ABAG Options that Work

Corte Madera’s departure from ABAG won’t solve any of their problems – indeed, it will compound them.  Despite the town’s protestations that housing mandates are imposed upon them by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats that don’t understand the town, the fact remains that by quitting ABAG they have simply gone from an organization where they had a say to a state housing department where they have no say.

If Corte Madera were serious about regaining local control over whether it will build any housing or not, it would look for ways to work within the system while seeking its reform.  In their ill-informed haste, Corte Madera left behind two important tools in the ABAG toolbox: forming a subregion, and allocation trades.

Shrink the fish pond

A subregion is a group of governments assigned their state housing needs as a block, and the subregion may then divvy up the allocations between members as they see fit.  This gives local governments significantly more control over planning decisions as staff is necessarily closer to the ground and even the smallest minnow of a town has a greater voice in a smaller fish pond.

An effective Marin subregion would need to involve the whole of the county's towns and cities.  Policy decisions, such as factors for the allocation methodology, would be decided by either the county’s ABAG delegation or the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers, consisting of all 60 of Marin’s elected councilmembers and supervisors.  Either way gives the process legitimacy, something ABAG is sorely lacking, and allows the public to be more involved decisionmaking.

Napa took advantage of the subregional option this RHNA cycle, forming a subregion for precisely the reasons of local control and to address local concerns.  Their draft methodology will likely include factors such as water availability and traffic, both serious concerns in Marin as well, and will involve significant negotiations between individual jurisdictions.

Alas, the time to form a subregion has passed.  Protests against this last RHNA cycle focused on the state’s supposed usurpation of local control and the deleterious effects thereof and so never got around to more productive lines of thought like forming a subregion.  Even if Marin were to establish a subregion tomorrow, the upcoming RHNA cycle would not take the subregion into account.  This process requires patience, and the blinkered opponents of RHNA are motivated by righteous anger, not calculated political moves.

Trading spaces

Luckily, ABAG allows localities who find their allocations particularly onerous to trade away some of their housing allocations, so long as a jurisdiction doesn't entirely abdicate its responsibility for new housing, compensates the receiving jurisdiction for the burden, and maintains the overall mix of affordable housing. ABAG must approve the transfer, but is not required to under state law - the Southern California Area Governments, ABAG's SoCal counterpart, does not require review, for example, though it does require the jurisdictions to be contiguous.

While there weren't any trades based on taste last cycle, as there would be if Corte Madera involved, Mountain View did transfer some of its allocation to Santa Clara County for practical reasons.  Moffett Field was projected to add jobs, but the town had no jurisdiction over the facility, which was in unincorporated county land, and protested that it was responsible for what amounted to federal workforce housing.  Santa Clara, as the proper jurisdiction over Moffett Field, agreed to take over responsibility for the allocated units.

It's unclear whether Corte Madera could be part of such trades while outside ABAG, as it would be the only jurisdiction in the Bay Area not part of the association.  Rather, as a jurisdiction receiving its allocation directly from the state it would likely be obligated to zone for the whole batch.  Town staff are preparing a report on what happens now that Corte Madera has left ABAG, which should shine more light on that issue.

Either option – forming a subregion, or initiating trades – requires political leadership that can reach across jurisdictional lines and convince those who want to work within the system.  It requires patience, and faith in the system, to lead reform, yet by acting so recklessly and counterproductively Corte Madera has shown it cannot be that leader.  Unless Marin finds such a leader, opponents of regionalism will continue to burn the only bridges they have back to local control.

Bikeshare Could Roll in Marin

This week TAM released a Request for Proposal allocating $25,000 to study whether Marin is suitable for a bikeshare system, and where it should go. If Marin eventually does develop its own system, it will join Montreal, London, Paris, New York, Minneapolis, and many other cities in implementing such a system.   The RFP itself is not terribly interesting, though you can read it if you like.  It's also not terribly intriguing that TAM is investigating bikeshare, as the authority has a history of investigating a wide variety of projects, no matter the project's feasibility.  What is intriguing is that this comes as the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is preparing to launch a bikeshare system with San Francisco, San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Redwood City; as SMART is under construction; as the Plan Bay Area gets into full swing; and as a bikemaggeddon is preparing to land in Sausalito with the America's Cup.  Each of these could push bikeshare to the front of Marin's mind and make it likely the system will actually be built.

What the devil is bikeshare?

The first successful system in the United States was Washington, DC's Capital Bikeshare, or CaBi for short, and it's been replicated across the country since its rollout in 2010.  Subscriptions are fairly cheap: $7 for a day, $15 for a week, $25 for a month, and $75 for a year.  A subscriber takes a bike out of a station and can dock the bike at any other station.  The trip is free for the first 30 minutes but there's a fee if the bike is out for longer.  Although it starts fairly nominal, the fee increases quite a bit once a trip goes longer than an hour.  The point is to get the bikes circulating, to replace single trips that might be too short for transit or too long on foot.  DC's tourists use the system all the time, and it's quite common to see families riding along the National Mall atop the striking red bikes.

DC's residents, including me, use the system all the time.  Riding a bike in the city is just as fast as using a car and, for short trips, faster than taking the subway.  It keeps me active, pays for itself after a month's use, is flexible and efficient.  It reintroduced me to bicycling and opened the city in a way the bus and metro never had.  Now neighboring cities are clamoring to join the CaBi system, while neighborhoods in DC are constantly fighting for new stations.

Not to say that CaBi doesn't have problems.  Bikeshare depends on users circulating the bikes around from station to station.  Nothing's worse than finding an empty bikeshare station when you want a bike or a full station when you need to park (you can get your time extended if the station is full).  Stations, therefore, need to be tightly packed so that if one station is empty or full, the next one isn't too distant.  In Paris, the stations are sometimes no more than a block apart and don't dissipate into the suburbs - there's a hard boundary.  In DC, the stations are rather further spaced apart, which works reasonably well though being "dock-blocked", as its known, still happens with maddening frequency.  The city contracts with a company to manually move bikes from full stations to empty ones, but it's not quite enough.  A more decentralized city would mean less strain on certain stations as people commute, but barring that more stations, bikes, and members would go a long way to improving circulation around the system.

The Bay Area's plan

BAAQMD is spearheading the San Francisco plan to establish a bikeshare system in the northeastern quadrant of the city and in isolated pockets along the Caltrain corridor.  Its centerpiece is the downtown San Francisco segment, centered around Market Street, which will include 500 bikes at 50 stations spaced 300 yards apart.  It's set to open this summer, just in time for the America's Cup, which will bring a flood of tourists to the city - tourists that will undoubtedly flock to bikeshare.

The District argues that bicycles can function as an extension of the transit network, but transporting them on regional transit agencies is discouraged.  Bicycles are not allowed on BART during commute hours, and are limited on Caltrain.  The Warm Planet bike shop at Caltrain's Fourth & King depot is over capacity, and transit is largely maxed out around Market during the commute.  Marinites face similar problems on GGT's commuter buses and ferries.  Having a bike ready for anyone in the commercial heart of the city (not to mention the other commercial hubs along Caltrain) will give commuters a solution, allowing them to easily transfer to bicycles in the city without the need to fret over getting a bike to and from work.  A bikeshare system would also free a commuter to bike to work but not from it, or vice versa, if they don't want to arrive at either end a little sweaty.  This encourages more bicycle use, more transit use, and, therefore, less driving.

Eyeballing Marin's Bikeshare Suitability

Marin's central and southern cities are ideally suited to the bicycle.  Commercial districts are close to one another and housing, meaning most residents are well within biking distance of at least one downtown.  Bikes are also better suited than the bus to traverse sprawling Novato or Terra Linda and can be a car replacement for most trips elsewhere.

Yet Marin is not terribly dense and has fairly mediocre bicycle infrastructure.  More than almost any other place, Marin is linear, with valleys branching off the 101 corridor.  The ideal grid, with its redundancies and infinite rerouting, is impossible over Marin's ridges.  This isolates communities to their benefit and detriment, and makes cycling more difficult than it is in DC's suburbs - it's fairly difficult to ride from Fairfax to Lucas Valley despite the fact that it's only as far as downtown San Rafael, as the crow flies.  Marin is also incredibly car-centric, rendering some of the county's major thoroughfares entirely inhospitable to bikes or pedestrians.

Marin's employment corridor is Highway 101.  Though office and retail exist in the downtowns tucked away from the freeway, the highest density of employment is along that central spine.  Those that don't work along the corridor probably work in San Francisco, also down the corridor.

Bikeshare needs strong bicycling infrastructure, to ensure there is a good way to ride from place to place; population density to keep the system running throughout the day; and decentralized commute patterns to ensure certain areas don't get overloaded as everyone goes to them, or denuded as everyone leaves them.  At first blush, Marin misses all three of these criteria, but it's not enough to convince me Marin is unsuitable to bikeshare.  Those well-spread downtowns lend themselves to bicycling, and other systems, like CaBi, have had success in areas similar to ours.

I also want bikeshare to succeed in Marin.  Beyond the health, environmental, cost, and traffic benefits, bikeshare would reap political benefits for the county's urban cycling infrastructure.  Transportation debates in the county are dominated by the driver's voice, as most Marinites are drivers first and cyclists second.  Bicycle improvements, then, play second fiddle to parking, roads, and other projects that maintain or strengthen our reliance on the automobile.  When bicycling does enter the debate, focus is often on its recreational aspects rather than its functionality as everyday transportation.  Since bikeshare is unabashedly functional, growing its membership means growing the political base advocating for cycling improvements.

