Mid-Week Links: Crashworthy

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpcfZeokUI] One of the reasons for SMART's higher-than-expected cost is Federal crashworthiness standards that forced the agency to look for custom-built heavy DMUs.  Yet, as explained by Market Urbanism, the regulations were made for a time before intelligent, lightweight materials were available and force the US to forego the engineering standards used everywhere else in the world.  As shown above, the new materials are perfectly capable of keeping vehicles safe.  It's too late for SMART to change their order, but this regulatory regime can and should be changed for all the other transit agencies looking to hold down costs.

Marin County

In case you missed it, there were off-year elections this past Tuesday.  Urbanism won the day for the most part, fending off avowed anti-city challengers in Novato and San Anselmo.  Many disagreed with San Rafael's new mayor, Gary Phillips, on Target but he has a firmly pro-business stance and will serve downtown San Rafael well.  Across the country, Greater Greater Washington looks at what makes a candidate electable, the Center for Transportation Excellence has posted the status of transit measures nationwide and Half-Mile Circles looks at a few of the big-ticket items.

• The County is considering regulations on smoking within multi-unit dwellings, I guess because a home is only private space when it's got a half-acre of land around it.
• There will be no Terrapin Crossroads, says Phil Lesh.  Fairfaxians are heartbroken.
• A driver struck a teen in Novato last week along pedestrian-unfriendly Novato Boulevard.  He's doing okay, although he's also lucky to be alive.
• SMART plans to spend up to $200,000 to polish its image and push back against opponents.
• Novato's Hanna Ranch development would be built without affordable housing while creating low-income jobs.  This is suspiciously inconsistent.  Deciding on final approval, meanwhile, has been punted by the Council to November 29.
• California may have  a massive infrastructure maintenance deficit, but at least Mill Valley is behaving responsibly.
• Mill Valley's Chamber of Commerce plots a comeback.
• A proposal has surfaced to create dedicated, separated bus lanes on Van Ness Avenue, speeding buses along the corridor with significantly more efficiency than currently allowed.  Since Golden Gate Transit uses Van Ness for a number of its lines, this change would benefit Marinites as well as San Franciscans.
• Want to save a state park otherwise slated for closure? Stop by the Parks Coalition brainstorming session on November 15.
• If there's one thing Marin does well, it's loving local businesses.

The Greater Marin

• Cotati is considering revamping a short stretch of Old Redwood Highway near their hexagonal downtown to make it more pedestrian-friendly and less of the car thoroughfare it currently is.  Local businesses want to entrench the 40 MPH status quo.
• The City of Napa is considering something similar: a $38 million redesign of their downtown.
• San Francisco apparently boasts three of the best bars in the world, and there's no better way to enjoy a bar than to take transit.  Don't stay out too late, of course: your last bus to Marin leaves at 12:30am.
• Oakland residents are dedicated to historic preservation, going so far as to wield shotguns to defend their heritage.
• Shockwaves from the $98 billion (nominal) price tag for California High-Speed Rail continue to ripple through the blogosphere.  On one side are engineers, who say it is far, far too overbuilt, and on the other are those who look at the big picture to argue it's still a good deal.  I say, if you can save money by foregoing massive viaducts through San Jose, forego the viaducts.
• Sacramento might not get its rail line for a while yet, but where to locate a station is still troublesome for officials.
• We love our green initiatives.  Unfortunately one of the most popular, Cash for Clunkers, was a bust.
• Congress did something bipartisan today and unanimously passed out of committee a two year extension of the federal transportation bill, MAP-21.
• Bad traffic designs that create gridlock create exhaust which seems to hurt our neurological health.
• Lastly, in a testament to how budget cuts can even cut efficient programs, the General Services Administration no longer will have the money to make their headquarters an example of solid office design and will instead remain in the big, bureaucratic office building that looks just like you expect.

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.

Open Data Delay

I just got back from a trip to West Virginia that involved lots of fabulous people and no Internet access, so today's post on communicating bus timing will be delayed for a day or two.  What I can give you, however, is something someone else made.  Streetfilms has a fabulous video on sharing transit data in an open and standardized way and the wonderful things that can come of it.  Golden Gate Transit doesn't have open data, at least not that I could see, and that dramatically hinders the capability of the entrepreneurial and tech-savvy to create customer-centered applications the agency may not even think of.  This deserves more rumination, but the mini-documentary can speak for itself.[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/13764646 w=620&h=349]

Mid-Week Links: Divide and Conquer

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/16399180 w=601&h=338] We intuit it, but we don't always realize it: a busy street is a pedestrian-dead street.  That's why you never walk down lower Miller Avenue, or Third Street, or, if you can avoid it, Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

Marin

• A Marin City woman is facing eviction from her public housing for hosting her dying mother without prior approval.
• Food Truck Crush might be a permanent after-work fixture at the Larkspur Ferry.
• The split-lot fee saga continues, which County Supervisors continue to adjudicate on a case-by-case basis.
• Golden Gate Bridge workers are engaged in a rather heated renegotiation of their contract with the District.
• If SMART is repealed, the sales tax that funds the project will remain in place until all outstanding contracts and bonds are paid off.  Dick Spotswood doesn't think this is such a great deal.
• SMART supporters are reviving to fight the repeal effort.
• There's a fight afoot to prevent the San Rafael Airport from also hosting a recreation center.
• Plans to expand Ross Valley's White Hill Middle School have been approved.
• Redhill Shopping Center merchants are taking it in the gut as the beloved San Anselmo strip mall undergoes renovation and beautification.
• Larkspur's low-density infill development at Niven Nursery near the city's downtown is proceeding apace.
• Mill Valley loses a hardware store and a bit of its past.
• The Hanna Ranch sprawl project is set to go before the Novato City Council without affordable housing.  At least it has that going for it.
• Novato approved the design of its new city offices, with some caveats.

The Greater Marin

• Local transit agencies are urged to work together more closely ahead of an MTC-led push for a transit gas tax.
• If you commute by bus to the City, no doubt you know that the Transbay Terminal is gone.  What you may not know is that in its place will be a 61-story tower atop the new transit center along with a number of other fine projects.  Have some opinions?  Stop by San Francisco City Hall at 5:30 Thursday evening.
• Highway 101 widening around Rohnert Park will be completed this month, part of a $172 million widening scheme along the thoroughfare's Sonoma reaches.
• Looks like California High-Speed Rail will cost a helluva lot more than planned.  Atlantic Cities waxes sanguine on the subject, and Alon Levy looks at the cause of the cost overruns: cantankerous residents officials at either end of the line.
• Why do Congressional Republicans hate bikes?

Maximizing Golden Gate Transit: Wayfinding from A to B

Marin isn’t known as a transit-oriented place, despite its deep green ideology.  While fewer than 45% of San Franciscans drive alone to work, a full 74% of Marinites do.  In other places, low transit ridership is due in part to the opaque nature of bus routes and schedules, and GGT is certainly opaque.  What might it do to become more transparent?

