Wanting the City Lifestyle, But It Costs Too Much

I love my neighborhood.  It's walkable, close to BART which takes me to work in Oakland, and contains a grocery store just a quarter of a mile away.  Unfortunately everyone else likes it so much that prices for houses are through the roof.  Just the other day, a friend of mine sent me a listing on redfin for a probate house that was about 800 square feet and a total wreck, but the asking prices was $650,000.  A steal!  It was gone in two days.

Part of the reason for the cost of the neighborhood is its location.  For the folks that work at Apple, Google, or Genentech that want the San Francisco experience, it's close to the 101 and 280 on ramps and has numerous tech shuttle pickup locations.  As the article states, there is a line drawn in the city which leaves the northern half to the financial district and south of market workers.

We see a lot of first-time buyers from tech companies who still want to have a city lifestyle; they don't want to live in the suburbs, but they work down south. What I notice is when people from Google, Apple, Yahoo and Genentech come in for a first meeting, we literally draw a line in the city because of the commute. Noe Valley is at the top of the list, then Bernal, Mission, Dolores, Cole Valley.

A city lifestyle means a really great bakery, very nice folks at the bagel shop, and a series of pubs and restaurants where if you make an effort, they'll learn your name and have your beer ready when you sit down before you even have to ask.

The other issue is not the demand, it's the restrictions on new housing, NIMBYs, and tough financing for affordable housing.  Trying to build new units is like pulling teeth, especially in historic older neighborhoods.  And other issues like inclusionary zoning are small change when there are very few new units overall built all together. Battles over affordable housing are not uncommon.  But it gets ridiculous when it takes 9 years to build a single affordable building.

The approvals were followed by the inevitable lawsuit, filed by a group called Citizens for Better Streets but funded by nearby landowners. But the real delay was the complexity of arranging a finance package drawn from six sources - a big reason the final cost is $34 million, far above the $20 million anticipated in 2003.

Affordable housing is a complicated venture.  But even more so in a liberal city where people want to protect their own properties and think they are doing a good thing pushing for 3 affordable units in a city where the need is approximately 100,000.  If people really wanted affordable housing, they would allow greater height limits and lower parking ratios for new buildings.  Heck they would declare open season for new housing and we'd have a revolution in the city.  Unfortunately, we are just looking for ticky tack solutions.

The mayor has convened a group of sometimes oppositional figures in the housing realm, from Calvin Welch, the longtime affordable housing advocate, to Oz Erickson, chairman of Emerald Fund developers, to find ideas to create a $50 million-per-year revenue stream to help make housing available to low- and middle-income workers.

Not sure what $50m would do.  Nothing for supply of actual housing to meet the demand. 

And sure there is a need to protect historic buildings and neighborhoods. My street has this huge apartment building across from my place where two old Victorians were probably ripped out to put a 70s style apartment building.  But you also have the egregious one story buildings at the corner of the most trafficked streets in my neighborhood that could have been four, like all the other buildings around them.   You know its a perverse market when there is a one story McDonald's on top of a subway stop at 24th street and Mission.

People want to live in great places.  And unfortunately those are limited because the development restrictions all over the bay area that push towards single family housing also restrict walkable, transit accessible communities where people can like me, sell their cars and walk to the grocery store.  Perhaps some day we'll get there, but we have a lot of work to do.

Go Underground Young Man!

Each time I go to a Rail~Volution conference I feel a bit revitalized.  For some reason just seeing people doing all the great work that they do really gets me excited about the future, even though it's always hard when recent politics dictates one step forward and two steps back.  I personally want to take 5 steps forward but we know that isn't how it works. 

Some of the best parts of the conference come from the stats and stories that people tell in the sessions and in the hallways.  Today I learned what "Festival Parking" in development projects was from Art Lomenick and yesterday learned about a CDC program that invests in communities looking to improve health outcomes. 

But one of my favorite comments came from one of my favorite public officials.  Harriet Tregoning mentioned in her session (and it was repeated in Streetsblog and STB posts) that subway tracking heavy rail is the best way to go when it comes to surface development.  While there are a few examples of it working around the country, I think the clean slate it affords developers and pedestrians is a huge bonus over the long term.

