Mid-Week Links: Room with a View

• Marin's bayshore towns, especially Tiburon and Sausalito, are hoping they don't get swamped by the America's Cup, a 20-day event scheduled for next summer, and have requested an EIR on the impacts the increased boat and tourist traffic could have on their communities.  Included in Sausalito's letter is this telling line: "It is not uncommon for the ferries to reach bicycle capacity and strand bicyclists in Sausalito to find other modes of transportation back to San Francisco."  Yikes.
• If your "other mode of transportation back to San Francisco" involves that bike, and if you're starting to get tourist/gawker fatigue, the Golden Gate Bridge has good news: the Western sidewalk is reopening Saturday.
• Sausalito might build a "hip" bathroom downtown.  It sounds like it'll be a markedly different design than San Francisco's proposed pooplets.
• If you eventually arrive in the City, you might get a good ride down Market: San Francisco might shut down Market Street to car traffic in the near future, prioritizing cyclists, pedestrians and transit.
• Old news now, but San Rafael's Albert Park may soon be home to a minor league baseball team.  Think it sounds too cool to be true?  You may be right.
• Elsewhere in San Rafael, electoral season's endorsements begin with the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce giving its stamp of approval to mayoral candidate Gary Phillips and Council candidate Andrew McCullough.
• Fairfax's held a big town meeting on Terrapin Crossroads, the proposed major music venue in downtown.  Patch's Kelly Dunlevy was there to record it: Part I and Part II.
• Although we normally don't recommend bikes and beer together, I think we can make an exception for Biketoberfest.
• Work on Larkspur's Doherty Drive has been delayed once again, this time because none of the bids were low enough and the city rejected them all.
• And finally, in inevitable SMART news, the agency's new GM Farhad Mansourian is getting paid quite a bit to run the organization, and the Press-Democrat editorial board thinks the deal sucks.  In response to criticism from another source, RepealSMART, Mansourian fired a shot across their bow in his first real, full-throated defense of the SMART project.  Shame it had to be over his salary.

San Rafael's New Apartment Proposal Isn't What It Could Be

Monahan Development Inc. is proposing to add 41 units of housing and 1,400 square feet of retail to downtown San Rafael at 2^nd & B Streets. Although the project is still in its preliminary stages, currently undergoing redesign based on comments from the city’s Design Review Board, what is known is that the building would consolidate four parcels into a four-story building.  (Click here for the meeting and attachments.) In whatever form it takes, more apartments would be a boon to downtown, but it is limited by legal barriers and complicated by the presence of a historical Victorian on the site.

The proposal would consolidate four parcels into a four-story, 41-unit apartment building, with two retail bays along B Street and a 57-space parking garage about a half-mile from the Bettini Transit Center, Marin’s busiest transit hub.  Two of the parcels to be consolidated are old Victorian houses that have seen better days, the third is a commercial space akin to the other ugly buildings along 2^nd, and the fourth is a parking lot that has become a magnet for crime.  Given the prime location and the decrepit state of the parcels, it’s not surprising to find that this is not the first time the space has been targeted for development.  The Board’s staff report shows that four other proposals since 2005 have been floated and abandoned by various developers and that this is the first without significant commercial space.  With San Rafael’s commercial sector so weak, a focus on residential development is a welcome change.

The residential development, however, is severely curtailed by San Rafael zoning laws.  The property is zoned for a maximum of 30 residential units, but the developers would receive a density bonus by including more affordable housing.  Even with the density bonus, the 41 planned units are only enough to fill out three floors; the bottom is used as a parking garage for the required spaces.  While the two retail bays do interact with the street, a ground-floor parking garage is dead space on an already isolated street, and the market is too weak to support more ground-floor retail.  In all, zoning cuts about 14 units out of the structure and promotes car dependence.

The complicating factor in this site is a burned-out Victorian-era house at 1212 2^nd Street, which is marked as a cultural resource.  At the moment, Monahan proposes to demolish all structures on the site, including the house at 1212, but doing anything to the 1212 structure would require an Environmental Impact Report, an arduous and fraught task that makes any construction within the project’s limited allowable scope that much less feasible.

By any measure, downtown San Rafael’s retail sector is weak.  Many of the stores that currently exist are transitory, like nail shops, and the streets aren’t exactly bustling.  With a new SMART station on the way and the trendiest downtown in the County, San Rafael is primed for the kind of transit-oriented housing Monahan's project could be.  Unfortunately, zoning restrictions means that the development will just be better than nothing; it does not start a new path forward for San Rafael or the County.  Given the history of failed projects for the site, however, “better than nothing” might be about as good as San Rafael can get.

Mid-Week Links: It's Nuh-VAH-to

Marin

Novato is the news coverage winner this week, with the city inspiring a number of stories on its behavior and future.

• There's a study afoot to improve buses through Novato.  Marinscope's Rachel Dovey took the 51 to Northgate Mall to see what it was like and found woefully inadequate service, including an inaccessible stop along the freeway and very long travel times.  The study was received happily, but Larry Rosen wonders what might be done to improve ridership.  If only there were a way to develop housing oriented to transit usage.
• CalTrans has approved $70 million in highway construction around the Novato Narrows and the Redwood Landfill, including a bike path to the Petaluma River.  CalTrans also approved the contract for widening Highway 101 in the same area, worth another $50 million.  If you're counting, that's worth 13 miles of SMART rail, enough to hit all but the northernmost two stations.
• Meanwhile, the IJ's Rob Rogers wonders if Novato's contentious debates on affordable housing, relocating city hall and other issues "are simply a symptom of a national malaise, a poisonous political atmosphere in which compromise — even over the most basic areas of national interest — seems impossible."
• Speaking of City Hall, Novato's city manager, under criticism for recommending that city offices move to Old Town Novato, felt compelled to outline his rationale.  He could have added that centralizing administration in Old Town helps make the neighborhood the city's practical heart as well as emotional.