I'm excited to see what TAM's study will show - Marin could reap so many rewards with the system.  With luck, the study will recommend the system.

Walkable Centers, Walkable Stations

If our local transit agencies ever revamp their bus maps or create supplements like my spider map, they should mark important stops as walkable centers, branding them like rail stations even if SMART will never go anywhere near them. Inspired by David Klion's metro station walkability rankings for the DC area I decided to make my own.  I was curious how our various bus pads and transit hubs stack up against one another in part out of curiosity, and in part to see whether major improvements could be made around our town centers and bus pads.  Using Walkscore, I got the following rankings, in order:

1. Santa Rosa Town Center, 98
2. Mill Valley Town Center, 97
3. Fairfax Parkade, 95
4. San Rafael Transit Center, 94
5. Copeland Street, Petaluma, 94
6. Terra Linda Bus Pad, 86
7. Larkspur Town Center, 83
8. San Anselmo Hub, 82
9. Sausalito Ferry, 82
10. Rohnert Park, Town Center, 82
11. Ignacio Bus Pad, 80
12. Cotati Town Center, 80
13. Tiburon Town Center, 78
14. Strawberry Transit Center, 75
15. Novato Transit Center, 75
16. Marin City Transit Center, 75
17. Rowland Avenue Bus Pad, 74
18. Lucas Valley Bus Pad, 74
19. Corte Madera Town Center, 72
20. Civic Center, 72
21. Paradise Drive Bus Pad, 71
22. Larkspur Landing, 71
23. Ross Town Center, 69
24. Delong Bus Pad, 68
25. Lucky Drive Bus Pad, 68
26. Tiburon Wye Bus Pad, 68
27. Canal (Average), 67
28. Seminary Drive Bus Pad, 66
29. College of Marin 63
30. Manzanita Bus Pad, 60
31. N San Pedro Road Bus Pad, 58
32. Spencer Avenue Bus Pad, 55
33. Atherton Bus Pad, 51
34. Alameda del Prado Bus Pad, 34
35. Marinwood Bus Pad, 18
36. Manor, 12

A few things stick out to me.  First, bus pads are far less walkable than town centers, though most of them are walkably close to amenities.  Especially surprising was the Lucas Valley bus pad, which is within walking distance of quite a few commercial outlets.  It is apparently more accessible than bus stops in downtown Ross and Corte Madera.  Second is the high accessibility of older towns and low accessibility of newer areas.  Third is that Marin's development is remarkably walkable compared to that of the DC metro area.  The average score for Marin is just a hair under 71, the same as DC's subway station average of 71, though some of the suburban counties have averages in the 40s. Lastly, there is no stop in Marin with a perfect 100.

One should keep in mind that Walkscore doesn't include the actual pedestrian environment. I'd much rather spend an afternoon in downtown Corte Madera than around the Smith Ranch Road office parks. Rather, Walkscore tells us that the bones of a real, metro-esque system are already in place, and that these neighborhoods, if retrofitted for walkability and served properly by transit, could take off.  It also tells us that development and the bus system have gone hand-in-hand: the various walkable (or at least accessible) centers around the county are served by the bus.

And these are the places that should be branded as transit hubs.  In DC, unlike the Bay Area, metro stations are the centers of a huge amount of development.  Cities market their metro stations as potential downtowns, and conversations about urban planning, office development, and more revolve around transit accessibility.  DC's metro map makes it easy for people to know how to get where they want to go, and businesses can market themselves with ease.  The carless Washingtonian may never get on the bus, but they know how to get where they need to go if it's next to a Metro station.

The same sort of branding and mapping could bring investment to the various gray fields around our bus hubs.  The Hub, for example, has an abandoned construction project not more than 500 feet away.  It's built into the hillside, so a taller building of four stories or more is certainly feasible.  Something similar might be built around Smith Ranch Road on either side of the freeway, while the huge parking lots around downtown Tiburon and Larkspur Landing could be put to far better use than car storage.

Because these centers are already walkable, they could in theory support more transit than is currently in place.  Marin's buses are blessed with walkable areas and mostly simple routes.  They just need that push to succeed.

Leaving ABAG Would Be a Mistake

Over the last year, rage against the Bay Area's alphabet soup of regional authorities has simmered just below the surface of Marin politics.  Although the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) got its share of hate for banning fires over Christmas and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) caught flack for housing mandates around SMART, it was the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) process that drew the most fire by forcing localities to zone for more housing.  Marinites think their cities are already built out and so were incensed that an unelected agency could tell them to zone for more development.  The frustration has finally boiled over in Corte Madera, and there's a push for the town to leave ABAG.  It would be a mistake if it did.

Background: The State of Local Control

The RHNA process comes once every seven years, driven by a state mandate to accommodate affordable housing within the state's regions.  Sacramento directs regional agencies - ABAG in the Bay Area, SANDAG in San Diego - to assess housing needs in the area and assign a number of housing units regional towns, cities, and counties must zone for.  Marin has had trouble keeping up with the RHNA cycle and only now are the last towns finishing their housing plans.  Unfortunately, they took so long to finish that the next RHNA cycle is about to begin, dropping voters with more homes to zone for just as they figured out how to zone for the last bunch.

This cycle will be different.  ABAG is working with MTC, BAAQMD, and the Bay Coastal Development Commission (BCDC) to develop a regional Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS), tying housing allocations to transportation, air quality, and water quality.  This unprecedented level of regional coordination means communities will need to work within the still-incomplete SCS or face financial penalties, as the regional agencies control and disburse a great deal of federal and state funds.  After going through a round of grueling negotiations over the last cycle's allocations and angst over the loss of local control, the SCS is just one more thing for local politicians to worry about.

Pulling Out

Into this walked Corte Madera's ABAG representative, Councilwoman Carla Condon.  For months she has argued that the association is trampling local rights, pursuing a social engineering project to make Corte Madera look like Oakland.  Mayor Bob Ravasio concurs, and would rather receive housing allocations directly from Sacramento.

I'm on record against these allocations - they distort the housing market and do rob cities of local control.  Yet I also know these allocations can do a great deal of good.  The densities mandated are not excessively high, and are met or exceeded in many parts of Marin, and they can give municipal councils an excuse to add housing near transit and historic downtowns.

Withdrawing from ABAG, as Corte Madera is considering, would not change either of those realities.  By dealing directly with the state, Corte Madera would be setting itself up to deal with a bigger bureaucracy with less chance of coming out on top.  As well, pulling out of ABAG could create a logistical mess for Corte Madera at other regional agencies, as transportation funding and support will be tied to the RHNA process, making even more work for town staff to sort out the inconsistencies with every other government in the region.

Far better would be for Corte Madera to spearhead a Marin County housing subregion.  ABAG allows localities to create subregions that can assign their own affordable housing needs.  Although ABAG still gives the subregion a total number of units, the subregion can assign those units however it likes.  A hypothetical Marin subregion would reestablish a modicum of local control over the allocations, allowing amenable cities, like Mill Valley or San Rafael, to take more units while others, like Corte Madera or Novato, would receive fewer.  Allocation would happen through the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers, so all localities would have a say in how allocations are made.

Alas, such a subregion would apply not to this coming RHNA cycle but the next, as the deadline for subregional formation passed last March.  As well, it's unlikely Corte Madera would be able to pull out of ABAG for this coming cycle either, meaning any reform will need to come from within ABAG or be in preparation for the rather distant future.  Given the major bureaucratic reforms coming with One Bay Area, it's too soon to say if the regional agencies will be too difficult for Marinites to handle.  In the interim, Councilwoman Condon should focus more on shaping the final RHNA numbers to Corte Madera's liking than trying to pull the city out of the ABAG altogether.

Bringing the Spider Map Home

The greatest problem with bus lines is that nobody knows where they go.  While light rail or streetcar tracks are not for every route, they do let people visually understand where transit goes.  Buses, however, travel along the same roadways as cars, leaving drivers in the dark as to where they go.  Communicating a route properly is extremely important to pulling back the veil of our transit system, and for showing people how transit is freedom from the car.

To address this problem in at least one corner of Marin, I've designed a draft spider map for the San Anselmo Hub (PDF).  We discussed spider maps previously; in short they are schematics of where buses intersecting a certain point run.  Such diagrams are used most successfully in London where they integrate with Tube stations, although DC has made some forays into this field of late by putting bus line schematics at bus stops and huge Transit Information Displays, or TIDs, in their metro stations.  (If anyone can find me a PDF of those TIDs, I'll be forever grateful.)  The point is to simplify a bus map by pulling out any unnecessary clutter and isolating just the bus routes, showing where riders can go without transferring.  It is, at least to some degree, a map of the freedom available to you from a given point.

My Hub spider map don't show all the stops, as those can change.  Rather, the map shows primary stops that are unlikely to change, such as Marin General Hospital.  The route lines and stop circles are displayed differently depending on levels of service to give riders a clear visual of where they can always go and where they may need to check a schedule.

As people generally don't care what service they use to go from point A to B, I included all possible transfers along with easily-identifiable logos at all stops where applicable.  This is best seen at the San Rafael Transit Center, which has transfers to all over the North Bay. Transfers in San Francisco, such as connections to the Cable Car, may be valuable to families that want to spend a weekday as tourists in the City.  Including such data also helps riders start to build a mental map of transit beyond Marin, adding connection points to knit them all together.  Plus, it provides advertising for the other agencies.  I had  never bothered to take the bus to the Oakland Airport, but now I know I can.  If I want to take a bus to the City of Sonoma, I know I can take the 38S, even if I don't know when.  The regional transit network map is intended to be an aid in that process.