The first problem is one of bus routes.  Many riders, if they don’t know a bus route, don’t know where they’ll end up if they board the bus.  Unlike a rail-based system, riders can’t look at the rails and see where they go.  Only specialized knowledge, gleaned from studying the bus map or utilizing wayfinding tools like 511.org, would allow an inexperienced user to utilize the bus system by feel.

Transit centers present a special difficulty because of the plethora of options.  If I want to go from Sausalito to the Seminary Drive bus pad, I first need to check to see what bus numbers depart from Sausalito, then what routes look like they might serve Seminary Drive.  The 70 and 80 have asterisks next to them so I don’t know if they’ll come by Sausalito.  The 10 might, too, but it also has an asterisk that says it might not serve Seminary.  The 22 probably does, but getting back I might need to get on someplace else because it looks as though it veers off someplace near… Forget it, I’m taking the cab.

This should not be so hard!  I look at maps like this every day in a much more complicated bus network and this confused me.  Any route that hits Seminary Drive from Sausalito doesn’t even always make it to Sausalito or Seminary Drive.  I only know this because of side notes that say, “Check timetables.”  On top of that, there isn’t an easy way to say that every X minutes a bus departs Sausalito for Seminary Drive.

What if I don’t want to go to Seminary Drive but want to see where I can go from Sausalito?  I’d know the end points but not the stops in between without studying the map to find the small numbers and make sure the tiny color lines match up with the numbers’ coloring.  Knowing where to go has turned from easy to highly technical, and this is only a small transit center; San Rafael would be significantly worse.

Without dramatically altering the routes to be more consistent, good graphic design can help lower the barriers to bus usage significantly.  One of the best ways to address wayfinding is what is known as a “spider map”, a concept widely used in London’s bus system.  It takes the jumbled mess of bus lines near a Tube station and charts them out to their ends, with major stops marked.

It does this in a cartogram, rather than a geographic map.  By removing the geographic data and showing only the most important stops, the map can most effectively highlight the most useful service data.  Differing line colors or patterns show visually the various exceptions to the rules, such as partial or peak-only service, and general trends of service, such as which “trunk” the line goes along or bus headway.  This grants the bus system the same clarity as a subway system and visually associates the lowly bus with the ease and comfort of rapid transit.

Making buses work for casual riders is a perennial problem.  Even here in Washington, DC, I know many people that live here months or years without ever boarding a bus.  Understanding the bus system is seen as Deep Knowledge of the system’s otherwise impenetrable black box.  Yet in Marin, the bus is our only mass transit option.  It is imperfect, but it is comprehensive, and converting a driver to the bus will require it to be much more than the confusing map of seemingly random lines it currently is.

This addresses casually knowing how to get someplace, but knowing when to show up for your bus is still a problem, one we’ll address next week.

Mid-Week Links

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18756600 w=620&h=349] Could you imagine something like this at Marin's transit centers? With GGT's long, long headways, it would make sense to have screens in local shops as well as more detailed information screens at the stops themselves, perhaps with an interactive map of the routes. Chicago's Bus Tracker: Taking the Guesswork Out of Waiting for the Bus from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Marin

This week, SMART went totally braindead and decided to play the villain.  The district, in defiance of the Secretary of State, passed an election ordinance requiring that RepealSMART include an unbiased statement with the repeal effort's signature petition, the first step to getting its initiative on the ballot.  RepealSMART has chosen to ignore the directive.  In other news:

• The County Board of Supervisors passed a fairly gentle plan to ease some of the barriers to affordable housing.  Brad Breithaupt thinks it's going to be yet another target for anti-development rage.
• Residents in Larkspur want to build a farm where the already-approved New Home Co. housing development is scheduled to be built.  They have little chance of success.
• Another week, another total road closure: a flaming tractor-trailer crash closed southbound Highway 101, closing all southbound lanes for over two hours.  A shame there wasn't some sort of rail-based mass transit alternative...
• IJ endorsements are in for the Ross Valley School Board, College of Marin Board, Novato School Board, Reed School Board, and Mill Valley School Board.
• Consolidation of emergency services in the Ross Valley continues, with Ross beginning to consider integrating its fire department with one of its neighbors.
• Children and parents got outside and got some exercise this past week in Mill Valley, participating in International Walk (and Roll) to School Day.  The Feds noticed, too, and recently awarded San Anselmo and San Rafael $1.8 million to improve its sidewalks around three local schools as part of the Safe Routes to School program.
• Homestead Valley will get a very, very narrow sidewalk on a very, very slow street.
• The architecturally lazy Novato city offices move forward.
• The San Anselmo Andronico's will remain open after Renovo Capital completes its acquisition of the ill-fated company.
• Patch's Kelly Dunleavy goes over the Fairfax town budget with the city and opponents to its half-cent sales tax proposal and finds that numbers can be more than they seem to be.
• San Rafael's Corporate Center will likely be rezoned to allow for medical and research uses, eliminating 77 parking spaces in its gargantuan 1,323 space lot and allowing for a greater diversity of uses for the downtown office complex.

The Greater Marin

• While Marin debates the value of SMART, Santa Rosa continues to move forward with renewal plans.
• Washington, DC - the city, not the feds - has come a long, long way since the days of Marion Barry, with foreign investors flocking to sock their money away in a stable regional economy. Part of the reason: a strong Metro system.
• Apparently, the only way to combat congestion is through congestion pricing.
• If you're going to build massive rail projects like BART, the best way to go is subterranean.
• While I looked at the cost of driving alone on Marin and found it to be hideously expensive, it's only one part of the whole economic puzzle, which apparently costs trillions to operate and maintain.  To save that money, we'll need to spend trillions more on a total infrastructure overhaul.  Could be fun.
• But in the meantime, the poorest places of the world are finding hope in good urban design.

The Theory: SMART to San Francisco

Building a rail line to San Francisco is the Holy Grail for many in the commuting public.  By 2035, there will be an estimated 80,000 commute trips across the Golden Gate Bridge every day, and both San Francisco and the SMART district counties could be well-served by a rail line going across the Golden Gate Bridge.  It sounds like a fabulous idea, but would it actually be worth the expense?  Let’s pencil this out.

SMART, presumably, would run along the old NWP railroad tracks to Sausalito, duplicating the old rail route.  From there, would proceed as the old BART plan did, tunneling through the Marin Headlands to the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, becoming a subway thereafter to run under Geary Boulevard before finally terminating at either the San Francisco Caltrain station or the Transbay Transit Center.