Elsewhere in Marin:

• Marin City's Transit Center is getting a half-million dollar facelift, including new lighting and safety improvements.
• Larkspur is having trouble maintaining its infrastructure, so it's turning to private companies to fill the gap.
• Mill Valley is forgoing its election this year, as only incumbents had filed to run.  Instead, the incumbents were reappointed, and the city saved $19,000.
• Although not quite in Marin, close-enough Rohnert Park wants to build a downtown with a SMART station at the center.

The Greater Marin

• California's SB 791 would allow certain tax hikes earmarked for transit to have a 50% threshold to pass.  The idea is to make it easier for transit projects to go forward despite reticence on the part of more conservative elements in a community.
• California High Speed Rail is extending its environmental report's public review period by 45 days.
• While California debates all kinds of rail projects, it's easy to lose track of the simplest thing: roadways.  Strong Towns argues that public highways should narrow to neighborhood streets once they enter towns and speed up again upon leaving.  Streetsblog thinks a good way to do this in California would be for CalTrans to relinquish control of state highways to local communities where appropriate.
• The Tea Party has a target, and its name is smart growth.
• On the other side of the globe, the Marin suburb of Istanbul is grappling with massive population increase coupled with auto-oriented planning.  A new documentary, Ecumenopolis, argues this is a bad way forward.

Larkspur's Missing Village

Imagine living on San Francisco Bay.  You live with the sound of the sea and the smell of the Bay.  There are fabulous views of shoreline and bits of the City's skyline peak over the hills.  Moonlight reflects off the water, and there are places to eat seafood very, very fresh.  You work in the city, but it doesn't matter because you are near the best transit in the region: departures are every 30 minutes on the dot and provide a speedy but relaxing 30 minute ride downtown.

I'm writing about Oakland, yes?  Near BART?  Actually, no: I'm writing about Larkspur Landing.  It doesn't have a train yet, but that ferry ride is very real, giving locals one of the best places in the County for transit to the City.  Buses regularly depart from nearby bus pads and from the Ferry Terminal, and the Marin Airporter office is in the middle of everything.  If a resident does own a car, Larkspur Landing is wedged between Highways 101 and 580, and located along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, giving easy access to Marin's principal arteries and to Contra Costa.  This should be a transit paradise and a destination to rival Sausalito or Tiburon, but it's not, and it's a lost opportunity for Larkspur and the County.

Jane Jacobs, the grandmother of New Urbanism, described a vibrant streetlife as vital to the health of a neighborhood.  People should be walking, they should be interacting and keeping an eye on the street to keep it safe.  Apartments and shops should interface with the street, putting more eyes on the street and adding to the draw of the outdoors.  To further encourage streetlife, traffic should be slow, roadways should be narrow and sidewalks wide, and parking lots should be kept away from the street if they exist at all.

Larkspur's downtown does this right: sidewalks are wide and inviting, the stores abut the street, the traffic is calm and there's not a parking lot in sight.  When we look at Larkspur Landing, however, it's clear the design is oriented to cars, not people.  A clear sign is just how much surfacing parking is available.  The Ferry Terminal alone has over 9 acres of parking, a terrible waste of land, and as the map at the start of this article shows that is only half of the surface lots that dot the neighborhood.  Larkspur Landing can do better, and the two lynchpins are Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and all that parking.

Sir Francis Drake cuts through the area as a divided and busy roadway, and its primary crossing is a pedestrian bridge that avoids the road altogether.  Cars zoom through, the sidewalks are narrow and uninviting, and there is nothing to do along almost its entire stretch through the area as it heads towards San Quentin and I-580.  It is a boring and unwelcoming street.  To combat this, Drake should be narrowed past the entrance to the Larkspur Ferry Terminal.  It doesn't need the capacity it has and could be narrowed to two lanes, with the difference going to bike lanes and the sidewalk.  There should be an entrance to the shopping center there, and buildings should be reconfigured or newly built to face Drake's sidewalk.

The parking lots present an opportunity for three to four story construction.  Although parking, given the car-dependent nature of the County, is a necessity at the moment, the lots could be consolidated into two garages spaced to serve different parts of the community.  The freed-up space should be subdivided into streets and 2-4 story buildings.  The success of the Food Truck Crush shows a strong desire for a sense of place and permanent service shops.  More residents and office workers will support more variety and greater depth of shopping and restaurants, which will serve existing residents as well.  Around the Ferry Terminal itself, a large, flexible and programmable plaza would give an opportunity for farmers' markets or an ongoing Food Truck Crush.  Strong bus links will be needed to serve a larger population, but a huge number of buses pass by on Highway 101; they could be diverted to serve a revamped Larkspur Landing.

J. S. Rosenfield & Co., new owner of Marin Country Mart - formerly known as the Larkspur Landing Shopping Center - plans to give commuters walking between SMART's planned station and the Ferry terminal someplace nice to walk, a third place literally between work and home.  But to make it that walkable place, Rosenfield and the City of Larkspur need to examine solutions for the deficiencies of the entire neighborhood: the lack of a street grid, the disconnectedness of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the oceans of parking, and the pedestrian-unfriendly development already in place.  Many waterfront areas are resounding successes, with examples in Marin and San Francisco.  Larkspur should take a long, hard look at this neighborhood and do what it can to make it the best it can be.

Mid-Week Links: And He Separated Water from Water

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/27744328 w=601&h=338] A beautiful video from Marin photographer Gary Yost shows everything I love and miss about my home: the nature, the towns, the Bay, the culture... I miss it all. On to the nitty-gritty of running all that.

Marin

SMART, once again, features prominently in local transit news this week.  Farhad Mansourian, interim General Manager of SMART, has been hired by the agency on a permanent basis.  Critics have addressed his pay - over $300,000 per year in compensation, comparable to other agency heads - and his credentials, although they've also stopped saying he duped the board prior to the MTC and TAM bailout hearings, as few boards would hire a man they felt had misled them.