Giving people a destination-based frequency guide shows riders how they could go from A to B.  If I'm in San Anselmo and I want to get to San Rafael, I don't care if it's I take the 23 or the 22.  The two lines complement one another along that corridor, and the frequency table reflects that.  Given space restrictions I did not include a full-fledged timetable, but I'm assuming other signage is nearby.  Timetables will still be necessary, as this map is for outbound trips only; the 22 doesn't always leave from Sausalito and once per weekday winds through Mill Valley on its way north, but never does going south.  These inbound trips are not visualized, and could confuse travelers.

The rest of the design is taken from MTC's TIDs (PDF), which are sadly missing in Marin.  The orange i logo, the headers, the green were added to visually identify this map with those more common maps.  A San Franciscan visiting San Anselmo would instantly recognize the visual vocabulary, knitting together in their mind that the Hub is still part of the regional transit network even if MUNI doesn't run buses there, and a San Anselmoan would feel a similar sense of recognition when leaving the county.

I chose to map the Hub mostly because I know San Anselmo best, but also because of the location's flexibility.  With some modifications it could be adapted for use up and down Ross Valley.  Used in conjunction with broader system maps and timetables, it would be a powerful tool for Marinites.

Since it's a draft, I'd appreciate any comments and criticisms.  You should know that I added a small border around the map, which is why things look a bit more squished inward than they otherwise ought.  If you think it's good enough as it is, feel free to print (and laminate!) a copy and put it at the Hub.  If you do, send me a picture: thegreatermarin [at] gmail.com.  I designed it on tabloid-sized paper, less than half the size of a traditional TID, so you can print it out without much hassle.

What do you think?  What TIDs and maps should come standard at any Marin transit hub?

On Narrow Streets

Let’s think of every amazing city you’ve been to, at least the ones that have been amazing for their form and dynamism. Imagine a streetscape, and think about its form. How wide are the streets? How tall are the buildings? Are there a lot of cars, or a lot of pedestrians? Let’s also think of the ideal, the city you always wanted to visit. Venice comes to mind, as do Paris and Jerusalem. Odds are, these cities look a bit like this:

What I love about the streetscapes above is that I get an overwhelming sense of home from them, but I’ve never lived anywhere but the suburbs. Then again, the downtown streetscapes of San Anselmo, Fairfax, and Mill Valley are pretty impressive:

And places are still being built that look like those quaint French villages we pay so much to visit, although these are called slums:

The elements in each of these are very similar: narrow streets, active pedestrian life and slow or no cars. I point this out not to be sentimental but because although this is one extreme, it is the one that is the most healthy, the most economically viable, the most environmentally sustainable. Marinites bemoan our car-centric attitudes and look with a little bit of aloof sadness at the state of obesity in Middle America, but we ought to always be wary of making the same mistakes that led our Middle American fellows to their current sorry state.

We’ve looked at some plans for redeveloping the eastern end of downtown San Rafael, and I suspect the Civic Center plans will be similarly ambitious and potentially transformative. Yet there is so much to get wrong: developers building fortress apartments, city staffers choosing cars over people, focusing on more and more parking rather than things that engage our hearts and make us feel at home, not interlopers in an automobile’s world. I hope instead we take inspiration from the best places in the world, to make Marin the greater place it could be.

The SMART Area, Part 4: Buses, and the Future

Over the last few days I've been posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needed more than just a single post. So far, we’ve covered land use and parking, and mobility, and this last post will cover buses the future of the site.

The hero of mobility in the Station Area Plan will not be SMART; it will be Golden Gate Transit. If a Sonoman wants to get to San Anselmo, she will likely go by bus. If a new resident in the Area Plan wants to go to San Francisco, he will go by bus. And if a Corte Maderan needs to get to Santa Rosa, she'll probably take a bus first. Yet, the bus system, as it stands, is widely lamented as inadequate, especially on weekends. How to improve long-range (beyond 2 miles) mobility for residents in and through the area, and how to accommodate the increased service in the study area, should certainly be part of the conversation.

The typical Marin bus route runs every 30 to 60 minutes and is far slower than driving an equivalent distance thanks to a few crazy loops, some too-compact stop densities, lack of signal priority, long stop layovers, and the general restrictions of running on surface streets in traffic. Although there is an effective and complicated transfer system, thanks to a 95% on-time rate, the bus as it currently stands is not a car-replacing transit system.

This bodes ill for transit-oriented development in the Plan Area, not to mention other towns that want to orient their ABAG zoning towards transit – essentially the whole of Marin except for Novato. Without an adequate framework, increased population will lead to more sprawl, meaning more traffic, more pollution, and less open space. We must make the bus work.

There's a debate in the activist community regarding how exactly to do that, but it comes down to a few priorities: improve the absolute quality of the bus service through frequency, improve the relative quality of the bus service by making cars a less attractive choice, and improve the efficiency of rider collection by putting residents and jobs near the stations. In the ideal this means bus rapid transit or just separated lanes, but in Marin's medium-term, such BRT lines on the old rail rights-of-way are probably politically infeasible, and auto mode share would likely remain too great to support the service. Express buses, however, make perfect sense.

Whenever I ride GGT, I hardly see any on-and-off boarding between major stations; people are going from center to center, and ridership is not evenly distributed along the route. GGT should acknowledge this and operate a high-frequency town-to-town express network. GGT's last semi-comprehensive system analysis showed that such express service, combined with developing a system of “green hub” transfer points, would benefit a huge number of riders. If marketed with SMART – a rubber-tire rail – GGT could have a success and draw riders out of the new developments along the SMART corridor.

To boost ridership more generally, GGT should mail every adult within a half-mile radius of the Transit Center a pre-loaded Clipper card with a year-long GGT unlimited ride pass, perhaps in conjunction with the proposed Zipcar membership. San Rafael should allow local businesses to cash-out of some parking requirements by purchasing annual transit passes for their employees. Boulder did something similar to these proposals and saw drive-alone rates drop from 56% to 36%, with the bus taking up the slack. Give people something of value, and they will respond.

The Area Plan makes no mention of improving overall bus capacity or promoting ridership, but it does make some recommendations on how to move the Bettini Transit Center to the SMART site. None of the proposals struck me as particularly attractive, as most of them involve transforming the blocks around the SMART station into rather pedestrian-unfriendly surface stations akin to the Bettini Transit Center today. Other proposals, such as putting bus bays along Heatherton and under the freeway are more attractive from a pedestrian perspective but offer limited capacity.

If San Rafael decides it needs a new parking garage west of 101, the bus terminal should be located to the ground level, giving riders a more weatherproofed facility and allowing the height above the terminal to be used effectively. Bettini's lack of developability is one of the major arguments in the Area Plan for its demolition, so the city should try to lump its desired but ugly infrastructure together. Using the example diagrams from the Area Plan, such a garage would likely provide between 10 and 20 bus bays, depending on the configuration and location of the garage.

The Future

SMART is coming to town, whether people want it or not, and with it will hopefully be a new neighborhood and a new swagger for San Rafael. The city has a chance to come to the forefront of urban policy in the North Bay through innovative (for Marin) land use practices like form-based zoning, parking minimum reform, and true transit-oriented development. Until now, these have simply been words in general plans and housing elements, but San Rafael may actually make it happen. The opportunities here should excite everyone who supports a more walkable, livable, and sustainable Marin.

That's not to say there aren't challenges. Parts of the city staff have a history of choosing car capacity over pedestrian-friendliness, and powerful organizations such as the San Rafael Neighborhood Association could still throw their weight against passage. Both impulses should be resisted by the Council. The opportunities are too great to let this plan slip by.

The Citizens Advisory Committee is meeting on February 2 at 7pm in San Rafael's Community Development Conference Room. The draft plan will go before the City Council some time in March. The Greater Marin will likely be back to its regularly scheduled programming Wednesday.

The SMART Area, Part 3: Mobility

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needs more than just a single post. Today we tackle the interplay of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. So far, we’ve covered land use and parking, and the last post will cover buses and the future of the site.

The SMART Downtown Station Area is set in a car-centric environment, complete with an elevated freeway and its ramps, pedestrian barriers, dead street frontage, narrow sidewalks, and open lots. There is no traffic calming, little in the way of bicycle infrastructure, and a push to move more and more cars through. This is a transit-oriented development, deliberately focused around means of getting around that don’t include a car. While it does not address needed bus improvements, the Station Area Plan tackles the other issues by building needed infrastructure for walking and cycling. It takes a step back by altering the street network to accommodate more traffic, giving one San Rafael Planning Commissioner “heartburn”, but overall the plan is solid where it chooses to look.

Cars

Highway 101, built as an upgrade to the old Redwood Highway to speed cars to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, bisects San Rafael. Irving and Heatherton are functionally the frontage roads, one-way strips running north and south respectively, and Second and Third are the on and off ramps, running one-way east and west respectively. This poses immense problems for active living, as a glorified freeway ramp is no place to put a pedestrian or a bicycle.

Car lanes are 12 feet wide, as wide as a freeway lane, but facilitating speed. Timed lights to keep traffic moving and encourages driving at the speed limit but contributes to noise and the perception of danger. There are no traffic-calming measures that I can think of.

For a transit-oriented community this is problematic, but it is understandable given the geography. In most other cities, traffic is funnelled through specific arterials on a wide grid, though if there is a problem on one street, others nearby can soak up the spillover. San Rafael is the primary freeway entrance for Ross Valley, and the whole of downtown is only five blocks wide. Speeding 24,000 cars per day on and off the freeway is a huge challenge for San Rafael, and this is a way to address the problem.

