Silicon Valley's Transit AND Land Use Problems

There's been a lot of bashing of Silicon Valley lately.  It's the butt of transit jokes because of its light rail line which is one of the least traveled LRT lines in the United States for its distance and service.  At the time it was built, it was one of the first new non legacy lines in the country.  Now that shouldn't be an excuse but we certainly know that in order to be successful you have to connect people with the places they want to go in a timely fashion.  The 1st street line connects a lot of places, but it does it rather slowly.

So we would hope they learned from that mistake when they were planning BART and actually decide to connect places, but give people a faster option, but they decided to double down with aweful all in the same of saving money.  Sure they are saving money using existing ROW for BART, but they are also skipping destinations they need to connect to make it successful. 

Light Rail is Dark Purple, Caltrain is Red, Plannded BART is Steel Blue, Green are areas of high employment density. 

You can see that the planned BART line skips all of the North Valley tech employment and instead makes people depend on a slow light rail system to connect. Even when BART is complete to Berryesa, it won't be as effective as it would have been going under or through this employment cluster into downtown.  Yes it would have cost more but the investment would have been there for hundreds of years. 

Additionally, as I've mentioned in previous posts (1, 2), when silicon valley does get dense, it's in horrible suburban layouts.  You can see below along the San Jose LRT line how buildings suck ridership right out of the system with parking and bad design.

  

The last image above below shows how many buildings you could fit in this space if they had better non auto oriented design.  And I guarantee this would drive ridership along the line. 

Now there have also been discussions of how Silicon Valley needs to become Manhattan in order to keep talent that wants to live in urban places instead of valley sprawl.  An article in the Awl made this claim but in reality, Silicon Valley doesn't need a hefty core of ultra tall buildings, it just needs to use the space it has better and become the DC or Paris of the Western United States.  There's so much opportunity, yet it is completely wasted. 

So in my eyes the transit is part of the problem for not making the connections that increase property values to do this type of infill, but its also the fault of developers who don't understand that a classic way of building for pedestrians is needed to attract pedestrians and quality of life that people are moving to San Francisco to attain. Sure some people don't want that, but we have more than enough supply of single family homes if there's more of a choice.

 

Bad Design and Money Disconnects

Hey everyone, I realize that the posts on here have slowed to a crawl. I don't meant to neglect them but sometimes life gets in the way. You can find links from me on twitter everyday @theoverheadwire. They are also on the bottom right of the blog. But on to biz:

I've had some tabs open that I really wanted to comment on but hadn't gotten a chance. So if this is old news I apologize:

First off, Kemper Freeman stands to gain a lot of development money from light rail. It's unfortunate that his head is so far up his ass that he can't see the dollar signs and is instead wasting them on lawsuits. No matter, give all those earnings to the lawyers and watch him lose anyway.

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Second, I'm really annoyed at Yahoo's campus design. This is just more suburban crap and instead of creating buildings and a street network that actually form a true urban grid, such that other buildings could form some sort of urban neighborhood around them. This is what is wrong with our employment centers and why they aren't walkable, making it harder to take transit. Sure its better than what was there before, but it could have been used to set off a new way of developing office parks that was sustainable. Great you're next to a light rail line and it looks like a school campus. I still think Adobe is the champ for going downtown.


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Finally. If you haven't seen it yet, the 1906 SF streetcar video is pretty cool. You can find more explanation at Market Street Railway.

Track Trauma

I've discussed the operator side of suicides on the track before. The Mercury News goes into greater detail with Caltrain engineers.

How About Something Besides Cars?

Quotes like these kill me.

"If you're late for work, and you might get fired if you're late one more time, it might be worth the (toll)," said Scott Haggerty, an Alameda County supervisor and commission chairman.

How about creating a transportation system that can get everyone to work at the same time every day?? I bet that would help more than paying a single toll because you're perpetually late.