The board also approved the new financial report, balancing the budget at about $360 million for the construction of the line which, at $9.7 million per mile, is by far the least expensive rail transit project in the country.  Local writer Steve Stein agrees, characterizing opponents as "nostalgic for a Marin County composed of mid-century ranch houses, suburban lawns and cul-de-sacs."  In other news:

• Cyclists and pedestrians got a major boost when the County allocated $8.8 million for pedestrian and bicycling improvements across Marin.  Among the projects: studying reopening the Alto Tunnel between Corte Madera and Mill Valley, improving sidewalk connections between the Canal and downtown San Rafael, and, in a major victory, constructing the Central Marin Ferry Connection.
• In affordable housing news, Assemblyman and Congressional contender Jared Huffman's bill to allow foreclosed housing to count against affordable housing mandates is on the Governor's desk for signature.  The bill once allowed cities to appeal their density requirements, but it's been pared down to just the foreclosed housing portion.  Meanwhile, Novato, which pushed most strenuously for reform, is following through on a 2008 development loan to expand Eden Housing, an affordable senior center home.  Critics contended that old folks will cause crime and join gangs.
• Terrapin Crossroads, the Phil Lesh-led music venue, was discussed at length at a Fairfax Town Council meeting.  Critics were concerned about traffic and noise at the site, while supporters saw it as a fabulous opportunity for the town to improve nightlife and remove an abandoned, but prominently placed, gas station.  Lesh had put it on hold after signs opposing the project were placed along his walking route in Ross, spooking him and his wife.  Plans are available here (PDF).
• The Marin Agricultural Land Trust purchased a large ranch outside Tomales recently, completing the greenbelt around the town and further ensuring that West Marin is off-limits to sprawl.
• Speaking of sprawl, the proposed Hanna Ranch development in Novato passed the city's Design Review Board, the first step towards project approval.
• Some anti-sprawl might come to San Rafael, as local developer Monahan Parker is looking to build a four-story, 41-unit mixed-use building at 2nd & B Streets.  Two Victorian-era homes that have seen much better days would be demolished.  The project would also include a 57-space parking garage, which is one space above the minimum for a project of its size and totally out of whack with the overall setting.  It is currently before the Design Review Board, and you can watch preliminary comments here.

The Greater Marin

• The debate over California High-Speed Rail is still a thing, and it's making national news.  Ezra Klein of the Washington Post provides a good rundown of current thought on the subject, while CAHSR Blog looks to BART battles in Livermore for signs of things to come.
• BART is still fighting protestors over police brutality and cell phone censorship.  It boiled over recently with multiple stations being shut down during rush-hour.
• In case you hadn't heard, there's a battle brewing over transportation funding in Congress thanks to the soon-to-expire gas tax.  Mercury News wonders what it would do the Bay Area.
• SMART isn't the only transit agency facing problems: Vancouver's TransLink has funding issues, Atlanta's MARTA system is under fire from the car-dependent, and Washington, DC isn't sure how it should align one end of its planned streetcar line.
• Looking to the Old World for how to structure urban spaces.
• Someone read the entire Seattle land use code and came away with some observations.  A braver man than I.

The Land Without Crosswalks

Outside Marin, crosswalks can be extremely rare: a note from Raleigh, NC.

Last week I wrote about crosswalks.  To rehash, although crosswalks aren't a panacea for pedestrian safety, they are a necessity, giving pedestrians access to the same mobility options as drivers.  At their best, crosswalks knit the streetscape into a seamless whole for the pedestrian.  Any driver can tell you how frustrating it is to see a destination on the frontage road but have absolutely no way to get there, and any pedestrian that can see their destination on the far side of a crosswalk-deprived road can tell you how harrowing that can be, too.

I just got back from a trip to Raleigh.  I stayed in the far-out suburbs, in a leapfrog development in the middle of farms and got to see how the 'burbs look in that particular metro area.  I'm glad I had rented a car, because I saw only a tiny handful of crosswalks or sidewalks on our trips around the city.  After I got home, I decided to count how many crosswalks along the two primary roads I had driven on, Capital Boulevard and Buffaloe (that's not a typo) Road.  The results were bad: between downtown's last crosswalk and the 540 Beltline, over 8 miles of road, there are six crosswalked intersections, and they're between Brentwood Road and New Hope Church Road.  In that 1.4-mile stretch, crosswalks are about 0.3 miles apart - a long walk, but at least it's possible to cross the 9-lane arterial intact.  Buffaloe Road, meanwhile, has no crosswalks its entire 4-mile length.

I started to take a similar look at the rest of the major roadways in the Raleigh suburbs and found, among other things, that Lynn Road has 11 crosswalks in 10.5 miles.  I stopped when I realized that a good bet would be that there are far too few safe pedestrian crossings anywhere in the suburban crescent between the Beltlines, US-64 and US-70.

Raleigh's suburbs also often lack sidewalks, which is especially difficult for pedestrians with strollers.  I saw a number of ruts in the grass along the road where people had walked, showing a desperate need for sidewalks, too.

Raleigh is a fast-growing city with a fabulous educational system and research campus, a reasonably strong downtown, and a solid sense of community.  The suburbs, both inner and outer, could embrace an opportunity for something more.  Their arterials are wide enough to be truly successful transit corridors and complete streets, and their parking lots are large enough for some fabulous infill projects.  They should look at the DC suburbs of Silver Spring and White Flint and imagine what could be done in their own neighborhoods.  If that's too ambitious, at least they could install some crosswalks.