“In the short term, under-grounding can be very expensive, but in the long term it saves a lot of money,” Zimmerman said. The development that occurs above the station easily pays for the tunnel, and there’s significant savings on maintenance when rails are protected from the elements. But perhaps more important, there’s little difference between a transit line and an Interstate when it comes to fracturing the fabric of the urban environment. “A railroad takes up a lot of space and creates a barrier — something you can’t get across, like a highway,” he said.

This also brings up another thing I would like to see in regions around the country.  Usually we get into the chicken and egg question whether the transit or density needs to come first but ultimately I think transportation investment drives development investment and putting these lines underground allows us to think about these as a long term investment, even though people these days don't think that way.


What I would like to see is a program for building at least three line subway lines in each major city in the United States.  Now I'm not talking about these hybrid systems we get in the United States like BART but true central city Metros with transfer centers at the end that might stretch 3 miles from the center.  What this would do is push cities to make urban development legal.  The demand for development along major corridors stretches from the market generated around the gravity of central employment district.  The benefit is that if you can get further from the center in ten minutes by putting the line underground, you will be able to build higher and create more walkable, sustainable development than you would have with just the bus.  We see what a ten minute trip from downtown on a streetcar can do, we just need to get multiple modes going and augment with the subway. 

I know its dreaming because it can't really happen given the current environment, but its really what I believe should happen.  This model is there with the DC Metro, we just need to make it happen somehow.

Bad Employment Location Decisions

Annoying me to no end are decisions to locate major new employment opportunities in areas that have no access to regional rapid transit.  The most recent of these is the idea that Berkeley Labs would take the Golden Gate Fields horse racing track and redevelop it to bring all the employees together that were once in different places. 

This is a laudable goal however it's right next to a major freeway and will basically add more transportation costs to the University, AC Transit district while also increasing auto traffic (A mention of 2,500 cars).  I'm sure my taxes will have to pay for that stupidity.  Apparently downtown Oakland isn't good enough. 

I think Auto Row might be a good location for this campus, right next to Pill Hill and Kaiser hospital.  There's plenty of space for a few tall buildings, its ripe for redevelopment because of all the parking lots, and its on a major transit route, and fairly close to BART.  Another good place would be downtown Oakland.  There's plenty of space if they really took a look.  People seem to be lazy and look for what amounts to an urban greenfield.  They really need to get an imagination. 

Transit to Empty Fields

In the United States we haven't been able to talk a lot about transit creating new neighborhoods whole cloth since the early 20th century. Now places like Portland have been able to take abandoned rail yards and turn them into new neighborhoods with a walkable street grid and amenities.

In Europe now, it's being taken even further. Eco suburbs in places like Freiburg are popping up and development is happening as tram lines are planned. The map below from a paper written by Berkeley student Andrea Broaddus shows the expansion of the network.

As an interesting side note, Broaddus' study noted that two ecosuburbs were the same except for parking provisions:

Travel behavior data showed that residents of Rieselfeld had higher rates of transit use in an otherwise typical modal split, while Vauban’s residents had extremely low car share and high bicycle share. These differences were attributed in part to more Vauban’s more restrictive parking policies.

But back to the Reiselfeld. Of interest here is how the development was conceived. The tramway was built before the development and historical Google Earth images show this development happening.

Reiselfeld in 2000


Similar image from a different angle, from The Modern Tram in Europe.

And a more recent image in 2006


To me this is awesome. This is true transit oriented and development oriented transit. Could we ever do something similar here in the United States? It's already happening. Though perhaps not as eco-friendly or dense as would be most sustainable.


Salt Lake City is building the Mid Jordan Trax line into the Daybreak Neighborhood drawn up by Calthorpe. While all the houses are planned to be a five minute walk from local shopping and destinations, there are still a lot of single family homes. Additionally, there is a freeway that is being constructed up the left edge of the valley that will just make Utah's air pollution and inversion days that much worse in the future.