With more density coming to this area, the Area Plan has proposed adding right-turn lanes off Heatherton to Third, increasing the outbound capacity and allowing the roads to keep flowing freely. Unfortunately, the plan proposes doing this while removing a crosswalk along Heatherton to prevent pedestrians from interfering with traffic flow. This is foolish in the extreme, despite the improved bus travel times. Most traffic through this area is pass-through, and there is more than enough capacity on Mission, Fifth, and Fourth to absorb the increase in westbound traffic from these projects. San Rafael needs to focus on calming Second and Third rather than simply pushing more cars through, especially here.

Bicycling

I remember reading a blog comment once to the effect of, “I’ve been car-free in Fairfax for years, but only because I have a bike.” Golden Gate Transit has somewhat thin service for being a car replacement so bicycle ownership is a must for the car-free, and this is almost as true in San Rafael as it is in Fairfax.

Improving the bike-unfriendly areas around San Rafael, especially under the freeway and along Second and Third, are absolutely essential to allow car-free travel around Marin, and the bike lanes included in the plan accomplish at least a bit by facilitating the bicycle connection between Irwin and the multi-use path behind the San Rafael Corporate Center. MCBC has called for a Class I bike lane (or multi-use path, what the rest of the country calls a cycletrack) on West Tamalpais instead of the planned bike lane on East Tamalpais. This is another good idea to be explored, as cycletracks would go a long way to promoting bicycling in all parts of Central Marin, and a good one on West Tamalpais could be a model.

Pedestrians

Walkability is the foundation of a livable neighborhood, a fact acknowledged by the Area Plan. Walking around the Transit Center is a pain, with missing crosswalks, long curb-cuts, and pedestrian barriers at key intersections. Walking under the freeway is unpleasant, especially at night, and the narrow sidewalks put the cars far too close to pedestrians. To solve this, the Area Plan calls for more crosswalks, removal of extraneous curb-cuts, and widening or adding sidewalks throughout the area.

Unfortunately, the most pressing pedestrian problem is handled in an astonishingly ham-fisted sort of way. When SMART arrives, it will be directly across Third from the Transit Center, and there are huge desire lines running between the two facilities. San Rafael, concerned that people would run across Third to catch their bus, wants to erect a pedestrian barrier along most of the length the station's Third Street side, forcing pedestrians to cross at either Heatherton or West Tamalpais, eliminating mid-block crossings from East Tamalpais by commuters desperate to catch their bus. This is the opposite of pedestrian-friendly.

A far better solution would be to initiate a block-long crossing, starting 30 seconds after a train pulls up and lasting 45 seconds, during which time cars would be unable to turn right. As SMART will run only once every half-hour, it would not be too disruptive of bus and car traffic, and Heatherton traffic would still be able to move south during the crossing. To prevent commuter desperation, buses should be instructed to wait a short time after the train arrives, and SMART itself should have real-time departure information displayed in the train for buses at whatever its next stop is.

Overall, the mobility issues addressed by the Station Area Plan are quite large and are handled competently.  Beyond the bizarre pedestrian barrier, removed crosswalk, and new right-turn lane at Third and Heatherton, walkability and bikeability are improved dramatically under this plan.  In our fourth and final installment, we'll tackle buses and the future of the area.

The SMART Area, Part 2: All Those Cars

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan. It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needs more than just a single post. Today we tackle parking. Subsequent posts will examine mobility, and the future of the area. So far, we've covered land use. With all these homes, all this retail, and all these commuters, parking could turn terrible without mitigation.  Although the transit options will be the richest of anywhere in Marin, the rest of Marin will likely remain just as transit-poor as it is today, so the Advisory Committee explored ways to deal with incoming traffic and where to put all the cars.

Overview

As you probably can guess, I’m not one in favor of parking.  You could call me a Shoupite, I suppose: parking has its place, but it should not be required, and where there is a shortage of parking it should be priced until there is no longer a shortage.  For regular drivers, this ensures they will always have a space roughly where they need it, mitigating the need for circling.  For commuters, it means the commuter lot won't fill up by some God-forsaken hour.  For cities, it means new revenue to plow into their neighborhoods and transit systems.

Excluding the 68 spaces that will be removed after SMART rolls into town, there are 144 metered on-street parking spaces (56 removed by SMART) in the Area Plan's study area that hit 50% occupancy at peak usage and 395 off-street, free all-day spaces (12 removed by SMART) that hit 90% occupancy by 11am.  This puts the total demand for off-street parking at for on-street parking at 100 and total demand for all-day parking at 389 spaces.  It's that second one that's awfully tight, and likely why there is overflow.

This poses a parking problem: how can the city accommodate new residences, retail, and offices while providing sufficient parking for new commuters and new shoppers without wrecking the transit-orientation of the area?  The Area Plan believes it can be done by adding more parking, including the area within the downtown shared parking district, and through demand mitigation.

More Parking!

Click to enlarge. Red are parking lots & garages

I'm not entirely convinced there's a need for more parking given the huge number of lots - over 110 by my count - within a half-mile radius of the station.  Much of this is probably due to parking minimums imposed by zoning regulations, but there is still a plethora of parking.  I'd wager that around half the buildable space south of Mission is taken up by parking.  Look especially at the north side of Third Street!  It's just a long line of parking garages.  Little wonder nobody says, "Oo, let's check out that cool place on Third Street!"

As well, with over 90% occupancy of lots that are free, it would seems sensible to me to simply start charging for parking at the various commuter lots, and encourage owners of private parking to open it up to the public, or provide a mechanism for developers to purchase shared parking from those with a surplus, diminishing their own requirements.  As for spillover areas, setting up parking meters with a residential parking permit system should ensure commuters don't park in residential areas, while the city could allow  enterprising residents to rent out their driveways for the day.

Alas, the politics and mechanics of parking are a bit more complicated.  Everybody wants free parking right in front of their destination.  Downtown Tiburon, for example, is often accused of having no parking, but when the city actually looked they found scores of spots, just a little off the beaten path.  As well, with luck, San Rafael's surface parking supply will continue to decrease.  Pricing the parking supply implies that there are competitors to parking, such as transit, cycling and walking, but those are the topic of our next installment.  Decreasing supply implies the same.  The Area Plan takes non-car mobility seriously, but also suggests additional parking, as well as demand mitigation through car sharing.

More Parking, Less Demand

Car sharing is absent in Marin, mostly because our low-density cities and towns can’t support it, but studies have shown it dramatically reduces the need for parking. A single car share vehicle removes 14 cars from the road. The plan suggests allowing developers to forgo some parking if they support on-site car sharing. This is an excellent idea, as the more flexibility a developer has in its parking, the better the city will be. Still, I’d go one step further. As part of the car sharing rollout, San Rafael should give every household within walking distance of the redevelopment area free membership for a year, which would cost a pittance at around $184,000. Marinites are unfamiliar with car sharing, and this could serve to get people out of their cars and onto the sidewalks.

Even with demand minimized, this is still a transit-unfriendly county, and parking will be needed for residents, commuters, and customers.  To keep the burden off the developers, the Area Plan recommends including the area in the downtown shared parking zone, which allows retailers to count spaces in parking garages against their parking minimums, and building another parking garage along Third.

I would hate to see San Rafael add yet another garage onto Third, especially in the middle of an important walking area and so close to other parking garages and lots.  If a garage is really deemed necessary, a better location would be east of the freeway and extending the shared parking zone out to San Rafael High School and Unity Street.  Montecito Shopping Center is overflowing with cars, and they'd probably like having a bit more breathing room.  Besides, the newly tall buildings along Irving will want good access to a garage if they are to be built with less parking than normal.

I'd recommend extending the parking zone to residences as well.  With on-street parking at only 50%, some demand for off-street retail parking could be absorbed by the street, freeing up space in the garages and lots for residents to store their cars.

Parking will be seen as a problem anywhere one goes outside of the mall, but properly managing it will make the place actually attractive rather than just giant parking lots and garages.  Through demand mitigation (carsharing, transit, bicycling), innovative policies to broaden the parking supply, and parking pricing, San Rafael should be able to manage the influx of people to the area.  If parking will truly be a problem, a garage east of the freeway will open up that area for business and support the high-density development planned along Irwin.

Generally, a car is anathema to transit-oriented living, but there's little transit to orient around.  It is difficult to balance the needs of a transit-poor community with the needs of its transit system, but the problem of parking will remain a very real one for the area.  I hope the city will strike that balance - managing demand and providing mobility without encouraging car usage.

The SMART Area, Part 1: Land Use

Over the next few days I’ll be posting my impressions and comments regarding the San Rafael SMART Station Area Plan.  It’s such a large, complicated, and potentially game-changing document that it needs more than just a single post.  Today we tackle land use.  Subsequent posts will examine parking, mobility, and the future of the area.

San Rafael has released its draft downtown SMART Station Area Plan, and I must say that I’m excited.  So many good policies are wrapped into this – reducing parking requirements, form-based zoning, traffic calming, street engagement – that it has the potential to change the face of San Rafael and Marin by showing what can be accomplished with sensible zoning and real walkability.  While not a 180-degree turn in local planning practices, it’s pushing that direction.  If comments from the Planning Commission are any indication, there’s a hunger to go all the way, and that can only mean good things.

If you’re just joining us

San Rafael’s Station Area Plans cover the immediate areas around the upcoming Civic Center (for another post) and downtown SMART stations.  The downtown station will be located at the current site of Whistlestop Wheels and will be the terminus for the system’s Initial Operating Segment (IOS), which will extend north to Guerneville Road in Santa Rosa, roughly 37 miles away.