Value Capture and SMART

If you follow the Marin IJ online, you've probably seen me posting a lot on SMART-themed articles.  Sometimes the comments from critics can be, to be kind, ill-informed, although it's typically a fun and spirited debate on the subject.  One comment that falls into the latter category recently got me thinking about value capture for SMART. I had just posted about Larkspur Landing's owners.  The SMART train was originally slated to extend down to the Larkspur Landing area and connect with a ferry into the City but has been scaled back to extend only as far as Central San Rafael as a cost-saving measure.  This, I argued, was a loss for the Larkspur Landing neighborhood and that the owner might want to pay to extend that last couple of miles:

Something I've been wondering about has been whether the owner of Larkspur Landing would be willing to help finance the Larkspur station. Although whoever does own that area isn't the most transit-oriented (to understate), being able to market your location as only 30 minutes to anywhere by bus, train, or ferry would significantly lift the value of that property.

Kevin Moore, who had seemed to be in opposition to the SMART project, replied:

In that line of thought... for every housing unit built near the new SMART stations, there should be a reasonable, but substantial "permit fee" for each bedroom and parking space. When Disney put in the monorail from his hotel to the theme park, he paid for it!

Although I was imagining a public-private partnership between SMART and Larkspur Landing, rather than a fee or tax levied across the whole system, Mr. Moore touched on an important concept.  When a station is built, it typically increases the value of the land around the station, boosting property tax receipts.  One method of value capture returns that extra boost to the transit agency, giving a consistent stream of income to the transit agency.

Mr. Moore's idea is another type of value capture, allowing the agency to assess a one-time fee on new residential development that occurs around the stations.  To tweak it a bit, the fee would be levied on whole units rather than bedrooms, to discourage strictly studio apartment developments, and would apply to retail square footage or some other commercial metric.  This would allow the SMART development to capture some of the value created by their system, hopefully bringing the system into a better financial position in the process.  A fee on parking would discourage parking spaces, which would be good for the County's traffic and for neighborhood walkability.  Ostensibly the developments would be exempt from parking minimums, allowing them to opt out of the spaces they felt they didn't need.

I'm hesitant to fully endorse the concept, however.  This provides a one-time stimulus to the system but doesn't have the staying power of a value-capture tax.  If SMART is really successful, it would eventually expand to a Phase 3, perhaps to Sausalito, Richmond, or even San Francisco itself, and slowly add a second track, and these expansions will need a stable funding mechanism.  Sales tax, as we now see, is not terribly stable, and is not terribly dependent upon whether the system works well or not.  As well, imposing a fee on any new development would disincentivize the new construction so desperately needed by the downtowns served by SMART.

The parking fee, though - that's a marvelous idea.  Any new space within a half-mile of a station could be levied at one rate, and any new space above the local parking minimum (at time of construction) would be levied at a higher rate, discouraging developers from overbuilding their parking capacities.  Although there shouldn't be a parking minimum in the first place, this would go some way to produce a less car-dependent corridor.

Mid-Week Links: Transportation Everywhere

Marin

• SMART might get delayed yet again, with Interim Executive Director Farhad Mansourian saying, "I doubt we will be operational by 2014."  It seems as though the two-year delay specified in their updated financial report, which saved $24 million in operating costs, isn't due to cost-cutting but rather because getting approval to build on wetland takes far longer than the Board had expected.  You can hear about that and much more later today at SMART's Board meeting, 1:30pm at San Rafael's Council Chambers or tomorrow's Citizens Oversight Committee meeting at 7:30am.
• Highway 101 is getting a $24 million repaving.  A fix-it-first policy is always good - it saves money for government and for drivers - but I should hope that these monies would receive the same scrutiny as TAM's $8 million SMART bailout.
• Fairfax's potential new music venue, Terrapin Crossing, got some support from the IJ editorial board, who said that the Phil Lesh idea would be "a golden opportunity for the town."
• Another town faces affordable housing in a cautionary tale from SoCal as to the results of blanket opposition.

Around the Bay

• Transit use is dramatically up across the Bay Area over last year.  The article doesn't mention Golden Gate Transit, but according to their site ridership on GGT buses increased by 1.3% while ridership in GGT ferries increased by 7.4% and is now higher than before the recession.  Driving took a hit, though, with Golden Gate Bridge traffic down 1.3%.
• Regional integration of transit agencies would help to improve service across the region and further boost ridership.
• Something happened to BART that dealt with cell phones.  It's not getting much coverage, though.

 The Greater Marin

• It looks like merchants tend to misjudge how people get to their stores, giving driving a far larger share of the pie than other modes.  This could lead to local merchants opposing bike lanes and pushing for more parking to boost customers, even if those policies don't help.
• Seattle is looking to cut car use in half in the city in a bid to become a carbon-neutral town.
• The New York Times shines a light on the dangers of missing crosswalks and sidewalks.  Marin is blessed that it lacks the huge, 10-lane arterials that run through cities like Orlando or Raleigh.
• The General Services Administration, landlord for the Federal government, is working with Washington, DC's transit agency to build or rent its buildings near transit, especially the Metro system.  This is especially important given that government buildings can stress neighborhoods that aren't designed to handle such commutes, and is a shift from previous policy that just looks at the cheapest options.
• California's High-Speed Rail is in court, as Peninsula governments have brought a lawsuit against them, saying they provided bad ridership information, bad cost information, performed a poor environmental review and failed to do a proper analysis of the vehicular impact of the system.
• Proponents of CAHSR, meanwhile, counter cost arguments by saying that the cost of doing nothing is $100 billion in new airport and road infrastructure, and Harry Reid joined the chorus in favor.
• And the San Francisco Chronicle goes all out with four pieces on the subject, calling it our generation's Golden Gate Bridge, a necessity, and a potential new industry.  In dissent, Jerry Hill calls into question the fiscal viability of the project given the present climate of austerity in Sacramento and Washington.

A Short Break

I have been away from a computer for the past few days in Raleigh.  Today's Monday Update will be on Tuesday.  So apparently that didn't happen.  Back to our regularly scheduled program Wednesday.