Image courtesy of Calthorpe Associates:


Salt Lake City Suffers from Wicked Inversion Days



Flickr Photo via UTA



Daybreak Under Construction - Flickr Photo via Jason S



Daybreak Completed - Flickr Photo via Brett Neilson



All the negatives aside, I think its an interesting experiment and one worth watching. And watch from the air we will...

2003


2005

2006

2009



More Flickr photos at Daybreak from UTA





And finally a little easter egg for LRT Vehicle nuts.

Bay Area TOD Policy Might Work

We've had lots of discussions about freeway running light rail and transit and some folks say its ok as long as the major nodes are connected. I probably subscribe to that version, but when it comes down to it I'd rather have the ends of lines not be parking lots. That's why I was glad to see that the BART to Livermore extension was actually going to end in downtown Livermore, not along the freeway. This was thanks in part I believe to the MTC TOD policy, which states that you need to have a certain amount of housing units to build certain technologies like BART. Now of course that policy in itself isn't as powerful as it should be but at least its a good start.

However that won't stop some folks in Livermore from arguing that they thought the line was going down the freeway median all along. What's the point of building a rapid transit line like BART if you're just going to park cars around the stations?! Apparently some people don't get this.

"I guess the thing that's hardest for me to comprehend is that they're putting this train right down the most populated part (of the city) they could come up with,"

Because that's the point! Going to the most populated places so the $3.8 billion line will actually have more riders than parking spaces is the goal. I would personally do it a little differently, but that's just me.

11:30 PM Tuesday Night Times Square

A few photos from my recent trip to NYC:

It's so busy, nobody ever goes there anymore...



Don't forget in the daytime



Apartments for cars near the Streetsblog offices



Your friendly bike lane taker uppers



Reminds me of the Netherlands. Needs less fire escape

Guest post: Why can't I find parking?

(Note from Pantograph: This is another guest post from my friend Ed. If you missed his first two posts, check back down the page for more of his work)

Spend any time driving in San Francisco, and you’ll notice that there isn’t a lot of parking. Then, just before you give up and put the car in a garage, it dawns on you that while there aren’t that many spaces, there also aren’t that many parked cars. Instead, driveway after driveway chops up the curb, leaving the street space unusable. Curb cuts are everywhere, of course, but San Francisco buildings seem particularly fond of them.

The obvious impact is that these curb cuts take away parking that could serve many different users of the neighborhood – residents, visitors, and shoppers, and put it into private hands. But there are a lot of other reasons to dislike curb cuts. They increase conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, they set up hazardous situations as cars back out onto busy streets, they encourage sidewalk parking, and they can often leave a street without room for the trees and other amenities that improve the way pedestrians experience the street. Moreover, the garages they lead to take up space that could be used for a variety of things that add to street life, like storefronts or stoops.

The desire for off-street parking in some areas is certainly valid. However, because there isn’t a price attached to installing a curb cut, we see the type of “overfishing” that plagues any unpriced resource, with some buildings sporting rows of 4, 5, and even more garage doors fronting city streets. Fortunately, this is starting to change - the city is soon going to start charging at least $100 per year for installing a cut, and there have also been efforts to slow new installations in North Beach. Hopefully these measures will lead to efficient use of the city’s curbsides.

Acres of Free Parking Actually Cost Something

Over at my own blog, I've complained about the focus in the livable streets movement on environmental benefits to urbanism. It's not that those issues aren't important - it's that for most people, and certainly for most local governments, it's the pocketbook issues that get all the attention. So I was happy to see this piece today that discusses the opportunity costs of having your city build a Walmart surrounded by a sea of parking rather than a compact mixed-use district:

[Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter] Katz showed the results from retail properties. Here comes surprise No. 1.: Big box stores such as WalMart and Sam’s Club, when analyzed for county property tax revenue per acre, produce barely more than a single family house; maybe $150 to $200 more a year, Katz said. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) “That hardly seems worth all the heat that elected officials take when they approve such development,” he noted in a related, written presentation.

[...]