To prepare for the incoming train, San Rafael convened the Advisory Committee, consisting of representatives from San Rafael; the San Rafael Redevelopment Agency; SMART; the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District (GGB), which operates GGT; Marin County; Marin Transit; and the Transportation Authority of Marin.  Their mission: to create the first real transit-oriented, mixed-use communities in Marin since the end of the Northwest Pacific Railroad in 1941.

This location is almost antithetical to transit-oriented development, located as it is next to the elevated section of Highway 101 that cuts San Rafael in half.  Second and Third are extremely busy arterials that function as extended freeway ramps, and the area is dominated by parking lots and auto-oriented uses, such as gas stations and body shops.

Almost antithetical, but not quite.  The station neighbors the Bettini Transit Center, which has buses departing frequently to all over the Bay Area and sees thousands of riders per day, and the Fourth Street commercial corridor.  Existing residential neighborhoods have a strong walking component, even under the freeway.  In other words, the neighborhood may be ugly but it is the transit and commercial nexus of the county, and that makes it ripe for redevelopment.

Better zoning

The key to development in this area is fairly basic: make it a place people want to walk around in and stay through safe sidewalks and streets, calm traffic, interesting sights and sounds, and high degrees of connectivity.  This is exactly what the plan advocates.

For land use, the plan recommends increasing height limits along Heatherton to 66 feet, enough for five-story structures, and to raise the limit to 56 feet along Irwin, as well as along Fourth Street to Grand.  Within these zones, the floor-area ratio would be raised to 2.0 and 1.5, respectively, while both areas would see density requirements lifted.  Residential uses would not count towards FAR, while parking minimums would be relaxed, although not eliminated.

I wrote last week about the need for residential development within the core, and the above would aid immensely in this endeavor.  Conceptual plans for the blocks immediately surrounding the station show the possibility of hundreds of new homes.  Given that a household can support 73 square feet of retail, just the example developments would support close to 20,000 square feet of retail.  Given the slack retail market in San Rafael, this will be a major boon to neighboring businesses.  With office development and the centrality of San Rafael to Marin, retail is likely to do extremely well.

The Montecito Neighborhood Association, which represents homeowners along Fifth Street between Irwin and Grand, complained that increasing height along Fourth on their block would overshadow their homes, and I’m inclined to agree.  Really aggressive land-use liberalization could accomplish the same goal of pulling the downtown core across the freeway without increasing heights at all.  Perhaps the city could lift lot coverage maximums, implement a setback maximum, and lift parking requirements while maintaining a two-story height limit.

I hope that the Montecito Neighborhood Association will not come out against larger portions of the plan than just those that would effect their own homes, and so far they have limited their strong opposition to just those recommended changes on the eastern side of the freeway. If they do begin to oppose developments in places that would not effect their homes, San Rafael could have a problem on their hands.

I’m concerned about crowding out the possibility of a second track through town, however.  If the system performs better than anyone expects, it could lead to major problems down the line and severely limit capacity.  I don’t want planning now to put a ceiling on the system if we don’t have to.

In any event, these land use patterns are new and innovative for Marin.  The Planning Commission was strongly in favor of the plan, and some even wished it would go further, instituting parking maximums or abolishing the minimum altogether, but they also felt that San Rafael was not ready for that sort of thing.  This sort of change comes slowly, and the Station Area Plan is the first step.

Going Downtown

Marin's downtowns are rich, vibrant places, but they're typically seen as historic shopping districts rather than places to live and work - Downtown San Anselmo is not considered to be the same as The Flats, although they are literally on the same blocks.  When redevelopment peaks its head out, it becomes lost in a sea of parking (as in the San Rafael Corporate Center), gets stymied by illogical density limits (as in the Second & B Monahan proposal), or dumbed-down by developers that see Marin as just another suburb (as in Larkspur's Rose Garden development). Few bold developments do get built in our town centers, and the most important one of late - Novato's Millworks - is perceived as a failure despite low vacancies.

One reason this might be is due to residents' perceptions of urban living.  Many Marinites are San Franciscans who left the city in the 1970s and 1980s.  Urban living, with its grit, crime, and bad schools was not for them, so they sought suburbia and wilderness at the nadir of America's cities. For a while, most commercial development was in shopping centers along 101, and most residential development was suburban tract homes.  Marin never went as far as Santa Clara, but that was largely due to geography - it's no accident that the most car-centered areas of Marin are the flattest.

Old Urbanist offers a broader view than my particularly local theory.  He argues that the American conception of cities has always been the separation of residences and commerce, exemplified in the downtown/suburban divide.  The commercial interests didn't want to give up their prized land at the center of town, so residents had to sprawl further outward, prompting more and more innovative transportation technologies culminating in the automobile.  Old Urbanist writes, "Once cars began to proliferate in the 1920s, the response was not, in most cases, to entice suburbanites with visions of urban living, but to either make valiant attempts at mass transit systems or, more often, to turn over large swathes of the downtown to the car."  The car made it economical for jobs to sprawl with the people, and downtowns declined.

This was just as true in Marin as it was in San Francisco.  Offices that moved to Marin went to Terra Linda or Greenbrae, and retail followed.  Meanwhile, to accommodate Highway 101, San Rafael wrecked its inner waterfront and devoted half of its downtown to car throughput.  The old rail right-of-ways became arterial roads, making shopping centers almost as accessible as downtown.  Without a large built-in population, the historic cores necessarily declined.

To really renew our downtowns, we need to alter our perception of them.  Our town centers are not just old-timey shopping centers competing with the strip-mall shopping centers but vibrant urban spaces for business and residences alike.  Thankfully, this shift has already begun.  Downtown housing is a recurring theme in Marin's draft housing elements, coming up even in the elements of Belvedere and Corte Madera.  San Anselmo going so far as to rezone its downtown core to allow for second-story apartments.  But this principally accommodates new residents; the old ones that fled the city still perceive density as an evil that brings the crime, grit and traffic of the 1970s, and that perception hinders development now.

In forgotten regional cores like Nashville's, people are accidentally finding out that they really love living walkable, connected lives in the city. Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space looked at Nashville's revival and proposed that, rather than leave revitalization to chance, downtown chambers of commerce or business improvement districts should actively market urban living.  They might rent a model unit and decorate it exclusively from local stores, or organize walking tours of the city.  Such measures would reacquaint Marinites to the kind of urban living our cities can support and show that it doesn't have to be like the old San Francisco.  Indeed, residents moved to San Francisco to enjoy the urban lifestyle and moved out because they had families.  Perhaps they can see that they can have that lifestyle again without going back to the City, and perhaps then residents will ask more from developers than just more detached housing.

Tiburon's Housing Element Might Actually Work

Tiburon recently released its draft Housing Element, the document required by ABAG every seven years. The document reflects the challenge of accommodating low-income residents in a high-income and largely built-up city, a challenge that all of Marin's communities have been forced to face. Tiburon answered the call with substantive proposed changes to its zoning and ordinance laws that should break the affordable housing deadlock in the town.

The strategies Tiburon currently in place are fairly common in Marin, although they have faced limited success since the last housing element:

• Inclusionary zoning laws, which force developers to include affordable housing in their developments
• Density bonuses for developers that make more affordable housing than required
• Affordable housing zoning overlays (AHOs), with lower barriers for affordable housing construction but with higher affordable housing mandates.

Commercial linkage fees, which force new commercial developments to pay a fee towards affordable housing, has been suggested by the town council but it has been stuck in limbo since 2005.

It is not difficult to see why these strategies have failed to generate much affordable housing, as each constrains developers in an already constrained market. If a developer includes affordable housing, the most generous restrictions are about 20.7 units per acre, roughly that of single-family attached homes (rowhouses); a maximum lot usage of 35%; and a 3-story height limit. This gives developers a very small building envelope to work with when looking at any new construction. As well, the cost of development is quite high, around $300 to $500 per square foot, including land acquisition. Add the affordable housing requirements and it becomes extremely difficult to thread the needle and make a development profitable. The AHO loosens these requirements somewhat, boosting density to 24.8 units per acre, but includes price controls on more than 60% of a development's units, an impossibly high amount.

The Housing Element as written does loosen these restrictions. One goal – H-aa, if you're wondering – lowers AHO's affordable housing requirement to only 25%. Another, goal H-y, introduces flexibility to the general zoning code: studios and one bedroom apartments count as 0.5 and 0.66 units, respectively, and parking minimums are decreased given that many low-income residents are carless. This opens the possibility of a one-acre, three story apartment building with 59 studio apartments or 37 one-bedroom apartments – still less than what such a building could normally support in the absence of density maximums, but far more than what Tiburon would otherwise allow.

This is far different from the approach taken by Novato, which had an incredibly contentious mark-up period for its Housing Element. Novato tries to encourage nonprofits to build affordable housing projects on vacant lots scattered throughout the city, building concentrations of poverty among the market-rate, single-family detached homes. Tiburon's plan would encourage mixed-income developments in already high density areas, concentrating people where they would do the most good for the town.

At least, that's the theory. Unfortunately, only one available and earmarked site is downtown, at 1555 Tiburon Boulevard. Granted, it would be wonderful infill development. Built on the site of an abandoned supermarket and its parking lot, the site would be immediately accessible to the town core, two bus lines, and the Blue & Gold Ferry to San Francisco. Other sites would likely strain the town's infrastructure. The Reed School site is almost a mile from the ferry, putting it out of easy walking distance to the town's primary transit feature, while the Cove Shopping Center site is hardly accessible to transit at all, save those bus lines. The remaining sites examined are already zoned for market-rate housing that moderate income families can afford.