Connecting the Dots

Looks like BART to San Jose has hit another snag because of the economy. The ~20 mile extension from the Fremont station all the way to the San Jose airport via downtown has been delayed for a number of years because of funding issues. Last fall the county passed an 1/8th cent sales tax to fix some of this but according to one analysis it won't be enough. I'm not sure if this is really true because the projections show flat sales tax revenues until 2036, which seems to me to be seriously wrong.

Board members used words like "shocked" and "astonished" at the report by consultant Bob Peskin, who analyzed sales tax projections through 2036. Once inflation is factored out, his sales tax projections are essentially a flat line.

But if true, this comes at the same time as a SPUR report that states suburban job growth imperils emissions reductions due to increased driving. As a practical goal, the region should focus growth in the more urban downtowns and urban areas that aren't office parks.

The city, and other urban areas better served by mass transit than suburban business parks, must adjust policies to attract a greater share of office development and employers, concludes "Recentering Work: The Future of Transit-Oriented Jobs in Downtown San Francisco," released by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.

So while the BART extension to downtown San Jose might seem like a good idea, its important to note that the round about way in which BART reaches downtown doesn't connect the areas which hold most of Silicon Valley's jobs but rather takes the path of least resistance (ie: existing ROW).

This is a big problem. The line which was conceived many years ago is a continuation of BART and regional authorities poor planning for rapid transit integration with land use. While it might have been state of the art as an idea decades ago, we've learned so much since then about TOD and how connecting destinations strengthens them. No longer will the suburban to urban model work with parking lots catering to the automobile. We need a better analysis of what to do but unfortunately it seems like nothing will stop this move from going through.

The map below shows job density in the valley (From LEHD 2004). Areas with the darkest green are over 20 jobs per acre. But the new BART line (dark blue) touches only the clusters downtown and extension of the VTA light rail line (light purple) go nowhere near the jobs that would attract transit riders.

The VTA Light Rail line hits a lot of the dense job clusters but underperforms because it is seen as slower. I don't know how many people who live in San Francisco have told me that the killer for thier connection to a job in San Jose is the slow round about light rail. This will be the same excuse for BART to light rail on the other side of the Valley.



When we look into these long term Bay Area projects, we need to push planners to think about where people work and where they want to go. It's really important to think about these long term strategies to connect people with jobs and connect jobs to each other. If we're going to be dependent on a knowledge economy here in the bay area, allowing people easy access through transit to amenities and each other is the best way to facilitate energy and emissions reductions. Even if TOD springs up along the new BART line, it won't be as good as connecting the existing clusters of dense jobs with tons of redevelopable parking spaces (see above photo) that might not be needed with rapid transit easily accessible.

Midweek High Speed Rail Links

My feed reader is getting bombarded with high speed rail articles. It's crazy how much attention something gets when leadership in this country gets behind it. In addition, things are heating up in California and the nuts on the Peninsula are trying to weasel out. Some of the anon comments on Robert's HSR blog are quite hilarious. I'm paraphrasing but when you say "Rich people live here and will sue so move the alignment to where the poor people are" it's time to rethink your priorities.
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An article in the San Jose Mercury News discusses the possibility of trenching. This is a better option than ending the line at San Jose and running Rapid Rail (which I assume is BART or electrified Caltrain) up the peninsula.
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One of China's High Speed Rail lines is going to start construction soon. Ahead again.

Groundwork started Thursday on a high-speed passenger rail line that will link Shanghai with Hangzhou in east China with trains that can run up to 350 km per hour.

And if only the United States worked like this...

Rail capacity in the Yangtze River Delta region has reached saturation point, said Yu. He said that during peak travel seasons, cargo transport was often suspended to make way for passenger trains.

Firefox warned me about the site so probably not a good idea to click...but if you must.
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It looks like Richard Branson wants to wring more money out of the trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has me sold on Virgin America. Robert says he'd rather an agency cover it so we can pump profits back into expansion.
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Newsflash. People who are bashing high speed rail as a Disneyland Ride are out of touch with America. It would also do them some good to get out of thier congressional district, state, or Washington DC once in a while to that crazy socialist Europe part of the world. I mean, Bulgaria will have HSR soon! BULGARIA!!!

