Transbay Blog

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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Last night, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency unanimously approved a plan to redevelop the Schlage Lock site in Visitacion Valley, in the southeastern corner of San Francisco. The planning process for this site, combined with myriad delays, have occupied the better part of a decade. Schlage Lock’s operations at the factory were a major source of manufacturing jobs in Visitacion Valley since 1926, and in 1974, Ingersoll Rand Corporation acquired the operation. The plant formally closed in 1999, and in 2000, a controversial proposal for a Home Depot on the site was opposed by community members, who thereafter were encouraged to step up and have a say in how this substantial chunk of vacant land in their neighborhood would be developed. Interim zoning was established to prevent big box retail from settling into the property, and a community planning process for the site was initiated that ultimately led to the creation of a Strategic Concept Plan in 2002. But an obstacle remained — and not the neighbors, who, in the case of Visitacion Valley, actually eagerly welcomed the opportunity to revitalize their often overlooked corner of San Francisco with an influx of housing and reinvestment. No, the obstacle this time was Ingersoll Rand, who was embroiled in protracted litigation with Universal Paragon Corporation. At that time, Ingersoll Rand owned the 12.3-acre Schlage Lock site, and Universal Paragon owned the the adjacent six-acre former Southern Pacific rail yard; their dispute was centered on the groundwater and soil contamination resulting from Schlage Lock’s operations.

The planning process was stuck in limbo once the Strategic Concept Plan was adopted — until 2005, when Supervisor Sophie Maxwell pushed for the initiation of a Visitacion Valley redevelopment survey area that was in turn established in June 2005. Community workshops continued through 2007, and the conceptual design for the redevelopment area evolved into the current form of the plan. June 2008 was a landmark timepoint for the redevelopment — for not only had the Redevelopment Agency completed a draft Environmental Impact Report, but Ingersoll Rand finally agreed to sell the Schlage Lock property to Universal Paragon for $450 million. Under the agreement, Universal Paragon assumed most of the $25 million costs for cleaning up the site, and Universal Paragon terminated a long-standing contamination lawsuit it had filed against Ingersoll Rand. Ultimate buildout of the redevelopment plan lies on the other side of this economic downturn and the costly cleanup of toxic contamination — but can we just say finally? A full decade after Schlage Lock operations ceased, the dream to redevelop this land revitalize Visitacion Valley moves closer to being realized. The Redevelopment Agency has now adopted environmental findings, approved the Design for Development, and approved the Redevelopment Plan. The next steps in the process will be to seek approval from the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor.

Aerial view of Schlage Lock site. Courtesy of S.F. Redevelopment Agency.

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Downtown Oakland, Courtesy Flickr user joshua aaron.

Earlier this week, we spent some time delving into SB 375, the landmark Senate Bill that recently passed through the legislature and, at the time of writing this post, awaits only the Governor’s signature. The bill unifies transportation and land use planning, housing, and global warming into one package, with the ultimate aim of encouraging dense growth near good transit. The bill would leverage transit oriented development as a crucial tool in the struggle to fulfill AB 32’s mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The very brief two-sentence version of the bill: SB 375 requires that each region in California create a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) that details where it makes sense to accommodate new growth near transit. If a new development, appropriately located, is classified as a Transit Priority Project (TPP) — meaning that it is sufficiently dense and close to a transit route that receives frequent service — that project would be exempt from studying certain environmental impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). If you haven’t already done so, please read this earlier post for full details on SB 375.

SB 375 is a pretty exciting piece of legislation, but we still have a lot of work to do. Certain individuals who occupy seats in the California legislature — McClintock, we are looking at you — are eternally captivated by the suburban non-planning of the 1950s, opining that:

Most people don’t want to live in dense urban cores. Most people want a little elbow room – they want a yard for their children to play in. They want a little grass, a little garden, a little breathing room they can call their own. And who the hell are you to tell people they can’t?

Based on McClintock’s remark, you might think SB 375 is all about burning single-family homes to the ground and replacing them with high-rises. This is of course completely untrue: suburbs are not going anywhere. Rather than thinking of this as removing the option of the traditional suburb, SB 375 is properly viewed as adding a new option, by making the increasingly desirable transit-oriented lifestyle more widely available. But the trick lies in lining up the commitment to implement it.

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Mt. Diablo, courtesy Flickr user qf8.

In August 2006, the California legislature passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), and the Governor approved it one month later, on September 27, 2006. AB 32 aims to transform California into a global leader in the climate change battle, requiring that greenhouse gas emissions levels be reduced to 1990 levels by the year 2020. AB 32 charges the California Air Resources Board (CARB) with several tasks, including: (1) adopt and enforce regulations that require the reporting of emissions; (2) create a scoping plan to provide a strategy for reducing emissions; and (3) adopt and enforce regulations that achieve AB 32’s emission reduction mandates. AB 32 requires that CARB adopt such regulations via an open public process. It further requires CARB to consult other state agencies, particularly the Energy Commission and the Public Utilities Commission, and it encourages CARB to study other emissions reductions programs, both domestic and foreign, when crafting its own plan.

We will need to implement a varied array of programs to achieve AB 32’s targets, but transportation accounts for over 40% of greenhouse gas emissions statewide, and almost 30% of emissions come from automobiles and light trucks — so reducing transportation emissions is a major piece of the puzzle. Of particular interest here is how smart land use and transportation planning can be implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the face of California’s projected population growth. Legal challenges will provide the mechanism by which CARB’s AB 32 regulations can be enforced, so the momentum has been building to enact state legislation that will strengthen the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to make it a more effective tool for enforcing AB 32.

Enter SB 375, authored by Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). First introduced in February 2007 and passed just last week by the state legislature, SB 375 now awaits the Governor’s signature. SB 375 is a complicated, multifaceted bill, but its overall message could not be clearer: transportation, housing, and land use — although traditionally placed in different thought boxes — are, in fact, closely intertwined, and the intersection area should be leveraged as a powerful tool to protect the environment and reduce emissions. In that sense, SB 375 is rightly hailed as a landmark piece of legislation.

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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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