Despite problems with siting, the Tiburon Draft Housing Element presents a good way forward. Especially exciting is the change to densities, potentially opening a new market for developers that would otherwise find studio and one-bedroom apartments impossible to build in the town. It dovetails well with plans to improve downtown vibrancy, which calls for more housing in the commercial core. Still, it remains to be seen whether the plan will be any more effective in adding housing than the last Housing Element. No matter, though: the next element is due in just three years.

Tiburon's Draft Housing Element will go before the Planning Commission on January 11.  You can find the document on the town's website.

Novato sprawls with Hanna Ranch

Two weeks ago, Novato approved the Hanna Ranch project, the city's newest commercial development.  Squashed between Highway 37 to the southeast, Highway 101 to the southwest, wetlands to the northeast and the Village Oaks big-box development to the northwest, Hanna Ranch is the epitome of sprawl development.  Inaccessible to anyone without a car, its only access road dead-ends within the development, rendering bus access impractical, and the only connection to the city proper is a freeway overpass a mile to the north.  New utility lines will need to be built, and emergency services will need to go out of their way to serve the development - an expensive prospect.

What will the city get for their trouble?  A hotel, some retail and a few restaurants on an eight acre site akin to an office park, far from any of the amenities that define Novato.  Income from the development will be equivalent to around $650,000, but that doesn't count the added expenses described above.

Given the push in the city to improve downtown, this is a step backwards.  Hotel visitors will be socked away in neighborhood that could just as well be in San Jose, Boise, or Dallas - a forgettable corner of Novato if there ever were one.  Locating a hotel downtown would leave patrons with the small-town feel the city wants to foster and drive customers to local businesses rather than the chains that will doubtless move into the Hanna Ranch development.  Adding more restaurants and retail downtown would continue to concentrate commerce in the core, promoting vitality for all of downtown.

Although councilmembers promoted this project as a way to combat blight, it will likely do the opposite.  In promoting development far from downtown, Novato encourages people to come off Grant's sidewalks and drive to chains at Vintage Oaks and Hanna Ranch.  Traffic gets worse, downtown patronage declines, and everyone loses.

Novato is often seen as the black sheep of the Marin family of communities.  Recent decisions to move city offices downtown was supposed to be a turning point for the city, but by approving Hanna Ranch the Council has shown itself unwilling to abandon its sprawling ways to the detriment of all Marin.

Unsuck Golden Gate Transit

For those of you that don’t know, I’m a Marinite that lives in Washington, DC, so commuting by GGT isn’t exactly normal for me.  (If you’re wondering why I blog on Marin issues while living across the country, my FAQ has a bit more detail.)  But, I’m home in Marin for the next two weeks for Christmas, giving me a golden opportunity to try the GGT.  I've written about maximizing our bus system before, but there's nothing quite like on-the-ground experience.  My few days have been eye-opening.

There were a number of general problems with GGT that I noticed immediately.  As one that lives on transit – I don’t own a car – proper wayfinding, signage, and branding is really important to me.  For the same reason some people want nice cars, I want nice transit that’s clean, efficient, pleasing to look at, and a pleasing experience to wait for.  What I got instead was this:

• Poor signage.  The transit pylons are ugly, not weatherproof, and the signage typically consists of timetables printed on office paper, which melts when the rain gets inside and turns brown when in the sun too long.  There are often no route maps, no system maps, and no regional maps.  There were system maps at the San Rafael Transit Center and the Lucas Valley Bus Pad, but GGT had printed them so small I almost needed a magnifying glass to see where routes stopped.  As well, there were no timetables for routes that didn't come to that stop, forcing me to check on when the various exceptions to routing occur and leaving me in the dark as to whether I could switch to that service.
• Poor shelter.  I boarded GGT at Polk & McAllister, which is the last primary stop for the service in San Francisco, but here is no shelter and no bench.  Despite its prominent position in timetables and relatively high volume of traffic, GGT treats the stop like an afterthought.  All they gave us was a pylon on the sidewalk with water-damaged route numbers and timetables.
• Poor lighting.  I stopped by the Transit Center Saturday night and found the advertising far superior and better lit than the cheapo signage.
• Lack of next bus departures.  Although I had brought with me a departure timetable, I had no way of getting this information otherwise, nor did I know if the bus had been early and I had missed it.
• Lack of next stop information.  Despite long distances between stops and long headways, GGT chooses not to have its buses display which stop is next.  Given that the technology that enables this is the same technology that enables next bus departure information, this should be a top technology priority for the system.
• Slow boarding and exiting.  The back doors of some GGT buses are almost vestigial, as they are not for boarding – despite the presence of Clipper readers – and they have signs imploring customers not to exit via them.  This means all boarding and exiting must occur at the front, forcing boarding passengers to wait for exiting ones to exit and forcing Clipper owners to wait while other passengers fumble for proper change.  Frustratingly, the buses that do allow rear exiting don't have Clipper readers, so Clipper users still need to exit the front to tag out.

Why is it like this?  GGT sells a valuable commodity – mobility – but it treats its customers like a burden.  The cheap and ugly signage screams to customers that the service is similarly cheap and ugly.  The lack of shelter tells customers they aren’t wanted.  The poor lighting says GGT doesn't even care about what signage is there.  The incredibly inefficient boarding and exiting tells me that they either prioritize the needs of the bus driver over those of the passenger or that they bought the wrong buses.

Many bus stops have shelters, but some of the major ones don’t.  There is money to buy shelters, but the distribution seems haphazard.  The same goes for lighting – properly lighting one’s signs and shelters goes a long way to ensuring the experience is pleasant for the passengers.

Real-time arrival (next bus) kiosks are inexplicably absent.  Although GGT equipped its buses with GPS to enable accurate Clipper Card payments and with WiFi internet, two major parts of a next bus system, the back-end infrastructure to enable next bus information is not in place.  GGT makes up for this by being highly punctual, which could, in theory, enable next bus displays to count down to the next scheduled departures instead.  MTC uses just such a display using GGT information in its style guide examples, but the district ignores what MTC developed and I saw no next bus kiosks anywhere except MUNI and BART.

The most advanced and useful piece of technology used is the booklet available on every bus, complete with route information and system maps.  While better than nothing, the maps don’t include a regional transit map or even a list of other transit services, rendering them less useful than they might otherwise be.  In addition, the schedules are inconsistent as to which stops are listed.  For example, the Lucas Valley Road bus pad is listed in some routes (the 49) but not others (the 70, 71, 80, and 101), leading the inexperienced passenger to believe those other routes bypass the pad when that's not the case.  GGT should choose which stops appear in the schedules and list them consistently.

This is made all the more frustrating because it doesn’t need to be this way.  MTC has a signage design document (PDF) that includes the Transit Center in its examples, so something better already exists on the MTC servers.  GGT need only spend a little money to have it installed, which would be part of the MTC Hub Signage project.  Other information, such as route numbers and timetables, could at least be laminated to prevent destruction by water and sunshine; using translucent plastic tiles would be even better.  Installing monitors to count down the next arrivals and departures would enable passengers to wait in peace rather than in trepidation.  Allowing Clipper Card holders to enter through the back door would encourage adoption of the card, and allowing passengers to exit through the back to speed boarding and offloading.

GGT isn’t trying.  Although it is the only possibility for good access to Marin, although it is the only way for carless San Franciscans to find Marin and although it is the cheapest way for Marinites to move around the Bay Area, GGT seems to deliberately ignore or overlook simple solutions, many of which MTC has already developed.  Indeed, some of the recommendations here were made five years ago by MTC itself (PDF).  The return on investment could be huge, but for some reason the Board relies on cheap half-measures and ignores the effects on its image.  Marin and Sonoma are incredibly wealthy counties, lands of the Cadillac, but their transit service sells itself as a Gremlin.  The North Bay deserves better.

Slugging: Bringing Casual Carpooling to the North Bay

Casual carpooling, wherein strangers carpool with one another to and from job centers, could be viable in the North Bay, but it will take coordination from citizens and government to make it really take off. When examining the modes of commuting, typically absent from the conversation is carpooling. Either it happens or it doesn’t, but governments and citizens will fixate on accommodating more traditional modes of transportation: single-occupant vehicles (SOVs, i.e., cars), buses, and trains, rather than actively trying to encourage carpooling.

There are a number of reasons for this, but I suspect a big one is that there is no ribbon to cut, no new lane or train to inaugurate. Another big one is the perception that carpooling only rests on social networks outside the reach of government intervention, where coworkers discover by happenstance that they live near enough to one another that carpooling becomes an option. Besides, interfering in carpooling takes attention away from the big capital projects that make headlines.

In spite of apathy from officialdom, the phenomenon of casual carpooling does arise in certain locales. Known in the Washington, DC, region as “slugging”, casual carpooling entails passengers forming lines at pickup areas, usually commuter lots or bus stops. A driver will approach the line, shout their destination (“Pentagon!” “Civic Center!”) and those bound for the area will hop in. It works both ways, and situating near bus stops gives passengers the option of a commuter bus if they’d prefer.

Casual carpooling gives drivers and passengers certain advantages over SOV driving. It allows them to use HOV lanes, saving time, and it allows passengers to save on driving costs such as gas and maintenance. For those who aren't in a carpool, carpooling means there's more for them: every passenger is one less car on the road and one less parking space taken. It’s a win for everyone. So why does it pop up in some locations but not others?