New Poll: Worst Rail Project in Planning

Thanks for all the input. It seems like we have a few projects that are pretty bad. Again I'm not going to let you choose more than one. You have to choose what you think is the worst. So here are the contestants based on feedback. I added in two specifically nefarious BRT projects as well.

BART to San Jose
NJ Access to the Regions Core
LIRR East Side Access Project
San Francisco Central Subway
Montreal Train de l'est
LA Gold Line to Montclair
Toronto Spadina Extension
NY Subway 7 Line Extension
Metro to Dulles (Silver Line)
MBTA BRT Silver Line Phase 3
US 36 Denver BRT
Miami Metrorail North
Anacostia Streetcar

So those are the list. Usual week for voting applies. Vote for Other if there is a project not listed.

BART Rumor Mill

There was a post up on Daily Kos today heralding the passing of BART to San Jose. Lot's of folks have different opinions about it but I was wondering if what one of the commenters said was true. I had never heard of this but commenter Maynard Krebs stated this:

When San Mateo County dropped out of BART expected revenue was too low to support BART to Marin. So the Marin line was dropped too but the 5'6" gauge was designed to be stable while crossing the bridge in high winds.

Does anyone know if there is any truth to this high winds theory? I had always heard it was just to make people comfortable by allowing wider cars by crazed futura engineers. I often wondered how they would deal with winds on the bridge.

Caltrain Must Hike Fares Too

Caltrain is going to raise fares in order to cover diesel fuel cost spikes. Imagine if it were already electrified. Less cost and cleaner air. Why do cities still think DMU's are a good idea?

And So It Begins...

Sound Transit 2.1 is on the ballot in Seattle. Where is the support badge? :) Check out STB for some liveblogging goodness. It looks like we're going to have a fun night in November when these votes take place. We'll be live-blogging results for LA, Seattle, and perhaps San Jose during the election. If there are more, we'll make sure to cover them.

Been Thinking About Transit Density Part 2

So as a continuation of this post on transit density, we're going to look at San Francisco and San Jose. This is not transit density in the usual sense of passengers per route mile as discussed by Mr. Setty at PublicTransit.us but rather station density as discussed by Richard Layman and his oft looked at take on Belmont.

For San Francisco, Eric and others have looked at what a city wide metro would look like. However I thought it would be good to look at it from the standpoint of the sphere I created for the Oakland Map. These aerials are the same dimensions as the Oakland map as are the 5 mile spheres. In the fine grid of San Francisco, you can see that a metro as envisioned below would create a tic tac toe board where getting from destinations all over the densest parts of the city would be fairly easy.



For San Jose though I took a different approach. Instead of using downtown as the center, like Oakland, I thought about how a metro could be used to reconfigure the city and employment districts of Silicon Valley. What came out of it was a more northern sphere centered around west of the airport where there is a lot of land and buildings that could be rebuilt now that their 20-30 year life might be almost over.

It was hard to not try and cover everything instead of focusing on the sphere. These city sphere metro projects could be pretty inexpensive when compared to their resulting benefit which is why its important to think about the area in much smaller terms and corridors.



In San Jose in particular, it grew up in such a spread out pattern, that serving the area, unlike Oakland and San Francisco, would be even more daunting. But its possible to use this metro as a starting point to comprehensive feeder bus and commuter rail system that connects the major cities.

Below is an example of this exercise at build out in Austin at the same scale.



So the point of this exercise isn't to say that these networks should be built with these specific lines, but to show transit density in a core area that would promote the usage of transit in the core while also starting to change the development paradigm. If this type of service were available, walkable neighborhoods would be constructed that have more opportunities to go carless. These networks could also be used as a basis for bike planning.