The Marin section would cut through Larkspur and Corte Madera, running at surface, bypass downtown Mill Valley and most of Sausalito before diving beneath the hills.  Larkspur to Sausalito costs would likely be higher than the rest of the rail line, as the old rails have been torn up for trails.  Given the cost of renovating the Alto Tunnel as well, a cost of $174 million – $20 million per mile – is not unreasonable.  The fact that this would run through some very low-density residential neighborhoods, however, would likely mean significant neighborhood opposition.  Running along Highway 101 would be significantly more expensive, as there is no single right-of-way for SMART to operate with, and there is no freeway median for the train to run down.

Sausalito to San Francisco would be a major undertaking.  The Marin Headlands present a major tunnel project, and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge would be a huge engineering endeavor.  Since all construction would be new and involve a tunneling project, from this point on the project would cost around $150,000 between $500 million and $1 billion per mile.  The line would continue on the BART alignment once it reached the city, hitting its first station at the Presidio, serving Industrial Light and Magic, before tunneling to Geary.  Total cost for this segment would be between $3 billion and $6 billion.

The Geary Boulevard alignment is important for this plan.  Muni bus service along the Geary route is over capacity and is the busiest bus route in the Bay Area.  The neighborhood has begged Muni for a subway but to no avail, as costs are extremely prohibitive, but from a transit perspective the project would be worthwhile.  Here, SMART has a choice.  It could stop at a Geary Boulevard transfer station, probably on Arguello or Masonic and allow passengers to transfer to Muni, or it could continue onward in the Muni tunnel.

There are costs to either choice.  Forcing passengers to transfer to Muni far from the Financial District would make the route less attractive to potential riders, but partnering with Muni to build the subway would be extremely expensive.  Despite this, the odds of actually building the subway would increase if Muni were to shoulder the cost with another transit agency, and the intra-San Francisco passengers would help to offset some of the cost to SMART.  If SMART chooses to go on, it would proceed along Geary with stops along the way until Market Street.  The cost for this segment would be around $330 million between $1.1 and $2.2 billion.

At Market, SMART again faces a decision.  It could proceed along the Central Subway to the Caltrain terminal, requiring express rails to be put in at considerable cost.  It could proceed forward to the Transbay Transit Center at an even more considerable cost, or it could stop at Union Square, allowing passengers to transfer to the Central Subway or BART and finish their trips.  The cost of the crossing under Market would likely be at least $1 billion but would provide a significant improvement in service to passengers, allowing a single rail ride from Santa Rosa to California’s High Speed Rail network, Caltrain, and a number of regional buses.

The total cost of a San Rafael to Transbay Transit Center line, using these numbers, is $2.5 billion between $5.3 and $9.6 billion.

The problem for this line is that ridership just is not there.  Already, 28% of commutes to San Francisco from Marin are made by transit.  If SMART’s numbers hold out through a whole system, only another 10% of ridership – about 8,000 – would shift to the train.  This would bring Marin in line with the mode share for San Mateo-San Francisco commuting at a total cost of $147,000 $400,000 per new rider, minimum.  To make it as cost-effective as SMART’s initial operating segment, 40,000 new riders per day would have to switch, an unrealistically high number without a significant change to growth patterns in the Bay Area an astronomically high number for Marin.

Building SMART to San Francisco would be nice, but in a world of limited resources it would be a massive waste of funds.  For that money, Golden Gate Transit could improve its bus system such that the towns it serves could begin to focus on transit-oriented development, SMART could extend to Sausalito, and there would be plenty of money left over for bike lanes, sidewalks, and a second track and electrification of the SMART route, and that only gets us through half the money.  Unless costs come down, a San Francisco SMART should stay strictly theoretical.

EDIT: After some off-line comments, I realized I had grossly underestimated the cost of subway construction without tearing up Geary, and updated the costs to reflect that.

Transit Commuting Saves Marin Millions

Some have wondered why I made the previous post in isolation to the cost of a transit commute.  Although I did point out that a transit commute saves at least the San Francisco-bound Novato commuter a ridiculous amount of money, I did not examine the county-wide costs because I wanted to emphasize the benefits to living where you can walk or bike to work.  Transit, both in my post and Mr. Money Moustache's, is sloppy seconds: it still costs more than walking or biking. Another reason I left out transit is the lack of work-trip fare data.  Golden Gate Transit (GGT), the local bus and ferry agency, aggregates all fares for each mode into a single average fare.  In addition, GGT operates outside of Marin as a regional bus service in Sonoma and is just about the only way to get into Marin by transit.  Finally, the Blue and Gold Ferry, separate from GGT,  doesn't even share its data, so its fares are left out.  Each of these factors pollutes the data and makes any analysis less accurate.

But what the hell, right?  Let's call this a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the kind you make when proving a point at a party.  Don't take this as accurate, but take it as a rough idea of something approximating the actual amount Marin residents spend on transit and how much they could save by relying more on transit.

Golden Gate Transit's average fare for all riders on its ferries and buses was $3.02 in fiscal year 2010.  Taking this as our base, we find that the average transit commuter spends about $1,500 per year on commuting and $19,500 over a decade.  Good deal, a savings of $29,600 over the average car commuter per decade.

Transit makes up only 7% of work trips by Marin residents despite the cost savings.  Playing out our $3.02 average fare means commuters spend about $9.6 million per year on transit, or $124.8 million over a decade.  This is in comparison to the $7 billion we spend to commute alone.  If 1% of our car commuters switched to transit, that would be a savings of $6.8 million per year and $88.6 million per decade.  If our transit riders switched to single-passenger car commuting, they'd spend $88 million more per year and lose $1.1 billion in wealth over a decade.

Mind you, this is for the average commuter.  While a car commuter from Novato to San Francisco saves $11,000 per year by switching to transit, a car commuter going to Solano County probably won't find transit a feasible option at any price.  But if changing homes to be closer to work or changing jobs to be closer to home isn't an option, you should reexamine the long-term costs of that car commute and see how much taking the bus might save.  You might be surprised by what you find.

Mid-Week Links: The Price is Right

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22610428 w=600&h=338]

Elections

The IJ made more endorsements this week, siding with the Pacific Sun on Damon Connolly and Andrew McCullough for San Rafael City Council, Bob Ravasio and Alexandra Cock for Corte Madera Town Council.  On the Larkspur City Council they chose PacSun endorsement Larry Chu but chose Ann Morrison over Brad Marsh and disagreed in the San Rafael Mayoral race, endorsing Gary Phillips over Greg Brockbank.  The IJ and PacSun agree that Novato should retain Novato City Councilmembers Jeanne MacLeamy and Madeline Kellner, but the IJ chooses Eric Lucan over PacSun's Eleanor Sluis.

College of Marin board candidates discussed the possibility of retail development along its campus in Kentfield.