Mid-Week Links: Building the Future

Marin County

• Roadwork is coming to the County, which will lead to delays but also better roads.  Total cost is more than $1.1 million
• Mill Valley took a giant step forward with its new plan for Miller Avenue, one of two arteries through town.  It's not perfect, of course, but it will emphasize bus and bicycle access.  Hopefully the city will work with Golden Gate Transit to improve travel times and headways, too.
• Want to join a planning board?  TAM and Fairfax are both looking for citizen volunteers.
• Two amazing things, parks and beer, are coming together.  Lagunitas Brewing Company is looking to operate and maintain Samuel P. Taylor State Park, which is threatened with closure due to state budget cuts.

California

• Napa County will receive some CalTrans money to study traffic flow for Highway 29, which runs from the city of Napa to American Canyon.
• San Francisco's cable car fleet has entered the digital age, as they now accept Clipper Cards for payment.  Won't make them any cheaper, though.
• Also in The City, Muni is trying to speed its abysmally slow transit fleet through all-door boarding, letting people pay at the back or front or middle of the vehicle.
• California's High-speed rail will be more expensive thanks to changes sought by Central Valley communities, including a 42-mile stretch of elevated rail, leading lawmakers to question whether the state can afford the project.  CA HSR Blog fires back at the criticism, saying, "If we want to build high speed rail and provide the basis of sustainable 21st century prosperity, we need to figure out how to get this built, and not make excuses for doing nothing."  They also have a list of the new documents that detail the added costs.
• The Central Valley is known for its Midwestern flair for sprawling communities, and UC Berkeley examined why in a working paper examined by Half-Mile Circles.  Its conclusion?  Despite a desire for high-end transit, "Unless considerably higher densities are embraced and politically accepted, high-end transit services will remain a pipedream in settings like Stockton."  Reminds me of a streetcar project a few years back.

The Greater Marin

• Lastly, we have a good example of how a building's perceived size can be altered substatially by modifications to the façade.  DCMud, Washington, DC's local real-estate blog, looked at an impending project in the popular and developing 14th Street Corridor.  The local community thought the original design was too over-bearing on local streets of rowhouses, so developer Eric Colbert reworked the design and, without losing much square footage, created a very different building.

Walkability, Thy Name Is Crosswalk

Walkability seems to be all the rage these days, and for good reason.  Any merchant will tell you that foot traffic is good for business, and any public health expert will tell you walking is good for your health.  It gets people out of cars for trips of less than a mile and puts people where they can see each other, generating the vibrant sort of street life where friends and acquaintances run into each.  It’s a win for residents, a win for businesses, and a win for the city’s health.

Crosswalks are key to ensuring good walkability.  A road system isn’t much of a road system if you need to drive 15 minutes out of your way to turn, and a sidewalk system isn’t much good if one needs to walk 15 minutes to cross the street.  A good crosswalk will enhance an entire streetscape, making it more inviting to pedestrians and more lively for all users.  In contrast, a streetscape without crosswalks can be dangerous.  If crosswalks are far enough apart, the two halves of the street will be cut off from each other, dramatically reducing the walkability of the area.

San Anselmo serves as a good example of good and bad crosswalk planning.  There are certain stretches where crosswalks are commonplace, mostly along San Anselmo Avenue downtown and Sir Francis Drake from Tamal Avenue to Fairfax.  Outside of these areas, walkability seems to be an afterthought, especially along Redhill and Center, where crosswalks can be almost half a mile apart.

The map at right shows the disconnect.  I’ve highlighted all crosswalks over or next to arterial roads in red.  The longest stretch without a crosswalk is on Center, where two crossings are nearly a half-mile apart from one another.  A sidewalk ends without a crossing, and cars tend to speed along that stretch of road.  On Redhill, there’s a commercial strip in the median that has no crosswalks except at the beginning and end.  For the 18 years I lived on Forbes, which forms a T intersection with that strip, I only saw a parade of rotating businesses occupying the buildings.

Especially within a half-mile of the Hub, San Anselmo’s principal bus terminal, pedestrian traffic should be encouraged as much as possible.  With its arterials forming barriers, businesses become isolated from one another, diminishing the appeal of downtown as a destination, and businesses cannot easily draw from its own population base.  San Anselmo, Fairfax and Ross should do a pedestrian traffic survey, identifying areas of possible improvement.  I suspect that adding crosswalks and calming traffic would be among the recommendations.

San Anselmo has the potential to become a walkable town with vibrant streetlife in its core and a healthy, walking population, but it needs to invest in the infrastructure to make it happen.

Mid-Week Links: Delay Delay

• In SMART news, Farhad Mansourian released new numbers this last week showing an increase in costs, causing the MTC to delay and reevaluate the critical bailout that was contingent on costs remaining steady.  According to Mansourian's analysis, the budget remains balanced, but overall construction costs increase.  The IJ keeps up its support, but it's right that the system needs to get its act together.  Opponents say the numbers still aren't right and begin gathering signatures for repeal while Mansourian blasted RepealSMART for arguing that the whole train project should be built at once or not at all, but made no comment on the numbers critique.  Also unknown is why the critical system continues to shoot itself in the foot.
• In affordable housing, a new study out of the DC Office of Planning (for the municipality, not the feds) attempts to take transportation costs into account when analyzing housing affordability.  As intuition would have it, the further you travel from work the more expensive it is to get there, decreasing affordability.  Forbes' Joel Kotkin declares that ABAG is conducting a war on the single-family home (nevermind the fact that rowhouses are single-family homes), saying people want to live in such homes but will pay a premium to live in urban areas, citing an old Chronicle article of how the middle class are priced out of San Francisco.  Nope, no contradiction there.  Oh, and he takes a few potshots at Marinites just for kicks.
• By the way, Novato's awesome.
• Elsewhere in California, Jerry Brown vetoed a bill allowing local planning authorities to require businesses help cover transit costs of its employees' commute; Larkspur will be timing its traffic signals to help car flow around, well, everywhere, although its pedestrian facilities could use some help; bike lanes are added to the Golden Gate Bridge's Eastern walkway, although it's still too crowded; the MTC's impending move to San Francisco may not be so impending; San Diego gets a new growth plan; and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs wants to find new space near transit, causing East Bay councilmembers to salivate simultaneously.
• In other news, Frank Gruber asks why Americans implemented policies that destroyed our cities, and Grist relays a grisly reminder of what happens when drivers don't realize that bikers are vehicles, too.  San Francisco does its own cyclists well by prosecuting the alleged driver in a hit-and-run that killed a German tourist on a bicycle.