But here’s the shocker: On a horizontal bar chart Katz showed, you see that zooming to the far right side, outpacing all the retail offerings, even the regional shopping mall, is the revenue from a high-rise mixed-use project in downtown Sarasota. It sits on less than an acre and contributes a hefty $800,000 in tax per acre. (Add in city property taxes and it’s $1.2 million.) “It takes a lot of WalMarts to equal the contribution of that one mixed-use building,” Katz noted.

It's worth clicking through to read the whole thing (and printing it out for your next local planning commission meeting about that TOD project you really like).

Kids These Days

The day that I went somewhere and said "dang kids" was the day I knew that I had grown old. Not that I am that old, but it just means I'd started desiring different things in my older life than that of my childhood. Kid me would probably be off buying packs of baseball cards and candy corn. Today though I can't even muster up the courage to throw down for an xbox 360 to finally play Halo 3.

But I'm not the point where I'm telling kids to get off my lawn like New Urbanist Andres Duany. In an article in the Atlantic in their very cool city section, Andres goes on to do just that:

There's this generation who grew up in the suburbs, for whom the suburbs have no magic. The mall has no magic. They're the ones that have discovered the city. Problem is, they're also destroying the city. The teenagers and young people in Miami come in from the suburbs to the few town centers we have, and they come in like locusts. They make traffic congestion all night; they come in and take up the parking. They ruin the retail and they ruin the restaurants, because they have different habits then older folks. I have seen it. They're basically eating up the first-rate urbanism. They have this techno music, and the food cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a place and ruin it and go somewhere else.

I'm not quite sure where this came from. It's pretty low to bash on the people who are moving to cities in droves because they want the urban experience. Do we all become angry at younger folks like this at some point? I sure hope not.

On Gentrification, Supply, and Expansion

Living in the bay area can be particularly maddening. Even if you're working hard and making a good living, you are likely to still not be able to afford a house in the neighborhood of your choice. The reason being its so hard to build anywhere without coming up against NIMBYs and people that already have theirs. Take the BRT disaster where Berkeley rejected even doing the study for dedicated lanes in the city limits. It seems like progress is just a step away but defeat is often snatched from the jaws of victory.

I sometimes wonder why we can't just build more dense housing in employment districts or places where NIMBYs don't exist. There's a huge supply of land in these areas of San Jose with parking lots that could use serious transit infrastructure expansion. But the fact of the matter is that areas that are really desirable and dense are for the most part built out, and since they are built out their cost continues to increase dramatically because people really want to live there and there is a limited supply.

Take for example the Mission in San Francisco. For many years it was a lower income neighborhood known for its culture but over time transitioned. There are still vestiges of this in the compact and livable urban environment, but now the hipsters have come. I'm not sure that's a bad thing per say but we've seen this story before. Certain parties populate an urban neighborhood and then others follow until it becomes upper class, it gentrifies/yuppifies (a good read here on this subject). This end state of neighborhoods is seen as awful for the folks that were pushed out, but it is also seen as progress for the city as buildings get painted and the garden flowers are potted. This very end state of the process or "Starbucks Urbanism" is what becomes the mark of progress for those seeking it.

The problem however I see with this is not the end state per say, but the fact that the process has to happen at all. The biggest issue I have with the gentrification claim is that it can be rendered useless if we actually supplied housing for the actual market for housing. I know this is a claim long pushed by the planners and CNU set, but there's actually something behind the idea that we've overproduced single family housing and under produced urban types. What we've seen in urban neighborhoods with good bones over the last decade or so is a transformation based on lack of opportunity to improve without pushing out the middle.

But I do see a possible opportunity in the massive expansion plans that exist due to the transit space race to improve without pushing away. With multi-line expansion plans in places like Los Angeles, Denver, and Seattle, so many stations will be brought on line, the market won't be able to get to them all at once. One of the major benefits and worries of these new transit lines is that they will bring increased property values and push out existing communities. While this will provide better mobility to many of these areas, it's not likely to bring wholesale change to each of them. But it does start to provide opportunities for building housing that starts to change the urban vs. suburban market, without focusing it all on one close in neighborhood such as what has been happening in smaller regions that build transit over the last boom. We'll see what happens, but this is the theory I have.