Marin County

Marin County was the big news-getter this week, as we found out just how expensive living here can be, how much our economy loses because of it, and just how terrible it is to rely almost exclusively on freeways to move us around.  We're still relying on it, though, as a new County emergency operations center will be relocated to the soon-to-be-acquired Marin Commons 1600 Los Gamos.  It's a terribly unwalkable and remote location, but at least the unpleasant bus pads are nearby.  In other news:

• In an attempt to attract workers, Larkspur Landing-based software company mFoundry is expanding into San Francisco.  The company expects the ferry to be the primary mode of transportation between the two offices.
• Golden Gate Transit will offer ferry service to upcoming Cal football games.
• West Marin Route 62 has been canceled due to extremely low ridership.
• SMART has shown once again that it really likes the taste of its own foot, bizarrely insisting that it has jurisdiction over repeal efforts by RepealSMART.  The California Secretary of State disagrees.  Meanwhile, General Manager Farhad Mansourian is taking to the editorial pages to tout job creation.  But what happens if the job-talk doesn't win the day and RepealSMART succeeds?  The Press-Democrat finds out.
• A wine bar?  On San Anselmo Avenue?  Yes, Hell has frozen over and San Anselmo should soon get a little bit of night life.
• In a step towards a more livable town, Corte Madera is set to debate proposed rules on keeping chickens and bees in back yards.
• Novato's planned downtown city offices have a new design and it's far, far better than the old.

The Greater Marin

• Winter's coming.  Here's how to ride your bike in the rain and still look awesome.
• The suburbs get a double whammy, being decried as a totally unlivable Ponzi scheme.  But perhaps we're overselling the suburban flight.
• How not to do infill development.

Car Commuting Costs Marin Billions

Marin’s commuting workforce travels quite a distance for work, 11.5 miles each way on average, thanks in part to its relatively suburban character.  Although most would say such a commute isn’t terrible, commuting even that far is a massive financial loss to everyone involved, and Marin’s economy suffers for it.

Financial blogger Mr. Money Mustache recently penned a fantastic piece on the true cost of commuting (which I truly recommend) and found that an 18 mile commute, roughly from downtown San Rafael to Market Street, costs around $75,000 over the course of a decade and wastes roughly 1.3 working years of time.  He factors in the IRS cost of $0.51 per mile in car depreciation, gas, and the like and assumes that it could be reinvested at about 5% interest.  This is crazy, and that’s just for one person.

How much time and money is lost to commuting alone in Marin?  The average drive-alone Marinite travels 11.46 miles to work, the distance from Petaluma to Novato.  After taking into account a bit of tolling and parking, this average joe spends $3,800 and 24 working days on his commute each year.  If he valued his time as much as his employer, that lost time is worth another $6,500.  This works out to almost $50,000 in lost wealth and 7 wasted months over a decade.  As a county, we spend $565 million every year to commute alone, and every decade we lose an astounding $7.3 billion in wealth and $9.5 billion worth of time.

Hearing these numbers, you’re probably thinking of abandoning your place in Sleepy Hollow and finding someplace nice in Russian Hill, or you’re worried I’ll want to make Grant Avenue a satellite Financial District.  Don’t worry.  I’m not advocating emptying out Marin, or turning Novato into Oakland, but I want to point out the immense, direct costs of investing so heavily in car-centered infrastructure.  Each 1% of the commuting populace that drives alone rather than paying down a mortgage costs Marin’s economy $106.4 million every decade.

Infill development is one way out of this mess.  By bringing workers and jobs closer together, Marinites will be able to save time and money if they want to drive, to the tune of $255 per mile closer to work, and will be more likely to bike or walk to work.  These don’t need to be monstrous apartment buildings or affordable housing, but there are enough redundant parking garages and vacant lots to provide a healthy amount of space without damaging the fabric and culture of our towns.

The other way out is through improved transit investments.  Although travel by transit is often no faster, and sometimes slower, than driving, that time can be put to more productive use than simply driving through stop-and-go traffic on 101, and transit is almost always cheaper than driving.  Switching from driving to taking the wifi-equipped 101 bus to San Francisco, for example, can save a Novato commuter up to $11,000 per year in parking fees, tolls and vehicle wear-and-tear.

These are the discussions Marin should have about its future.  How can we boost alternative transportation?  How can we intelligently promote infill development?  These are also the discussions we should have with our families.  Personally I’d rather have $11,000 at the end of the year than the convenience of being totally flexible with when I can leave the office.

We often simply accept the commutes we’re given as foregone conclusions and don’t count the ways they hurt our wallets and our time; if we do reexamine our commute, it’s often with the time horizon of a month or a year.  It’s high time we started to look at things a little more broadly.

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Commuting statistics used for the above information is from Change in Motion from December, 2008, by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.  Mode share and commuter numbers are the 2006 observed base.  If you would like to see my work, you can download the spreadsheet I made here.  If I made any particularly egregious mathematical errors, do let me know in the comments.

Mid-Week Links: Properly Pricing Parking

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XRjatW_N9M] The head of Strong Towns describes the difference between a road and a street, and how bad design is sucking the life out of our cities.  Marin is blessed with strong towns, but unless we are good stewards of our forebears' investments, we risk slowly becoming less a destination and more just suburbia.

Marin

The biggest news for Marin was the health-related resignation of County Supervisor Hal Brown, who represented Ross Valley on the Board since Barbara Boxer left for the House of Representatives in 1982.  The scramble for appointment has already begun, with a number of politicos, old and new, vying to be appointed by the Governor.  The IJ has a glowing retrospective.

• Importing 60% of our workforce has its costs, namely $22,950 per year in local spending and 0.16 jobs per imported worker.  That's according to a new report from Live Local Marin.
• One way to get more workers to live in Marin is to build more housing.  Marin has taken a step towards this by adopting a plan to lower barriers to affordable housing development.  You can read the plan here. (PDF)
• Governor Jerry Brown signed AB42 into law last week, allowing state parks to enter into operating agreements with private entities.  This applies most particularly to Samuel P. Taylor Park.
• Riding the bus saves money, even in the 'burbs.
• Major media endorsements are in.  IJ has endorsed candidates for the councils of San Anselmo and Fairfax.  The Pacific Sun has endorsements for everything on the ballot.  So far, the two outlets agree.
• Four election debates (San Anselmo, San Rafael, Corte Madera and Larkspur) are now online - you can check them out on our Election Coverage page.  Another Novato debate is up for October 17.

South Marin

• A Tam Valley crossing guard injured himself saving a child from an inattentive SUV driver.  The community is taking a collection on his behalf.
• Also in that busy burg, construction began on the Tennessee Valley Pathway, linking Tam Valley with existing multi-use paths.
• Mill Valley will alter how it issues event permits for its downtown plaza, making them more lenient to encourage the plaza's use as a vital space for the town.
• Sausalito follows San Francisco in the parking app field, adopting a new smart phone application that allows users to see where spaces are open in real-time.
• Marin City's Gateway Shopping Center has been sold.
• Off the Grid had a great start last Sunday in Larkspur, creating sufficient buzz to draw San Franciscans to dust off their cars and ferry passes to visit.
• Tiburon's library needs to expand, and in the process it could make the downtown a bit better, especially if it removes parking for an outdoor plaza between it and City Hall.

