Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Locating Stations is Hard

Where does the station go? Novato has chosen to tell SMART not to put a station in their downtown. After looking at the map, it seems a bit silly to me.
But Eklund and other council members were concerned about the lack of parking for those who would take the train and the relatively small job centers. Councilwoman Jeanne MacLeamy said she expected as many as 1,500 new jobs to come to the Atherton area in the coming years on top of the 1,500 already there. There are about 500 jobs near the proposed downtown station.
Why not have a policy to push more jobs onto the urban grid that exists downtown. It's also the most connected to the residential neighborhoods meaning it will be easier for people to get to the station without cars. Stop designing for cars!!!

The top is a close up of the two stations under consideration. The downtown station was ruled out which with the experience of Caltrain seems a bit silly. The yellow box shows the jobs they are talking about which have a huge parking lot outside of the building. Why not develop the downtown more and create a reason for people to live in downtown Novato and take the train to other cities?


3 comments:

Unknown said...

Because people from Marin love their cars. Of all the counties in the Bay Area, Marin residents drive the most, and have the highest overall carbon footprint.

Morgan Wick said...

Can out-of-staters write these people and set them straight? Marin county residents aren't going to get out of their cars if we treat that as a foregone conclusion.

ian said...

being from marin, I'm a little disappointed that they're designing for existing development instead of to shape future development... article says they're still going to ask for the downtown station though, so maybe we'll get all three...

oh well, it's a start. at least getting commuters out of their cars will help congestion... my thought is that marin will be slow to go to fixed guideway (like the marin corridors streetcar plan) since after the commuters are off the roads, most people could still get around in electric cars (since they can probably afford it).

streetcars would be nice though. someday.