Thursday Night Notes

Here's some news I wanted to share:

I did a report on aerial ropeways once. The City Fix shows they are used for transport around the world and even in their favorite place, South America.
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The Cotton Belt rail line in Dallas might have an interesting funding mechanism.

The plan would most likely include much steeper fares for the Cotton Belt, paid parking, and the creation of special tax districts that would capture property tax increases associated with private development along the rail line.

I'm always dubious of using value capture to pay for infrastructure. There's just not that much of an increment on commuter rail I think.
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DFLers are going to start playing hardball with U of Minn. I don't really see how a mitigated train is any different than a few thousand cars and huge buses on the same road.
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Are we really going to be spending $3.7 billion or more for a subway stop in Livermore and (an overestimated) 34,300 riders? Have we learned nothing from any of the other transit lines we've built (or didn't build) in this region? If Pleasanton has 7,400 exits (14,800) on a weekday, how is Livermore going to add 30K more riders???

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Baseball and Streetcars were bff back in the late 1800s.
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One of my favorite things about the internet is all that it can do to break down international barriers. For example, this hungarian transport blog translated discusses the Salt Lake BRT line.

Markets and Urban Development

I've been meaning to weigh in on the debate (1, 2, 3 and others) from a while ago on zoning restrictions that cause sprawl and the general libertarian argument. Matt, Ryan, and others have been pushing back hard on the idea that suburban sprawl is based on the market.

Basically the argument goes that because the market is not able to balance what people actually want, housing markets such as San Francisco, New York and many city centers to cost much more comparatively to places in the periphery. In addition, home owners don't want to see change. They like things the way they are and become an entrenched entity against any densification seeking to put all new growth somewhere else.

I agree with all of this but also would like to note that markets for density are highly dependent on agglomeration.

If land prices are rising, as they are empirically, firms economize on land. This behavior increases density and contributes to growth.

But what causes land prices to rise, or at least be high enough to support economization and higher densities? I would say that there needs to be a key catalyst, perhaps a major employer moving into an area or a major landowner or government entity focusing energies into a single place. These infrastructure investments increase land value and in turn make new dense developments possible. The demand for this type of living is real, but the ability to supply it can be harder and more locationally dependent than general sprawl.

It's also based on access. Just because someone runs a light rail line to a destination doesn't mean that a market for density is going to magically appear. If we think about where suburban centers pop up, it generally has to do with the transportation network and infrastructure that was set up to support it.

Ultimately the densest places are those that grew up close to where the major employment centers are located or proximate enough to the other largest employment center in the region with access enough to feed on it. Tyson's for example feeds off of the DC metro area and is suffocating. In order to get denser, the infamous edge city has to upgrade its circulation system and throughput. The Silver Line starts to do this and plans for a better grid and streetcar system are in the works.

But sometimes landowners believe their land is worth more than it actually is which stifles density plans as well. For example, in Houston in Midtown along the Main Street Corridor, there are some land owners just holding out for super high density projects that the market can't bear quite yet.

The typical price per square foot for land in the Midtown area grew from $4 per square foot in the early 1990s to more than $50 per square foot in 2006. This is in part due to land speculation fueled by the new light-rail line, with some buyers purchasing land in anticipation of higher land values in the future.

Or burdensome regulations such as parking requirements take the possibility of building higher density out of the mix. Once you get over a certain height, steel instead of wood must be used for construction and costs increase again. But all of this isn't possible if the land values are low or if demand isn't there. Demand typically increases when existing densities exist. But for many cities or station areas, this can be tricky. We can say that there is a demand for denser living, but we also need to know where the market exists to expand the agglomerations that exist, because unlike sprawl, we can't just build into nowhere land.

Double Vision

While it's great that the Chronicle and others are calling on Houston Metro to have a regional vision with goals, it means nothing without a tandem city land use and development infrastructure strategy. While Houston has no zoning in the usual sense, it does have everything else needed to regulate development (restrictive covenants, parking requirements, setbacks etc). The region can't just keep building HOV lanes and even light rail/commuter rail lines to chase development. Chasers never prosper, but leaders do.