Central and Northern Marin

• San Anselmo's principal and beloved strip mall, Red Hill Shopping Center, is undergoing renovations, and tenants are uneasy.
• Walk to School Day meant a healthy, happy "walking bus" in Novato.
• Want to name San Rafael's new baseball team?
• The IJ profiles the races in Lagunitas and Nicasio, which bring a bit more politicking to West Marin.
• The San Rafael Canal will be dredged in November for $1.4 million.
• Someone wants to make part of Fourth Street a pedestrian mall.
• San Rafael shot down a proposal for nine new townhomes in West End and sent a 67-unit development near the downtown Elk's Lodge back to the drawing board. Neither were terribly transit-accessible.

The Greater Marin

• Ongoing widening of 101 has yielded its first new lanes in Sonoma County.
• Sadly, this probably won't alleviate traffic for long.
• One wonders how we might shift the funding priorities from roads to transit.
• The City of Sonoma is installing new bike lanes, to much fanfare and controversy.
• But bikes aren't just for the civilian.  They're also for war.
• Los Angeles has released a manual on how to redesign roads to be livable streets again.
• Affordable housing advocates want to keep parking minimums so cities can trade them for more affordable housing.  This, by the way, is a bad thing.
• Governor Jerry Brown may have approved AB42, but he vetoed SB910, which would have instated a three-foot passing rule for cars passing bicyclists.

Public Access and Openness Is a Win-Win-Win

This November, Marin County residents will be asked to vote in six council elections, three district elections, and one mayoral election on top of eight ballot initiatives. There are 40 people running for 22 positions and there have been debates in most of the races. Not one is available online on-demand, and at least one wasn’t even recorded. This, in the most tech-savvy part of the country, is unacceptable.

Most debates happen during the work day, when a typical voter is at work with their nose to the grindstone. The first Novato council debate, for example, took place on a Friday morning, as did the first San Rafael mayoral debate. Night time debates often aren’t much better, scheduled early in the evening when most are still coming home.

The Community Media Center of Marin (CMCM) and Novato Public Access typically record events, but rather than put them on YouTube or their own sites, they keep them for pre-scheduled reruns online. If it’s already in a digital format, why lock it up?

Not only does this throw up an unnecessary barrier to voters but it makes life significantly more difficult for news outlets, especially blogs. As a blogger, I cannot embed, reference, cut up, sample or refer to specific bits of the debate without first creating my own recordings of their recordings, and the IJ and Patch can’t either. Instead, we reference the parts that we think are interesting in pieces about the debates, leaving readers’ interests by the wayside. If we want to quote someone’s debate answer after the reruns have stopped, we’re out of luck.

If debates were online, they could be used on any website at any time. Candidates could post video of their success and their opponent’s gaffe, TV and radio reporters could use the video on their shows without the expense of sending a news team, hosts get their logo everywhere the video is referenced, and voters get exposed to the voices and faces of people they wouldn’t otherwise think about. This could be a win for everyone.

Candidate debates are a vital part of the democratic process. They enable us to contrast competing perspectives, allow us to get a read on candidates’ knowledge, and serve as a proxy forum for the major issues of the day. In Marin, we are grappling major and contentious issues that will shape the county for decades: SMART, affordable housing, pension reform, and downtown revitalization. Knowing where our candidates stand informs the debate and informs the voter, so that everyone better knows where our County is going.

Mid-Week Links: Portly Passengers

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znLBYLeH1Nk]Pardon my geekery, but this was the first I'd seen of Marin's old commuter trains in action.  They're EMUs, the electrical version of SMART's DMUs.  Strange also to see so much empty space in West End, and interesting to see how the buildings along the rails still treat the roads as something to be shunned.

Marin County Elections

• San Anselmo, Larkspur and Corte Madera all had council debates this week, none of which are available online.  At least you can read about the races; that's good enough, right?  If you can time it right, you can watch them on the Community Media Center of Marin's live stream.
• There is a highly edited video of the San Rafael Council Candidate's forum available on Patch with a pre-event questionnaire.  Candidates are all in favor of leveraging SMART to improve downtown, with incumbent Damon Connolly giving the strongest answers.
• Last month's San Rafael mayoral debate may not have been recorded (the host speculated that it "would've been a good idea"), but that doesn't mean there's no news.
• Tiburon's school board race wouldn't come up but for a renewed focus on making Tiburon Boulevard, the principal artery on the peninsula, a safer, better street for all users but especially schoolchildren.
• Mill Valley's vacancies were uncontested, so the town cancelled their elections.  Not everyone is happy.

Marin County

• SMART has secured authorization from the MTC to use $33.1 million in Larkspur station funds on the IOS.
• "We believe in working toward making [SMART] better, ensuring that it spends its money wisely and makes sound decisions. Opponents just want to kill it." - Press-Democrat Editorial Board
• Marin Transit contracts with Golden Gate Transit to provide local bus service within Marin, and it wants to renegotiate.  In the comments Kevin Moore and I get into the details of GGT's farebox recovery rate.
• Food Truck Crush is over for now.  Long live Off the Grid!
• A driver accidentally killed herself and seriously injured a passenger in a crash on 101.
• San Rafael's West End is a bit of a drive-through part of the city, and a vacant Big Box doesn't help.
• Two new developments are up for review in San Rafael: a 67-unit apartment building at 1380 Mission and a 9 unit townhome building at 21 G.  The meeting and documents are available on San Rafael's website.
• Biking is certainly for road mobility, but MCBC is shifting focus to the slopes and trails in Marin's open space.
• Getting women interested in biking, one class at a time.
• Believe it or not, it's more expensive to live in Marin than it is to live in San Francisco.  Being forced to rely on the car doesn't help.
• Novato debated its housing element last night.  No word on decisions as of press time.
• Mill Valley did the same, and also debated an amendment to the Miller Avenue Streetscape Plan.
• San Anselmo is getting a bunch of slurry seal work done on its roads, although it was delayed by rain.

The Greater Marin

• Santa Rosa is getting progressive, what with plans for a pedestrian bridge, bicycle parking and shower requirements.  It could use an overhaul of its use-based zoning restrictions, though.
• San Francisco's F-Line - those historic streetcars running along the Embarcadero - is expanding West.
• The US Department of Transportation is pushing high-speed rail loans out the door before Congress shuts down the whole intercity rail project.
• Greater Greater Washington posits that music venues should engage with the streetscape but often don't, and I'm inclined to agree.  Fenix Live in San Rafael will do well on this metric.