Arlington Did It Right

One of the things that bothers me these days is the need for the FTA to judge things based on cost and not long term benefit. An article in the Washington Post discusses the long term benefits that the planners in Arlington VA saw when they decided to run the Orange line underground and away from the freeway.

It got me thinking, what would BART look like if they had made the decision to build like Metro in DC and run the line through main corridors instead of down the center of the freeway. Here is what I came up with. The dotted lines and black dots I drew and the regular line and existing stations are shown by the little BART symbols.

If I were to speculate that these stations would have the ridership of 24th and 16th street mission, we would be seeing an additional 110,000 riders.



Since BART didn't learn anything from Arlington either, the BART to San Jose line will make the same mistakes, running on existing ROW instead of down the main corridors where its needed. The same exists with the BART to Livermore extension which we discussed earlier.

Using Space Better

What happens when we orient buildings to transit? It saves space. It creates more value from the land. It creates more opportunities for walking. Here is an exercise I did with that employment sprawl photo from the post below.

1. The Sprawl Way - What San Jose Looks Like



2. Sprawl Rearranged - What the same amount of development would look Like if the development were organized around the station. I outlined the buildings and rearranged them in a more compact way.



3. Sprawl Rearranged x2 - Doubling the amount of buildings, using the same footprint for each original building.

Kenworthy Speaks

Fred at MetroRiderLA went to a lecture by Australian researcher Jeff Kenworthy. Here are a few things from Fred's overview that caught my eye.

1. LRT(Tram) Patronage in Europe has been increasing while bus ridership falls.

This is interesting to me because unlike the United States, Europe has kept a good amount of its tram systems. In many large cities, they are still networked to go a lot of places.

According to Jeff, in Europe, over a period of 10 years, Light Rail Transit (LRT) patronage rose 20.3% while bus patronage fell 5.6%. His implication is that people, the masses, simply and unequivocally prefer rail over bus. And surprisingly, it’s actually what are commonly considered the disadvantages of rail that turn out to be it’s advantages over bus transit in encouraging use. The high cost and inflexibility of rail creates a permanence that people prefer over the impermanent and unreliable nature of bus transit.

2. Rail Focuses Development, Buses Follow it

Another polished gem Jeff provided us with was the idea that rail systems “focus” a city and development while bus systems simply “follow” development. So buses, because of their impermanence and reliance on auto roads, must heed to the “predict and provide” game and attempt to follow wherever development may randomly occur. Rail on the other hand spurs and centralizes development, creating a sense of permanence not found in no rail cities. Rail and streets renaissances go hand in hand.

I've said this a few times before. Rail has the power if harnessed to focus development unlike buses that just respond to it. But it's not going to just happen. There need to be plans and policies in place to do it right. In the comments below Fred's post, a discussion started on San Jose. This is the perfect example of just saying that light rail is going to do all the work. I posted a while ago on employment sprawl. Well here again is an aerial of San Jose's system by all the tech jobs, something to not emulate.



Here is the Pearl District, which used to be a rail yard and was helped by the plans and policies of the PDC and the streetcar



Update: ABC in the comments asked that we use a more suburban area to show what's possible instead of an urban area. In the situation like San Jose above with 3 -5 story office buildings I think it's perfectly ok to expect a street grid like the Pearl Districts, there was a thought that it was the Pearl was predestined to turn out that way. Before the development agreement it was supposed to be tops 15 units an acre and the developer had thought about doing townhomes. Here is what it looked like in 1996.

But as suburban examples go, here is another from Portland with single family homes in a grid South of Orenco Station.



Downtown Plano trying to reintroduce Urbanism



And a Heavy Rail Subway example, Rosslyn Ballston on the Metro Orange Line. I've discussed this before but this used to be a strip suburban corridor. These things take time, this has been over 30 years.

AC on Density #2

I mentioned AC's post on Density earlier. In his most recent post, he calculates the weighted densities for 34 regions. I'm wondering how San Jose had such a high density. Perhaps for the same reason that Los Angeles' density is relatively high, due to natural boundaries hemming in exurban growth. Atlanta on the other hand is flat as a pancake and is the worst sprawl offender.