More Urban Form

In an attempt to go a little deeper into the previous post I went looking for more pictures of Rotterdam and Houston and found even better comparisons and interesting views than the photos I posted before.

It should also be said that I don't mean to discount the devastation of war to people and property. There is a difference between choosing to build parking lots and having your life and possessions destroyed.

First Rotterdam:

This from scientific psychic:


And this from the special collections of the Wageningen Library:


Next Houston:

Clearance of housing to build US59 via TexasFreeway.com, an amazing resource if you want to see how freeways were built in Texas.


Also via TexasFreeway.com, a view of Houston from the same angle as the previous post's shot:



This is from Aerial viewpoint. A historic shot from 1945 compared with today. Notice the freeway intrusion. Also notice the downtown getting taller. Finally, where Union Station used to be is where highway 59 rockets through on the east side of downtown and Minute Maid park now exists with a token train filled with oranges.

Parking Bombs

More! That's the scream of merchants and others who believe that a downtown without an endless sea of parking is not worth going to. But once the whole downtown turns into a parking lot it's not really worth much anymore is it? Yet we still see the discussion of parking dominate without an eye for the destruction that it can cause a downtown if left unfettered.

Before Portland's miraculous return as an urban Mecca, it too was once infested by parking. So was the city of Houston, where parking lots took over most of the downtown at one point.

Via Mike Lydon and Transit Miami (Via the book City Shaped)

Perhaps you can say how different this is from Rotterdam after German bombing...


It's unfortunate that we didn't see what we were doing to our wonderful cities in the name of cars first. Europe had war, yet we dismantled our cities in a similar way in the name of progress. So much parking though, what has that done to the city's value? What has it taken away in terms of tax revenue from land and greater employment agglomerations? A study by Anne Moudon and Dohn Wook Sohn showed that offices that were clustered had greater values than those that weren't in the Seattle region. In addition to the spending on highways that expanded our regions to their current far reaches, how much real estate value did we destoy?

Greater value for downtowns was lost and in the process we saw places like Hartford, as found by Dr. Norm Garrick at UConn lose population, employment, and their character. Not just the loss from parking, but from the gutting of the city by the Interstate System. Here are some slides from Dr. Garrick showing the destruction. When he toggled through the first time, the room I was in audibly gasped for air.

Hartford Pre Interstate


Hartford Post Interstate


So what's the damage? The amount of tax creating employment did not grow and parking spots skyrocketed.


So in aggregate what did this look like? The red shows it all:


Lost revenue, lost agglomeration, lost value. Will these examples teach us a lesson about too much parking? Perhaps

Free Parking Again

Another issue with free parking. Isn't there a market based way to take care of this issue around Mockingbird Station?

Sunday Night Notes

A few things to chomp on:

State lawmakers in California are understanding what parking is not. Free.
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MARTA is a big reason why UPS located its headquarters in northern Atlanta. It's pretty interesting how much development happened around the MARTA stations outside of downtown.
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Since High Speed Rail is such a newfangled thing to most people in the United States, many want to put it into the urban transit category when thinking about its mission. However this is not the case. In my opinion its intercity transport like airplanes. Often opposition to HSR brings out the density straw man to oppose expansion of intercity rail lines but then they would also have to argue that airports and greyhound bus stations need density to operate as well.

I also believe that HSR is a one way train. It's not necessary to have density to operate between cities but it starts the conversation on increased density and transit service once it gets there. And I feel that the comparisons to Europe and density are really mischaracterized discussions about connectivity and service levels. Ultimately the reason why HSR is fairly useful in Europe is because you can get a train to everywhere. Much like the Hub and Spoke airport system in the United States.
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Wendell Cox is always a fun comic relief.

Monday Night Notes

Hartford has been brutalized by parking. The loss of tax base to the virus of surface parking is staggering.
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Can you reduce GHGs and still grow?
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Is Paris more accessible than London? Some physicists say yes because the ants told them. Via Price Tags
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Can space be found for affordable housing in New York City?
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An interesting thought, the city as a living machine. How can we bring cities back to a pre-city natural state while still growing? This is an idea that is being explored in many places. A variant on this was discussed last year when discussing plans for the Lloyd district in Portland. It opened up some interesting discussion in the comments.