SMART Money Part II: The Myth and Allure of Caltrain North

Dick Spotswood is a supporter of SMART and an optimist regarding its success, but his insistence that it could function with the same form as Caltrain shows a lack of understanding of how either system must work. Back in July, Spotswood argued:

When in Oceanside, [former general manager Lillian] Hames' crew should have walked across the depot to ride Coaster, the excellent passenger rail line linking the San Diego County coast. There, they'd find an off-the-shelf commuter railroad using high-capacity cars that are America's standard.

They would work perfectly in the North Bay hauled by environment-friendly Tier Four locomotives… It's all proven technology. Think Caltrain on San Francisco's Peninsula.

This, he says, would result in $120 million in savings and provide twice the capacity over the Sharryo DMUs SMART ended up buying.  The savings would come from:

• Using non-customized trains
• Cutting specialized track work
• Cutting specialized signaling systems
• Cutting high loading platforms

This is simply bonkers.  The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has rules of crashworthiness that come into force when freight trains run with passenger trains, rules that Caltrain doesn’t meet.  The Sharryo trains cost $6.3 million apiece.  A comparable FRA-compliant and Caltrain-style train costs $11.7 million*, almost double the original cost.  Not only that, but the locomotive makes the train too long to fit within a normal city block, meaning streets would be blocked while the train is at a station.  Caltrain is elevated Caltrain's stations are grade-separated and so does not have that issue.

FRA rules regarding freight/passenger interaction also dictate the specialized track work and signaling systems, which total only $36 million.  ADA and FRA regulations conspire to require level boarding at stations, but the stations cost less than $3 million apiece.  Even cutting them all entirely would only save $27 million.  I cannot understand how one finds cost savings of $120 million by purchasing more expensive trains and cutting legally required capital expenditures.

The point is that train type doesn’t dictate much with regards to SMART’s capital costs.  Specialization does come with a price, and there may be one to pay in maintenance later, but SMART’s cost overruns are not the result of purchasing DMUs and so cannot be fixed by replicating the Caltrain model in the North Bay.  Indeed, Caltrain’s model is unsuited to the SMART corridor because those corridors are different.  Caltrain cannot run with freight, its trains are too long to run at street level, and it is more expensive than the custom-built DMUs SMART already has.  Making them fit SMART's constraints would only cost more.

If someone wants to build a boondoggle, running Caltrain on SMART’s tracks would be a good place to start.

UPDATE: Multiple commentators have pointed out that Caltrain is already FRA-compliant, and that the waiver is for future, rather than current, service.  This was an oversight on my part, but the point still stands: traditional trainsets are too long and too expensive for SMART.

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* Assuming 1 Amtrak locomotive at $6.7 million and 2 Bombardier Bi-Level cars, to accommodate the 312 seats Spotswood argues are necessary, at $2.5 million apiece.

Mid-Week Links: Spin Cycle

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/29401217 w=620&h=349] Marin has one of the best recreational cycling cultures in the country and a burgeoning commuter cycling culture, but everyday travel is typically done by car - you can blame our beautiful and formidable geography for that. Cycling For Everyone from Dutch Cycling Embassy gives a vision of how Marin could look if we embraced the bike in Terra Linda as much as we do on Mount Tam.  The Pacific Sun has an excellent rundown on the political debate so far, from the Capitol to the Alto Tunnel.

The Greater Marin

It's so easy to focus on Marin and its foibles that sometimes we forget that other places are doing awesome things.  Take Norfolk, VA, an active but small city of 242,000 people and one light rail that goes by the name of The Tide.  The Tide is brand-spanking new and underwent the same issues SMART is dealing with today: cost overruns, plans cut short, and political opposition.  After surviving that gauntlet, The Tide opened to great fanfare this past August.  One month in, the Richmond Times-Dispatch examined how the city feels about it now.  In a word, they're proud.

Marin County

• Of course, if RepealSMART gets its way, SMART will just be a failed dream.  The anti-rail organization started gathering signatures for its repeal measure this week.
• In good news, MTC approved its $33.1 million SMART bailout (PDF) and recommended to the Federal Department of Transportation that it receive another $18 million (PDF) in federal funding for the accompanying bike/pedestrian path.
• The IJ has profiles on Town Council candidates for Corte Madera and San Anselmo, and Patch will host a candidate debate for San Anselmo on October 5.
• Tensions in Sausalito came to light when Councilmember Carolyn Ford filed battery charges against Vice-Mayor Mike Kelly for hitting her hand (rather hard) during a council meeting.  Video at the link.  Kelly has since apologized, but no word on whether the charges will be dropped.
• The empty seat left by Joan Lundstrom's retirement from the Larkspur City Council must be filled, either by a special election after the current election is over or by an appointment.
• Speaking of Larkspur, Piper Park is due for a makeover.
• San Rafael's Design Review Board approved the Fenix Live music venue for the heart of Fourth Street.  You can hear the Board's deliberations here.
• Novato wants to sprawl, and, as much as it hates density, it loves its sprawl.  Planners just approved a 3-unit-per-acre subdivision.  Larkspur isn't much better after the sale of a pre-approved 5-unit-per-acre development. That one is just one block from downtown in a prime walkable development location.  You can check out a possible site plan for Larkspur here (PDF, p. 13), although it may not be accurate because of the change in ownership.
• Ever wondered what the deal is with that empty commercial building at 520 Red Hill Avenue?  Now you can find out.

The Golden Gate

Golden Gate issues deserve their own section this week because the sheer number of news items cries for special attention.  It cries, we answer.

• Golden Gate Transit will install WiFi on all its buses, making it an even more attractive transit service.  Cost is cheap, too: only $610,000 for the final cost.  Take that, BART.
• Marin Transit wants to reopen their $15 million/year contract with Golden Gate Transit to provide local bus service in Marin.  Marin Transit argues that GGT is overcharging by about 23%, while GGT argues the extra cost is due to regularly scheduled overtime.  Sounds like GGT has a staffing problem.
• The Golden Gate National Recreation Area will be reconfigured under a preliminary general management plan with the aim of "connecting people with parks."

SMART Money Part I: Relative Costs

There is no doubt that SMART is a major investment.  At $404 million, the 37 mile system is the largest single public undertaking the North Bay has seen in quite some time.  (Not to say it does not have competitors: CalTrans is widening and repaving Highway 101 up and down Marin at a total cost of $120 million, but that’s another story.)  Because of that unique position in recent history, the project has no local context, allowing opponent claims that SMART is an expensive boondoggle to go largely unchallenged.  To evaluate those claims, then, we need to place SMART's costs into the wider scheme of transit projects around the country.  The easiest way to do that is to break each project down to two metrics: cost per mile (how cheap it is), and cost per rider (how cost-effective it is).  Let’s look at both in turn.* SMART, assuming a final cost of $404 million (PDF) for the initial operating segment from San Rafael to Santa Rosa, will cost approximately $10.9 million per mile.  These costs go to extensive upgrades and repairs to the old rail corridor, stations, trains, a parallel bike and pedestrian trail, and the attendant staff time and reports to go along with all that.  This is relatively cheap for North American transit construction.