Thinking Big: The Next Bay Area Project

I know that BART to San Jose is in the pipeline and as usual it wasn't planned to serve people but to be cost effective. This means that it goes where no one is along available ROW and skips major employment centers except Downtown San Jose. You would have thought that we might have learned something from the planning of BART in Oakland and Berkeley but apparently not.

But that isn't what i really wanted to talk about. I have a new idea for the Bay Area's newest New Start/Transit Project. I'd like to call it the Subway to the Sea 2, Urban Core Capacity Enhancement. The title is a nod to the Subway to the Sea bubbling up in LA and the New Jersey Access to the Core tunnel under the Hudson. If we're going to densify the bay area further, we need more of a metro system along major corridors. We need to be cost effective, so we should start with a corridor that would generate a lot of new ridership. So how about we build a line between the beach and downtown on Geary, build the new trans-bay tube that's been planned, and build up Broadway in Oakland to Rockridge and Berkeley under the 51 line.

Current ridership in this corridor is 56,000 for Geary and 18,600 boardings on the 51. This means that if everyone changed modes (which we know there still has to be a surface bus line for shorter trips) there could be about 80,000 riders. Given the speed of the new line and convenience it could increase ridership to way over 100,000 a day just on the line. This is a third of BART's ridership. Now the line is 19 miles from Berkeley to the Sea along the route I mentioned.

Now the line wouldn't just generate a lot of ridership, but it would generate a lot of new TOD, Office and Residential. In Oakland on Broadway, there would be a surge in new development along the corridor between College Avenue and Downtown. It's possible to capture a lot of the office and residential markets and take some pressure off of the outer sprawling suburbs. It will also take pressure off of the almost at capacity Transbay Tube.

Another feature of this would be the tunnel under the bay. it should be designed to be dual mode so that Caltrain/HSR could go to Oakland, Emeryville, and/or Jack London Square. That way Caltrain could extend into downtown and across the bay to Emeryville and possibly beyond making a connection between the jobs there and Silicon Valley (Yellow). It's possible to electrify the line all the way up to Martinez making commutes from around the horn easier with new stations in North Richmond and Hercules. It might also provide a way to keep trains away from Jack London which has had some issues with accidents. It would be a big project and more than likely cost a lot of money, but it will also be a huge ridership generator. Not only will you get over 100,000 from the subway alone, there will be the tens of thousands that want to get across the bay with a one seat ride to Emeryville and Jack London Square.

Creating Demand for Office TOD

Recently Microsoft has started its own bus service to its campus in Redmond. Google and other companies have these bus services and I've discussed before why they annoyed me. But there might be a small consolation bonus in this that wasn't previously realized. Because of companies such as Google, office space is at a premium making it possible to build more office space near transit stops. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal:

Demand for quality space in Google-land is strong, and market rental rates now justify the costs of redeveloping obsolete industrial structures into higher-density modern offices, observes veteran Silicon Valley commercial broker Gregory M. Davies at CPS/Corfac Intl. in Santa Clara.

Planned commercial projects are taking advantage of the neighborhood's attractive transit service, including not only the VTA light-rail system but also Caltrain's Baby Bullet express service whizzing commuters from San Francisco in well under an hour, Davies adds.

This also brings up another point about San Jose. The office park sprawl there with all the tech companies is probably the worst I've ever seen. I don't get why our buddy Randal O'Toole calls San Jose a failure in Smart Growth when there is none. The land use around light rail is the worst in the country and never focused. Just junk buildings that should be destroyed and reoriented towards the streets and given a grid.

Check out the aerial below to see what it looks like. Tons of parking spaces and wasted land. Its amazing this system gets over 30,000 riders a day. The green and blue lines are the San Jose Light Rail. Looks like its going through a bunch of industrial warehouses, but they are just single use offices.