East Coastin’

The Washington, DC, region makes an interesting test case. Straddling as it does three states (DC, Maryland, and Virginia), we can see how different policies effect the outcome. Virginia has an active and large slugging community dating back to the 1970s, while Maryland’s community is relatively small. The principal difference, according to David LeBlanc, author of Slugging: The Commuting Alternative For Washington DC, is that Maryland uses HOV-2 lanes, where having only one passenger qualifies, while Virginia uses HOV-3 lanes, where two passengers are necessary to use the lane. He argues that HOV-3 lanes give passengers a sense of safety when getting into a car with a stranger, and spurs drivers to more actively pursuit warm bodies to fill their vehicles.

Dampers on casual carpooling include high-occupancy toll, or HOT, lanes, as Virginia will soon discover when its primary HOV corridor into DC is partially converted to HOT. If a driver can simply pay a toll to qualify, they will be less likely to detour to a slug line for passengers and clog the lanes with SOVs. The lack of HOV lanes, of course, will remove the incentive for the driver to pick up passengers as well.

North Bay Slugs

In other words, the North Bay, with its HOV-2 lanes that stop after Sausalito, is not ideally suited to casual carpooling. While Northern Virginia has an entire reversible highway dedicated to HOV-3 that extend all the way from suburbs to job centers in Arlington and the District, complete with their own exits and with limited access, the North Bay has only a single HOV lane in either direction that requires drivers to slow from top speed to the speed of traffic in order to merge over to the exit, and which stops before reaching either the East Bay or San Francisco. Although it’s conceivable that a small, Maryland-style community could spring up in the North Bay with the right tools – an app, say, allowing potential carpoolers to mark off their home and destination – true casual carpooling will require a bit more intervention at the governmental level. As with everything, there are cheap and expensive solutions.

On the cheap side, just switching our HOV lanes to HOV-3 would be a boon, giving drivers a greater incentive to pick people up. Following up the switch with congestion pricing on both bridges applicable only to SOVs would prove a high-profile shot in the arm for any casual carpooling system. Given the hubbub over the last attempt to institute congestion pricing on the Golden Gate Bridge, the press would be wonderful. Instituting a peak-only HOV lane on the southbound side of the bridge would be another major reward for carpoolers: no more waiting in line at the toll plaza. Instituting congestion pricing at the Sonoma/Marin border or just north of Marinwood* would stimulate casual carpooling among Sonomans coming to Marin – our largest in-commuting population – and would raise millions for transit projects between the two counties.

On the expensive side, CalTrans might consider combining Highway 101’s two carpool lanes into a single, reversible HOV freeway, complete with limited access and dedicated on/off ramps. This would make carpooling significantly safer and faster, and would have the added bonus of improving bus access along the freeway. The cost, however, would likely be upwards of $1 billion given the technical challenges of HOV exits and the cost so far just to extend regular HOV lanes.

It has been suggested that the app described above would help drive a casual carpooling renaissance, but the truth is that these networks typically form in response to everyday commute pressures - heavy traffic, centralized job centers - that ultimately come from structures either put in place by government or arising out of commuting physics. That’s not to say technology does not have a role to play – casual carpool networks often have websites to guide potential participants and there are a number of apps already in existence – but a truly robust system will be one that arises organically. Drivers will only take the time to pick up passengers when they can clearly see that it is worth their time or money to do so.

Casual carpooling in Virginia has been described as another transit system by the Virginia Department of Transportation, complementary to the existing Metrorail and bus systems. It certainly has a place in the highway-centered transportation systems of the US, but it will take work to implement in the North Bay.

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*Most freeway traffic in Marin actually comes from Novato, not from Sonoma; although instituting congestion pricing there would be a political nonstarter, it would make the most sense from a practical standpoint.

For information on casual carpooling in the Bay Area, RideNow.org has a website dedicated to the local network. For information on ridesharing in the Bay Area, you might want to look into eRideshare.com. For information on how the slugging system works in Virginia, local NPR affiliate WAMU aired an hour-long segment on the subject, while local transit blog Greater Greater Washington has a number of posts on the subject.

Not Just Bedrooms Anymore

Slowly, Marin County has transformed from a bedroom community to a working destination, yet residents still view their county otherwise.  It’s time to change. The old stereotype for a Marinite is easy to trace.  Looking for a new life, someone moves to San Francisco.  She’s young and vivacious, she enjoys the city and all its grit.  When she finally makes it big, though, it’s time to settle down, and there’s no better place to settle down than Marin County.  She keeps commuting to the City but lives in Mill Valley with the family.  Her friends and neighbors have similar stories, and so southbound 101 is a mess every day.

True though narrative is for thousands, it neglects a key fact: more people commute to Marin than commute from it every day.  We have become a destination, and that has implications for how we approach the form and development of our cities.

The Destination

In digging through the commuting numbers, there are some surprising finds.  Marin residents were estimated to make 60,051 commute trips to other counties every day in 2010, while residents of other counties were estimated to make 87,573 work trips to Marin every day.  That means that 45% more people commute to Marin than from Marin every day.  The only counties that had a net in-commute from Marin were San Francisco and San Mateo; all others gave more commuters than they got.

This shows up in Highway 101 load numbers.  Through Sonoma, the load peaks through Santa Rosa but declines sharply until leveling off near the Sonoma/Marin county line.  The sharpest increase is at Novato, which adds 79,000 cars per day, and peaks at San Pedro Road.  After that, 101 shows a sharp decline in load to the bridge, from this point shedding 82,000 southbound vehicles per day.  If we include Novato and Terra Linda, 101 is only 25,000 vehicles heavier when it leaves the county than when it enters from Sonoma.

(When we try to include 580, things get a bit trickier because of the lack of temporal granularity in the available Caltrans numbers, but this quick-and-dirty analysis shows where the principal destinations in Marin are: San Rafael, Highway 131, and Bridge/Donahue.)

The Response

So what?  Marin is a destination; what does that have to do with form and transit?  It starts when county leaders and residents change how they think about their home.  Golden Gate Transit, for example, has strong commuter links to San Francisco, but doesn’t coordinate morning departures from the City, and its links to the East Bay are woefully inefficient.  As well, SMART is denigrated as a “train to nowhere” because it stops in San Rafael, which should be seen for the insult it is.  Altering this perspective would lead to three big changes in urban form and transit.

First, we would encourage our downtowns as places to work, not just play and live, and we would find new places to build them.  At the moment, office development focuses on suburban office parks, such as Marin Commons.  Downtowns, meanwhile, are left as alternatives to the mall, quaint places that serve residents’ shopping needs rather than rich and active working destinations.  Building up downtowns as working destinations by building offices - government, as in Novato, or otherwise - would give retailers and restaurants all-day clientele.  Even small town centers, like Fairfax, have space for appropriately-sized office development.

Second, we would improve our inward transit links to serve the transit-oriented and carless residents of the rest of the Bay Area.  Currently, only 2.4% of in-commuters use transit.  Although much of this is likely due to perception rather than actual service, the long headways and lack of inbound commuter coordination is a needless barrier.  We already boast 20-50 minute travel times from the City and 30 minute travel times from BART, but the atrocious state of inbound routes shows that GGT hasn't even thought about accommodating inbound commuters.

Third, we would start to redesign our cities as places to stay rather than simply pass through.  The most egregious symbol of the pass-through mentality is the Second-Third Street corridor.  The timed lights, speeding one-way traffic, and narrow sidewalks implicitly tell pedestrians that they aren’t wanted there, deadening the streetscape and what developments could come.  Almost as bad are Novato Boulevard, Tam Junction and South Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

Marin will never supplant San Francisco, but its cities can capitalize on their role as satellites of that regional anchor.  Strong towns would decrease commute times and encourage transit use; strengthen government coffers; and bolster the small businesses that call downtown their home.  Marin has already moved in this direction; it's just a matter of whether it can capitalize on its success.

Larkspur Bike Bridge Isn't Bad

Tomorrow, TAM will solicit comments on the misleadingly-named Central Marin Ferry Connection Multi-Use Pathway Project, a bike and pedestrian bridge from the Larkspur Landing SMART station over Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.  This project, the largest near-term project in the city, would connect with the existing path across Corte Madera Creek and under Highway 101.  A second phase would extend the bridge across the creek, although there are no concrete plans at the moment for this phase.

The area around the Greenbrae Interchange is a pedestrian wasteland, but at least the planners in charge of the project made some nods to access, putting in a paved path beneath the interchange and small (less than 5-foot wide) sidewalks along the on and off ramps to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

Still, it needs some dramatic improvements.  Apart from needed reforms of Larkspur Landing as a whole, the future SMART station and Cal Park Hill Tunnel need strong connections to points south and west.  Perched on a steep hill, the station site and tunnel exit are accessible only by a 7 minute circuitous route along Drake, Larkspur Landing Circle, and through parking lots.

The first phase of this project is a worthy bicycle investment.  Creating a coherent bicycle path along the 101 corridor would provide a backbone for the non-motorized transportation network in Marin, just as 101 provides a backbone for the motorized network.  Stairs and a crosswalk across Drake would be far less expensive but would force riders to dismount, diminishing the attractiveness of the just-completed Cal Park Hill Tunnel.  A bridge across the street would make the north-south connection seamless.  It wouldn’t demolish the rail trestle or interfere with that right-of-way, keeping the door open to rail expansion into South Marin, and it wouldn’t further deaden Drake, as there’s nothing to activate.