Out of the 49 projects The Transport Politic has lengths and cost for, SMART is only the 45^th most expensive.  The cheaper projects all run along currently active tracks or utilize existing trains, so only minimal track improvements are necessary.  From a cost-per-mile perspective, SMART is one of the cheapest in the country.

From a cost-per-passenger viewpoint, however, things look different.  SMART’s initial segment is expected to draw 4,800 riders per day (PDF), a respectable total but certainly not ideal.  Using that number, we get a much different picture.

SMART’s initial operating segment will cost $84,167 per passenger, the seventh most expensive rail project in The Transport Politic’s database.  This is not to say that its impact will be inconsequential – 4,800 riders would be about 9% the size of the projected Sonoma-Marin commuter base – but just that the cost per rider is on the high end of normal.  To me, the high ratio of riders to commuters means that there just isn’t a lot of inter-county traffic to capture in the first place.  Any growth, then, will most likely happen with intra-county travel.

Sonoma’s cities are trying to boost densities around stations that are currently planned, so ridership intensity should go up.  Dick Spotswood could be (although probably isn't) correct and the projections might only be half the real ridership.  And, if SMART wanted an intermediate expansion before completing the full line, expanding north to Jennings Road and south to Larkspur Landing – if my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct – would add about 1,000 riders for $34 million.  At $34,000 per rider, that would be a huge boost to the corridor’s effectiveness.

SMART is not the most cost-effective transit system in the country, but it is one of the cheapest.  Its initial operating segment will capture a good chunk of Sonoma-Marin traffic, and the urban improvements it is sparking will add value far beyond SMART’s farebox.  We now return to our first question: is SMART a boondoggle?  The answer, it seems, is no.

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*Note that for this exercise, SMART's stats are pulled from the most recent ridership report from February and the most recent cost update from August.  All other system stats are from The Transport Politic's database of rail transit systems that are planned or under construction.

Mid-Week Links: We'll Cross that Bridge

San Rafael

It's been a busy week in the County Seat after a few weeks of Novato hogging the spotlight, and why not?  There are plenty of empty lots to fill, streets to calm (or not) and parks to lease.  The big news, of course, is that baseball is coming to San Rafael now that the City Council has approved the lease of Albert Field to Centerfield Partners.  There's talk of a lawsuit from some neighbors, but they haven't yet decided whether to sue or not.

Now that there will be a major pedestrian destination in San Rafael, the city will double-down on pedestrian improvements and try to really solidify a place as a walkable city, right?  Actually, no.  The city has deemed two intersections along Third Street, both within a quarter-mile of the Transit Center, to be too dangerous to cross.  Rather than try to improve the crossings and calm the raging one-way traffic, the city will make it illegal to cross there by removing the crosswalks.  Brilliant.  The city will hold a public hearing if it hears enough objections from pedestrians.

Greg Brockbank officially launched his campaign for mayor at a party on Sunday.  In his speech, he listed things he'd like to see to build up San Rafael: more events, more affordable housing, a shuttle, a downtown hotel, a music pavilion, and drawing seniors downtown.  I'd like to add more crosswalks to that list.

A bit further north, a long, long dead Sizzler's near Los Ranchitos will be renovated into a hardware store.  This is an undeniably good thing, as North San Rafael has lacked one for over a year.  As well, the County is evaluating the old Fireman's Fund building at 1600 Los Gamos as to the feasibility of it housing a public safety complex.

Elsewhere in Marin

• The Ross Valley real estate market is "holding steady," while White Hill and other Ross Valley schools are moving forward with plans to build more classrooms.
• The Town of Ross will hold its annual Town Dinner next Friday, September 30.  Get home from work early for some community cheer.
• The oldest business in Marin, Smiley's Schooner Saloon in Bolinas, is up for sale.
• Once again, the Mill Valley Council changed course when confronted by small and vocal opposition, voting unanimously to reject a plan to installing a paid-for electric car charging station.
• Meanwhile, Mill Valley will likely spend around $400,000 to patch, not repave, their roads.
• CalTrans will repave (PDF) a half-mile stretch of Tiburon Boulevard in downtown Tiburon at a cost of $1.2 million.
• Dick Spotswood wanted the facts on affordable housing, and, courtesy of Stand Up for Neighborly Novato, here's some facts for Novato.
• The IJ comes out in favor of Novato's planned downtown city offices, citing economic and symbolic reasons.
• Yet despite this renewed push to have a heart, the city continues its sprawling ways.
• Larkspur's planning director, Nancy Kaufman, has retired to do watercolors and planning consulting.
• MCBC is beefing up its efforts to improve open space bike trails.

SMART News

The SMART project keeps chugging along, with new and old ideas coming up in the editorials of local papers.  Mike Pechner opined in the IJ that purchasing CalTrain trainsets would save money over the Japanese DMUs SMART currently has on order.  I haven't seen a good comparison, but individually motorized carriages is best-practice in Europe and Asia.  Amtrak faces the same questions as SMART, which the Infrastructurist has kindly parsed for us.

Another ongoing debate is the effect of the system on home prices.  Conventional wisdom is that homes increase in price when they have proximity to transit, although some believe the noise of the trains will lower house prices.  Half-Mile Circles has a fabulous literature review for anyone's perusal on the subject.

Meanwhile, the North Bay Business Journal wonders if an excursion train like the Vine Line is possible along the SMART corridor.  The short answer?  No.

The Greater Marin

• Contra Costa's Lafayette and Orinda want better downtowns, but it's sparking some debate in the communities about what is, or is not, appropriate.  Marin needs a debate like this.
• Streetsblog wonders whether our transit systems should strive for profitability or coverage.
• Wondering what San Francisco was up to this past weekend?  Enjoying Chinatown and North Beach streets by closing them off to cars, that's what.

Transit in Marin

Terrapin Crossroads, Phil Lesh’s proposed music venue in Fairfax, CA, has been talked to death lately and, despite the fact that no formal design has been reviewed, is drawing quite a bit of excitement from the town.  Very rarely in Marin does a project of this relative scale bring more vocal support than opposition, but Fairfax is a rare town.  Still, one item itches: transit access. Getting to and from Fairfax by transit is, to put it mildly, difficult.  Golden Gate Transit (GGT), Marin’s principal transit system, only operates a few lines outside the County.  This is a problem if you’re among the 28% of San Francisco households that have given up the automobile and rely on transit and your bike to get around.  To get from San Francisco to Fairfax, the best-case scenario will take 1:20 at $5.25, and the last bus home leaves at 9:30pm.  That’ll probably mean you’d have to leave the town well before any Terrapin Crossroads shows begin.  Getting between Fairfax and the East Bay is even worse, as there are no direct routes.