Looking at SMART after Larkspur

SMART works well as a Marin-Sonoma train, but it has a lot of shortcomings, too.  Once it's up and running, it needs to look beyond Cloverdale-Larkspur. It's 2030, and SMART is a smashing success.  Despite the best efforts of rail opponents throughout the construction of both Phase One and Phase Two, SMART has far surpassed ridership expectations and is the backbone of Marin and Sonoma's transportation systems.

That, at least, is what I hope I'll get to write about in my late 40s.  Despite its flaws, and they are manifold, SMART is a good project.  This is especially true for the commuters from Sonoma to Marin who constitute 39% of Sonoma's commuting workforce.  Yet for Marinites, SMART is only a partial solution.  Far more Marin commuters work in San Francisco than in Sonoma, and this will be just as true when SMART is fully built as it is now.  So how might SMART expand to serve areas outside Marin?  Here are a few of the options I've seen floated around.

1. Run BART along SMART tracks, or vice versa.  This plan sounds good, but it is technically impossible.  BART runs on a different track width than SMART - Indian Gauge for BART, Standard Gauge for SMART.  BART tracks would need to be constructed from scratch along 101, and SMART could not operate on them.  If people are complaining how expensive SMART is, they'd surely balk at a project with more than 10 times the cost.  Back of the envelope cost: $500 million/mile, or $6-35 billion, depending on how far north BART goes.
2. Run SMART across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Transbay Terminal.  This plan would be a partial resurrection of the original BART plan, which called for the train system to run north to Ignacio.  In its place, SMART would have to reconstruct tracks south of Larkspur, reconfigure the bottom deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, and build new tracks out from the Bridge.  Once the system reached San Francisco, the system would get far trickier and far more expensive.  SMART's trains couldn't run on the streetcar tracks along the Embarcadero for a number of reasons, such as incompatible stations and the safety of mixing streetcars and regular trains, so new tracks would need to be built through a dense, urban area already well-served by transit.  In total, 16.5 miles of new track would need to be reconstructed or built.  Back of the envelope cost: $8 billion+.
3. Run SMART across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to the nearest BART station.  This concept makes sense on paper: little new rail would be required, as the lines already exist on the Richmond side.  SMART would principally run through an industrial area, so this alignment would enhance the value of the line for freight.  Doing this would require reconstructing the bridge's third lanes to handle train traffic.  CalTrans is resistant to the idea of bicycles using that lane and would surely oppose running tracks along the bridge as well.  As well, it would not help Marinites get to work so much as it would help others get to their jobs in Marin: by 2030, only 11,000 Marinites will commute to the East Bay while 32,000 East Bay residents will commute to Marin.  Back of the envelope cost: $2 billion.  (Compultense has a fantasy map with this alignment.)

All these plans have some heavy drawbacks.  The isolation that makes Marin so fantastic hampers exercises such as this.  So is there a way to improve connectivity without doing something with such high barriers?  To some degree, yes.

As it currently stands, the Larkspur SMART station will be built 0.4 miles away from the Terminal, forcing a 15 minute walk through extremely pedestrian-unfriendly territory: a bus depot, two parking lots, a barren pedestrian bridge over an overbuilt Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and another parking lot.  This makes the total trip from SMART to San Francisco at least 55 minutes long - the maximum most people are willing to travel.  Improving the space between the SMART station and the Ferry to be more pedestrian-friendly would ease the walk, and operating a shuttle would cut down on walking time.

There are no good, inexpensive ways to utilize SMART outside of its already described corridors unless Marin is willing to foot a much, much larger bill.  Given the opposition SMART has received already, I cannot imagine support building for a further expansion without a major shift in thinking about transit in the County.

High Barriers for Low-Rise Affordable Housing

I've sometimes wondered why towns often lack mixed-use, low-rise development.  San Anselmo, in its draft housing element update (PDF, p. 47), found that adding a second story of housing on top of its downtown retail district would add 45 units.  Other cities in Marin could do the same.  Such plans would bolster tottering downtown economies, place low-income residents near transit and amenities, and help defuse some of the painful debates over affordable housing we've seen lately, all while maintaining the "village character" of our towns.  It should be a win-win, but the federal agencies charged with enforcing affordable housing policy are making it harder.  From Streetsblog:

[Department of Housing and Urban Development] lending standards dictate that the total value of mixed-use development projects can’t be more than 15 to 20 percent retail. Fannie [Mae] caps retail share at 20; Freddie [Mac] at 25 percent. And these standards set the tone for the private market — a tone that is consequently skewed toward single-family housing, and away from the pent-up demand for urban development with walkable amenities.

In other words, the loans that go to support affordable housing cannot go towards the kind of mixed-use development that would most help the poor and the cities they live in.  Second-story units in downtown San Anselmo would be ineligible for these loans under current law, rendering any plans for such units moot.

Congress for the New Urbanism is leading a campaign to change these rules.  San Anselmo and the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers should lend their full support and join CNU.