Those stairs, however, should still be planned to provide easy access between the SMART station and the north sidewalk.  Although they should not be built until the station goes in, building the bridge to allow for stairs would reduce costs later.

The second phase of construction, a new bike and pedestrian bridge across Corte Madera Creek, is not quite as worthy.  Improving the mixed-use crossing of Corte Madera Creek is already a part of the broader Greenbrae Interchange project; why spend millions on a duplicate effort?  The only improvement over the sidewalk would be a single jump from the hill to the south side of the creek, but the bridge’s alignment is not favorable.  Unless the railway trestle comes down (taking southern SMART expansion off the table for the foreseeable future), such a bridge will extend to the Greenbrae Boardwalk and away from the on-street cycle route.  Still, there are, as yet, no formal plans, so the second phase may not even come to fruition.

I’m typically opposed to pedestrian overpasses, as they deaden streetlife on busy streets, typically where streetlife is needed most.  They’re expensive alternatives to fixing the traffic that’s actually wrong with the city.  However, for the Greenbrae Interchange, an exception can be made.  The Interchange is at capacity, partially because of high demand for ferry travel, and a huge number of buses pass by along 101.  Downgrading the intersection to make it safe for pedestrians would hurt transit riders as well as vehicular traffic, without much benefit.  There is very little in the immediate vicinity, and very little room for improvement.  A bridge offers riders a far better experience than stairs and maintains the current interchange capacity without much loss in streetlife.

Maximizing Golden Gate Transit: Open Data

So far in this series, we’ve discussed how Golden Gate Transit might better communicate its routing, its scheduling and its headways. This transparency would be incredibly useful to the end-user, but the data that generated those maps would still be hidden away on the GGT servers, accessible only to internal users. Opening that data up for outside developers, a concept creatively known as open data, would allow anyone to present that data in ways – both useful and whimsical – that GGT would never even think of, much less fund.

The most obvious use for open data is integration with other regional systems. At the moment, getting around using GGT requires a trip to 511.org, but it’s clunky, unattractive and inflexible. Besides, anyone who is not from the Bay Area wouldn’t know that 511 exists. Google Maps is a good fallback for these visitors but GGT isn’t on the system, leading to Marin being a black hole; only the ferries are really an option. (When asked, GGT said they were planning on integrating with Google Maps but had no timeline.)

In real estate, there are apartment and home finder tools based on travel distance by transit. Type in an address, specify how many minutes you want to travel, and the map highlights how far you can get using transit only. The people that invented Walkscore have also invented a Transitscore, showing how accessible a given location is to transit at any given time of day. With open data, real estate agents could easily market a given area as highly transit accessible. This would not just appeal to potential residents but also to those who need to hire the young and carless, such as tech companies. Many people take transit accessibility into consideration when considering job opportunities. If I can’t figure out on my tool of choice how far an employer is from me by transit I’ll probably pass them by.

Open data also provides a wealth of information for those that love mapping, statistics, or both. Rather than paying tens of thousands of dollars for analyses of headway frequency, stop density, or the like, opening up performance, location and routing data lets advocates analyze the data for themselves. They could combine it with census data to find out how many residents are covered by transit, or determine which routes have the most frequency. They could chart scheduled departures and, if GGT invests in NextBus, show on-time performance for any given route. They could find the busiest corridor, the most densely populated corridor, the worst-performing corridor, and on and on.

Opening up data, then, provides free advertising on all the transit accessibility or utilization tools that want to include Marin. It allows advocates and enthusiasts to process data for the system for free, giving power to the people and giving GGT stronger tools to work with.

Opening data is not always a straightforward matter. The databases need to be converted to usable formats, the information needs to be scrubbed, and service disruptions need to be communicated in similar ways. None of this is free. But the benefits of open data to an otherwise opaque and infrequent suburban system are too great to ignore.

SMART Train, Foolish Board

It seems so simple: sell the public on a transit system and keep them from turning against it.  It’s been done before in countless projects across the country, from Norfolk, VA’s Tide light rail to Los Angeles’ 30/10 plan.  Even in Marin, the SMART plan was approved by 70% of the population.  Yet whatever political savvy the SMART Board possessed seems to have evaporated with success, leading to a drumbeat of bad news and setbacks compounded by the Board’s bumbling responses.  Now, a repeal push threatens the entire project. That effort, spearheaded by a grassroots organization under the name RepealSMART, is gathering signatures for a measure to repeal the ¼ cent sales tax that is funding the train.  Despite their name, the organizers say they don’t want to repeal the project but rather want to give voters a chance to vote on the current business plan.  This is ridiculous on its face, as the name of the organization calls for repeal and its website is explicitly hostile to the idea of rail transit.

Yet rather than publicly treating RepealSMART as a distraction and quietly buffing its own image, the SMART Board declared all-out war.  In defiance of the Secretary of State, the Board declared itself the governing electoral body of the repeal effort.  This arrogance elevated RepealSMART to the level of a large, organized resistance when, in actual fact, it was not.  It perfectly plays into opponents’ narratives, and the Board looks like the bad guy while opponents look like the scrappy underdogs.

This is only the most recent bit of political blindness on the Board’s part.  Since the collapse of funding in 2008, the Board has issued three Initial Operating Segment plans without any public input that damaged their reputation; forced out their General Manager; hired a new General Manager who, while perfectly capable, has no rail experience; and awarded this GM far more than the originally offered salary.

It is shocking that a board consisting of elected local politicians can have such poor political sense, and it is infuriating to me and other supporters that this trend shows no sign of stopping.  The repeal effort would not be nearly as strong as it is if the Board had behaved with public perception in mind when facing the project's challenges.

The Board’s political incompetence threatens to bury the rail project despite its vital importance to the North Bay.  SMART needs to be saved from itself, but there is little sign the Board even realizes it.

Maximizing Golden Gate Transit: Headways Schmeadways

I remember reading about a Fairfax woman that decided to go car-free in Marin.  To do it, she sat down each night, mapped out her route and carefully wrote down the times, transfers, and locations for each of the buses.  When she borrowed a friend’s car because of a particularly hectic day, she felt "like a bird flying over her homeland" as she was finally free of the bus schedule. Call me naïve, but I think this means Golden Gate Transit has a problem.

Mapping Frequency

Buses lack the walk-up quality inherent in a car or subway system if headways are longer than about 15 minutes.  Headways longer than that force passengers to memorize the schedule and adapt their lives to the bus, rendering the bus a significantly less attractive mode.

Not all bus corridors are like this, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at a bus map.  While a street map indicates the priority of its roadways through different line colors and weights – highways as thick and red, arterials as less thick and yellow, and local streets as thin and gray – bus maps typically show all lines and all corridors as equal.  While there is a hierarchy in the bus system of which corridors are more or less important, that information is hidden from the rider.  There is nothing to distinguish the tangle of lines from one another.

Human Transit has strongly advocated for frequency maps for larger cities, which highlight routes or corridors with headways that meet or exceed a certain threshold, typically 12 minutes.  Examples are SF Cityscape's frequency map of San Francisco, Washington, DC's draft 15-minute bus map, and Los Angeles' published 15-minute bus map.  GGT’s bus lines rarely see consistent headways better than 30 minutes, but even showing which corridors combine for 30 minute intervals would be a fabulous improvement.  Another possibility is to emulate Vancouver, which publishes a frequent bus map highlighting peak hour routes.  This is where the bulk of GGT's transit ridership lies, and would be useful to capture more of that share.

Either map type would be an improvement over the current map, which shows transit operator.  Riders don’t need to know who operates the bus, only that it takes them where they need to go.

When's the NextBus?

Unlike other regional agencies, GGT doesn’t share its real-time data with 511.org and doesn’t use NextBus despite the fact that it uses GPS to track where its buses are.  This is odd, to say the least, as opening up its location data and utilizing NextBus would be incredibly fruitful for the agency.  Its buses have such long headways that missing the bus could mean an hour’s delay.  If the bus is a little early and the rider is a little late, it’s a missed connection that could mean a blown appointment or a missed pickup at school.

Showing when the next bus will come and not just when it’s scheduled to come frees the business man or the parent from that worry.  Applications and devices utilizing similar data are common elsewhere.  The typical use is directly feeding the data to the rider through websites, smartphone apps and a call-in service, and some systems use them at high-traffic transit centers.  There are more innovative uses as well.  In Chicago, the open data is used for displays in shops and cafes near bus stops, allowing riders to shop, relax or keep out of the rain while keeping an eye on the arrivals.

This last use would be especially helpful for the long headways.  Little is more frustrating or annoying than feeling trapped at a bus stop waiting for your ride.  Shop displays capture the rider for business and allow the rider to do more than just sit around and wait.

Publicizing the bus arrival times opens up the bus system to casual users.  If I need to get to Fourth Street later that day and I see that a bus is going there in 7 minutes, I know I can hop a ride and be there without dealing with parking.  It embeds the fact that buses are a viable transportation option into the collective mind and bypasses scheduling entirely.

Frequency maps accomplish the same thing in a system-wide way, giving riders an idea of the priority given to bus corridors and routes far from where they normally travel or currently are.  It widens the mental map from two points (home bus stop to San Francisco bus stop) to the whole network, demystifying the system and rendering it useful for casual use.

Longer-term, shorter headways facilitated by and facilitating denser infill development around the various transit centers would provide a much more seamless experience with the bus.  As it stands, headways of an hour makes GGT a system of last resort.  There's only so much marketing can do to help counter the inherent structural flaws of the system, but maximizing what we have requires it.  Lifting the black veil that covers GGT would be a boon to the system and, by extension, to Marin’s sustainability and livability.