Get Riled Up!

Want to get riled up? Check out the back and forth at the National Journal between highway lackeys and the good guys. "You're trying to take away our freedom to drive 100 miles to work everyday!" This one from the head of the truckers:

However, many of the proposed solutions encroach upon our freedom of mobility and our right to live where we want. Smart growth land-use strategies are simply ways to encourage living in high-density areas offering mass transit, which counters the preferred lifestyles of most Americans. Instead of changing the transportation systems to modify our behavior, we should improve our transportation systems to match people’s behaviors and preferences.Personal freedom is a defining characteristic of the American way of life...

This gem is from the head of the highway users alliance:

If so, I assume you would reject policies that would limit the choice of new homes that can be zoned and built, force people to pay to park in front of their home, add high tolls to their car trips, require paid parking at suburban shopping centers, divert their taxes, and involve the federal government in local land use planning, right? Afterall, these unfortunate souls do not need to be punished for living how they were forced to live, right?

We are in total agreement in fact -- Americans should be free to live where the want to live, work where they want to work, and shop where they want to shop. And as they choose freely without armtwisting from the federal government, we should provide the transportation system that is finanically, politically, and environmentally sustainable to support that free choice. We could start our plan with the one mode of transportation that could theoretically support itself with a reasonably set gas tax paid by its users.

I just fell of the couch laughing. Man those users sure do pay for the system! We can let people live however they want as long as its with cars! This is amazing yet not surprising. This is what we are fighting against.

Job Centers Should Be Center

As Becks notes, I think its important to start thinking 20 years ago about transbay capacity. Unfortunately we haven't had a real conversation in the region about it. A second tube (I believe with four tracks for commuter rail and BART) is certainly needed to reinforce San Francisco and Oakland as the central job centers of the region. But why waste $10B on a new tube as Rafael from CAHSR blog says in the comments when you could be creating more jobs in the regions other centers.

Instead of demanding the construction of a second BART tube for $10 billion, perhaps we should be asking why everybody and their grandmother absolutely, positively has to work in downtown San Francisco to begin with.

I'm pretty sure San Francisco's CBD only has a certain small share of the region's overall jobs, perhaps 10-15% at most. I'm guessing here but for the most part this is the case in most of the country. But the reality is that since the jobs are clustered so tightly, they demand usage of alternative transport. They also are places of agglomeration and its not an issue of the execs getting a corner office but where face to face meetings and deals happen at lunch. (This is a whole other topic but I don't believe E-working is every going to replace working in an office with other people) There is a reason why the first BART system was built, because leaders of the area wanted to be the Banking Center of the West Coast and needed that critical mass of density and prestige to achieve it.

Another issue here is that of sprawl. There is this belief that the highways and housing policies were what caused the sprawl with the thought that more people could just drive into the central city. But in reality its even more nuanced than that. We've been building these roads out but when we do that we create these job centers and edge cities on the periphery that increase the outward migration pattern. People keep moving out and towards the exact point at which they can have a thirty minute commute or less from their job center. For jobs such as finance or research or science that are transit oriented, this means less people taking transit and more people deciding to drive their cars. I'm fairly confident that less Chevron employees take transit to work these days. It also means less urban office parks with parking lots that increase reliance on SOVs even more. We see this with Pleasanton and the continued movement of people out to Stockton.

If we're truely going to be transit oriented and sustainable in this region, we can't put a cap on the jobs in the center cities and continue to push jobs out to the periphery. If you don't spend that $10B on a second tube and push for more development (residential and employment) in BART's current reach in the inner East and West bay and even more money on an actual urban rapid transit network to connect to the existing bus network, I would argue that you're going to be spending much much more money to try and get people to and from their exurban and suburban job centers let alone the difference in city services (water sewer police fire) that must be supplied to all of these new suburbs and growth.