Mid-Week Links: Empty Inside

• Nathan Kensinger took a fantastic photo essay of one of the Bay Area's ghost towns: Drawbridge, Santa Clara County.
• Density doesn't have to be bad.  Here in Washington, DC, there have been a few particularly beautiful examples of rowhouses hitting the local blogosphere. (DCMud, DCMetrocentric)
• Well, my Washington ties finally pay off.  The debt debate is all the town can talk about, and at least one outlet asks, What happens to transportation if we can't borrow?  It turns out, not much.  In the mean time, the FAA still isn't reauthorized. (Transportation Issues, Washington Post)
• It looks like the Marin County Planning Commission is going to look at some zoning changes.  On the table: density and mixed use, among other things. (MCPC)
• Some neighbors are filing suit against a planned expansion of Edna Maguire Elementary in Mill Valley over slightly more traffic and slightly more height. (IJ)
• Fairfax could get some more night life, although a bit off the beaten track.  South downtown's abandoned gas station might become a music venue.  Rockin'. (Patch)
• For once, the IJ was full of constructive examination of SMART this week.  A veteran transportation planner takes a look at the SMART train and asks naysayers, "Can't we now get on with this project?" while Dick Spotswood thinks it will be too successful for its rolling stock, which have a maximum capacity of 498 seats.  Personally I think his analysis is oversimplistic, as SMART's corridor is hardly similar to CalTrain's.
• Just when you thought it was over, ABAG's affordable housing saga rolls on, this time to Sausalito.  They're just getting started, but so far the debate sounds rather more civil than Novato's contentious debate.
• Speaking of Novato, opinion on the new affordable housing plan keeps rolling in.  SUNN panned the site selections for being insufficient, the IJ editorial board congratulated the city for how far it has come since the start of the debate, Brad Breithaupt decryed the whole process, and the city itself, in an uncharacteristic bout of practicality, started to look at how to make  better use of the market to meet its affordable housing needs through second units. (Pacific Sun, IJ, Patch)
• Late Edition: It's been a long time coming, but the San Francisco bike share project marches forward by announcing next year's pilot plans.  Other cities along the CalTrain corridor will also be part of the system which, in the Bay Area's Balkanized transit system, is most welcome. (San Francycle, HuffPo)

Marin's Roads as Transit

If there is one thing that gets a transit advocate's heart racing, it's a transit fantasy map.  It speaks to our not-so-hidden desire that method by which we get around - trains, buses, cars, bikes and feet - should each occupy a niche in the urban landscape, hopefully without too much spillover into another mode's bailiwick.  A fantasy map means that a given area is no longer strictly the domain of the car but is accessible to all travelers.

Sometimes, however, a fantasy map is really not a fantasy at all, but a reimagining of what is already there.  Cameron Booth, for example, created a map of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System as though it were a subway system.  Complutense has a fair number of fantastic maps of Bay Area transit.  (Marin sure looks lonely with its one little track.)  With that, I submit my own - East Marin's roads as metro.

Why?  When my eyes drifted from DC's transit network and back to my home, I realized that Marin is laid out in lines thanks to its geography.  Not only does this lend itself to diagramming, but it lends itself to frequent buses: the population is forced to travel along these routes, and they already live close enough to them that bus improvements help the whole corridor, not just a few near the stops.

The map will be updated as time goes on.  It needs some work, but it has helped me visualize Marin's potential.

Mid-Week Links: Baby Steps

County Proper

• The never-ending news of rail in Marin continues with Novato's final approval of the mighty and efficient freight train, which will now run through the city as far as Eureka.  Santa Rosa got its first new freight train this week, too.  (IJ, Patch, Press-Democrat)
• In a mishmash of acronyms, MTC considers SMART's pedestrian facilities for TIGER funds. (IJ, Fast Lane)
• Work is starting to add HOV lanes to the Novato Narrows, an area of Highway 101 north of the Atherton Avenue exit.  Freeway widening is never a good answer to traffic, especially with a train on the way, but at least it's HOV. (Patch, IJ)
• Meanwhile, Novato declares sprawl to be the way forward, approving zoning for affordable housing at 20 units per acre instead of the State-mandated 30 units per acre.  Although 20 units per acre could do some good, as the form matters more than the density, the downgrade is a loss to the city. (IJ, Transit in Utah)

Near Marin

• ABAG, MTC, and BAAQMD might buy a place together in San Francisco.  ABAG and MTC currently share a much more transit-accessible space in Oakland, but it's too small for what they want.  Maybe they'll live up to their own mandates? (Mercury News)
• It looks like they got the memo: AC Transit and BART are looking to merge.  As two of the largest transit agencies in the region, their merger would go a long way to better integrate Bay Area transit.
• Regional development agencies got the axe this last budget cycle, and they're suing to stop the state from shutting them down.
• California passed a law (SB 582) mandating employers offer benefits to its bike-commuting employees, just as they do to their car-commuting employees.  Now the Governor just has to sign it. (Cyclicious)

Greater Marin

• If you've ever worried about bike commuting (it's too hot, too cold, too wet, too tiresome), maybe you should give one of these things a try.  No problem to hit 28MPH and an optional electric assist for troublesome hills.  One of these could go from San Anselmo to the Ferry in 10 minutes, no gas required.  (Inhabitat)

Making Sense of Our Governmental Mishmash

Marin is governed by a huge number of overlapping governments, commissions, committees, agencies, authorities, departments and boards.  No wonder the Bay Area is so difficult to govern. If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a new page at the top of The Greater Marin, with links to every official entity with some power over Marin County development issues, from the White House to the Bolinas Public Utilities District.

At the Federal level, things are pretty clear.  Congress has oversight over the Executive Branch, which has issue-specific Departments and Agencies to deal with whatever regulations need to be enforced or enacted.  Laws get passed, but are typically implemented by the existing structure.

