill. Hancock chairs the Natural Resources Committee in the Assembly and has demonstrated a strong commitment to environmental issues, while Chan has concentrated time on other very worthy issues while she was in the Assembly, including health care and banning chemicals from toys and other goods. Given Hancock’s commitment to environmental causes, I might be inclined to vote for her if I lived in this district, but it really depends on how one prioritizes the issues. Chan has done some very good work, and I could also see her determination winning me over. Bottom line: either candidate would represent this district well in the Senate.

Assembly District 12 (Western San Francisco, Daly City, Colma): FIONA MA. So she isn’t perfect, but she is also an unopposed incumbent (and Majority Whip), so there is not much choice. But I do want to acknowledge Ma here for her commitment to improving transit — particularly in pushing for high speed rail in preparation for the bond vote this November. In spring of last year, she boarded the record-breaking 357 mph TGV run, and this year she joined other California legislators on a trip to Spain and Japan to study foreign high speed rail systems. She has become a valuable HSR ally in the Assembly, emphasizing HSR’s economic benefits, its role in reducing transportation emissions by providing a much-needed alternative mode of travel beyond automobile and plane, and the need to jumpstart this project sooner rather than later. Ma also authored AB 1221, which would allow for tax increment funding of transit villages, and AB 101, which is an amendment to the Vehicle Code that would allow footage from video cameras mounted on Muni vehicles to be used as evidence to enforce parking violations in transit-only lanes.

Assembly District 13 (Eastern San Francisco): TOM AMMIANO. Okay, so this one wasn’t so hard, since Ammiano is, after all, running unopposed for Leno’s 13th District seat, but he will be a good guy to have on our side in the Assembly. Although he is probably better known for San Francisco’s universal health care ordinance and his work on behalf of the LGBT community, Ammiano has also been a strong transit advocate throughout his time serving as Supervisor of SF’s 9th District. He is an MTC Commissioner and one of four SF Supervisors on the board of the Golden Gate District, not to mention a member of Rescue Muni. Although his district is especially sensitive on smart growth and displacement issues, Ammiano has generally taken SF’s transit-first policy to heart, discouraging road construction that would only increase car use, supporting use of tools like congestion pricing, working towards the procurement of cleaner Muni technology, and advocating for transit riders even in the face of budgetary constraint. He was also a co-sponsor of Proposition A (Muni Reform Initiative) which voters passed in the November 2007 election.

Assembly District 19 (Northern/Central San Mateo County): JERRY HILL. This is a three-way race involving County Supervisor Jerry Hill, Mayor of Millbrae Gina Papan, and Richard Holober, who is president of the San Mateo County Community College Board. From the transit and environmental perspective, Jerry Hill is a no-brainer to endorse as the successor to Gene Mullin’s seat, as he will provide a strong voice for these issues in the Assembly, and he has been the most vocal about making it a part of his campaign. Hill also has the most experience in elected office. From the transit perspective, Hill has served on the SamTrans Board of Directors, the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers board, and the Transbay Joint Powers Authority board. He has also served as President of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, as Chair of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and as a member of the California Air Resources Board. As 2nd District County Supervisor, he has worked to preserve open space in San Mateo County, and he co-sponsored a Sustainable Building Policy requiring that new County buildings be constructed to LEED standards.

Don’t forget to get out and vote on Tuesday June 3! If you do not already know your polling place, click here to find out where it is.