Lower down the chain, the situation becomes significantly murkier.  The Bay shoreline is managed by the San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission, while the Pacific shoreline is managed by the California Coastal Commission.  Housing and urban development is even more touchy, with involvement from the Association of Bay Area Governments, the BCDC, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Joint Policy Committee, the County government, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, State regulations, and the affected city and county governments.  Transit further complicates affairs, as one or more of the Bay Area’s dozens of transit agencies gets involved, as well as the County transportation authority, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, State agencies and the US Department of Transportation.

At current count, for Marin alone I count seven unincorporated areas with governments, twelve incorporated cities and towns, four transit agencies, the Board of Supervisors and nine other regional entities with specific issue areas.

The good news is that most of the unelected bodies draw from Marin’s body of elected officials, so there is consistency of policy between them.  The SMART Board, for example, requires that some of its members sit on the TAM Board, to ensure that their policies have continuity, and that members are kept abreast of local transportation issues.

This agglomerated structure, though, leads to weakness and a sense that the unelected bodies are sent by Sacramento to intrude upon local sovereignty.  When the Clipper Card rolled out, it took a very long time for it to filter into the various member transit districts of the MTC, and even now not all transit agencies accept the card.  In the interim, local transit agencies spent millions of dollars to roll out similar cards, duplicating efforts, wasting money, and further prolonging the wait for a standardized smart card.

When Novato debated affordable housing mandates from ABAG, a continual complaint was that Sacramento was imposing its will upon the town.  When the city eventually finalized its rather modest housing plans, the chatter was that Novato had told off the State, not an Association on which its own councilmembers sit.

So what can be done?

On the one hand, Bay Area residents are fiercely independent and notoriously headstrong.  San Francisco has its own style, and it would just as soon not be lumped in with Fremont if it can be helped, Berkeley would blanche at being dictated to by Oakley, and the New York Times once called Bolinas the "Howard Hughes of towns."  On the other hand, the Bay Area functions as a region and faces regional problems, from the Bay itself to the freeways and bridges.

One idea is to create a new office, a Bay Area Lieutenant Governor directly elected by the residents.  The official would act as advocate for Bay Area policy in Sacramento and coordinate policy between each of the disparate bodies that has authority over the region.  The election campaign of a Lieutenant Governor would unite the region in a way that is impossible under the current governmental mélange, while having someone at the top would mean greater legitimacy for the bureaucracy.

A less ambitious idea would be to simply consolidate the various bodies into a single unified hierarchy, perhaps under ABAG, and reduce overlapping mandates.  Any permitting would go through this unified structure.  The bodies would share staff, standardize forms and processes, and proximity would allow policies to rub off from one agency to another in a way that’s currently impossible.  A merger between ABAG and MTC was proposed in 2001 but eventually died due to internal opposition; the two agencies established the Joint Policy Committee instead.

But no politician or bureaucrat wants to cede power, and few people have the stomach to create government, even if it means streamlining what already exists.  There are so many sacred cows, so many little fiefdoms, in the current system that Bay Area residents will most likely be stuck with what they have for some time.  At the very least, now there’s an index to reference.

Midweek Links: Get SMART

SMART was making news this week, what with TAM voting not to rescind last month's approval of an $8 million bailout for the transit project.  MTC then voted to approve its own transfer of $33 million.  Sonoma had already contributed $3 million.  Larkspur officially approved of the project, votes raised my eyebrows.  When the original vote deadlocked at 7-7 on whether to approve the bailout, it was Larkspur Councilwoman Joan Lundstrom who switched her vote.  She was not at the second meeting, allowing her alternate, Larkspur Mayor Larry Chu, to sit in her place.  Despite his city's official approval of the project, he voted to rescind.  In any case, RepealSMART would have none of it, suing the organization for violating open meeting laws and general nefariousness.  All the while, the SMART board reported that they were "fundamentally sound and on track" and continued its search for a new executive director. Meanwhile, Corte Madera and San Rafael passed their budgets.  Turns out the San Rafael gas tax doesn't always go to transportation.

Not all budgets are in yet, with a number of cities contemplating sales taxes to close gaps that keep coming up.

Novato gets a new bicycle lane to bypass a stretch where bikers shared 101 with vehicular traffic.

Not all vehicular safety news is good.  A boy was hit by a driver outside of a crosswalk in a Mill Valley shopping area.  Police blame the kid for crossing outside of a crosswalk, but there's a problem: there aren't any crosswalks there.

In other local drama, Novato has revised their list of sites to zone for affordable housing.  Looks like the churches are off the hook, but I still wonder why the city insists on building single-purpose affordable units.

From here on, the only thing shocking about San Rafael's Pizza Orgasmica is going to be the name.  Its owner has given up a fight to keep its bright yellow, Brazil-inspired hue.  SFist calls San Rafael's objections an "Orange County-mentality".

TAM is considering high-occupancy toll, or HOT, lanes on 101.  Despite research that congestion pricing is the only way to keep down traffic, I can't help but think the $66-120 million required to install might go to a better use like, say, transit.  At least it makes the $8 million SMART bailout look like the chump change it is.

Lastly, and as an offering for being a day late, I bring you meaty theory.  Free parking, that ubiquitous scourge of the suburbs and thing that exists all over Marin, is really a huge drain on our local, regional, and national economies.

SMART Moves Forward

If you haven't already seen it, the Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) approved an $8 million bailout of the SMART rail project.  The rail project's phase one will extend from downtown Santa Rosa to downtown San Rafael, with operations aimed to begin in 2014. Not everyone is so pleased with the result.  RepealSMART, an anti-transit organization formed exclusively to fight the project, is suing in Marin Superior Court, saying TAM meetings violated open meetings laws and election promises in providing the bailout.  The organization also alleges that SMART has an undisclosed $35 million deficit, a number group lead John Parnell says comes from an anonymous source.  Although he claims he'd have no issue if the train were being built at once, he calls the first segment "useless."  Those that live and work along the segment will doubtless disagree.