Most Marinites probably don’t care.  Why bring more San Franciscans up to Marin, and shouldn’t they own a car anyway?  The people that choose San Francisco and Richmond are the people that start new businesses, the young people who are poor in cash but rich in talent and enthusiasm.  They are also the people high tech companies want to attract.

Digital Domain Productions, Inc., a digital effects and animation company spun started by Industrial Light and Magic alumni, is moving to Larkspur Landing, but they’re concerned about attracting the young people that come to San Francisco to live in the city, not the ‘burbs.  Digital Domain likely chose a location by the Ferry so they could access the car-free employees they want to attract.  They’ll contribute to the city coffers, but those employees will probably never venture outside of that neighborhood.

How could they, and why would they?  Fairfax has so much to offer, but it’s locked away.  A carless San Franciscan thinks of Fairfax as impossibly far away, and even those Digital Domain employees that would come into contact with Marin daily are stuck on a car-centric island wedged between two freeways.  Odds are high they’d never even see downtown Fairfax, despite its proximity, and that means lost sales, lost interest, and lost opportunities.

How could Marin break out of its self-imposed exile?

In the short-term, GGT and Marin should market the Marin Experience.  Open hills, good hiking, good food and villages away from it all – these are things a city dweller will trek to find.  Pushing the time of the last bus departure to midnight would give visitors a chance to enjoy dinner before becoming stranded.

Often suburban buses carry a lot of unknowns about them.  Making a simplified map showing what goes where, like my simplified road map at right, can go a long way to demystifying the routes and drawing new riders in.  Washington, DC, has a bus called the Circulator, which operates as an express connecting activity centers to one another.  A GGT circulator could move from Market and hit the major downtowns between the City and Fairfax.  This further simplifies the route and gives GGT a chance to brand each stop with the town’s character: antiques for San Anselmo, redwoods for Mill Valley, the Mission for San Rafael.

Longer-term, Marin needs to move to a more transit-oriented form.  It is laid out in corridors, meaning most new construction in Central and South Marin will be along a transit lane, and it’s high time for Marin’s cities to build with the buses in mind.  Eventually, ridership would improve enough that GGT will be able to become a viable alternative to the car and build better connections with the regional transportation network.  By then Terrapin Crossroads will be years old, and hopefully be a draw north for young San Franciscans looking for good music in the country.

Mid-Week Links: City Papers

Lots of news from lots of cities this week, with retirements, delays, debates and bad ideas.  Wordpress ate my homework, but I've culled what I can from local papers for this week's Mid-Week Links.

Marin

• If you're a senior citizen, there's a new way to get around town: Marin Village, which provides rides for subscribers.  I can't help but think that better bus service could go a long way to helping Marin's elderly get around, too.
• Joan Lundstrom, 28 year veteran of the Larkspur City Council, is stepping down to get married and do "a great deal of traveling."  Lundstrom was most recently on our radar for being the deciding vote on TAM's $8 million SMART bailout.  The IJ editorial board wrote a fitting farewell piece for this local fixture.
• Larkspur's Doherty Drive reconstruction had no acceptable bids made, so the City Council rejected them all, delaying the project even further.
• San Rafael's mayoral candidates went to bat at a Marin Coalition lunch for their first debate.  Neither is shaping up to be a terribly urbanist candidate, with Greg Brockman decrying red light cameras and Gary Phillips pushing for the new Target store.  The Greater Marin is trying to obtain a full recording of the debate.
• Further north, the San Rafael Airport may end up being converted into a large sports center, complete with 270 parking spaces.  Neighbors oppose the project.
• Even further north, Novato's City Council candidates debated at a breakfast sponsored by the Novato Chamber of Commerce.  Incumbents defended their records, while challengers argued that less housing, fewer downtown offices and more parking would boost commerce.  We're also trying to get a recording of this debate, which will be televised towards the end of September.
• After receiving endorsement from the Citizen Finance Committee, Novato is pressing ahead with its plans to move city offices downtown.  Opponents had complained that it would deaden the street, although office space can often be a boon to local merchants.  Somehow, the architect created a building so awful that, if built, it would make the opponents' worst fears come true.  The building turns away from the street and places the main entrance in the middle of the complex, deadening it not just at night but also during the day.  Hopefully, Novato's Design Review Board will tell the architect to start over.
• To touch on yet another hot Novato topic, construction began on Eden Housing, a senior affordable housing development.
• The transit center at Marin City is undergoing rehabilitation, with new lighting, pavement, and other amenities.  Total cost: $506,000.
• A developer trying for the past decade to get a small building built in Mill Valley has been delayed again, this time by environmentalists who convinced the City Council that demolition would disturb lead in the soil and get it into the creek.  They're demanding a full and detailed soil analysis, nevermind that the developer wants to restore the creek bank.
• Golden Gate Transit's popular 101 express bus to San Francisco is running on Sundays now, giving Sunday commuters and daytrippers another way to get into the city without using a car.

The Greater Marin

• Ryan Avent, Economics correspondent for the Economist, writes in the New York Times: "The idea of it may chill a homeowner’s heart, but the wealth supported by urban density is what gives urban homes their great value in the first place. And when it comes to economic growth and the creation of jobs, the denser the city the better."
• Those foreclosed houses will soon be a boon to those that try to limit affordable housing development: Governor Brown just signed Assemblyman Huffman's bill allowing cities to count foreclosed homes against their affordable housing quotas.
• AB 42, another Huffman bill, has reached the Governor's desk.  It would authorize qualified nonprofits to help operate and maintain state parks in danger of closing.  This isn't a new idea: New York's Central Park is operated by a nonprofit, and the National Mall is partly maintained by a nonprofit as well.

ABAG Density and Affordable Housing: Neither Are What They Appear

Every seven years, the cycle returns.  The Association of Bay Area Governments, or ABAG, fulfills its California-mandated duty and examines the state of housing in the Bay Area, using the data to assign affordable housing quotas to its member cities and counties.  The following year or two sees each government in Marin haggle over where to wedge affordable housing zones without wrecking the neighborhood.  As Marin goes through this process yet again, it’s worth examining whether the process is really as bad as all that, and it’s worth wondering whether ABAG’s – that is, California’s – process even works.

Your Town Is Denser than You Think

California mandates that all affordable housing zones meet one of two densities: 20 units per acre for cities smaller than 50,000 people, 30 units per acre for those larger than 50,000.  In Marin, some of the more partisan opponents to affordable housing use these density requirements to paint a picture of a Marin County overrun by poverty and crime, with apartment projects stretching into the skies.  They think of Oakland’s inner-city problems of the 1980s and believe that this is what will happen to Mill Valley and Novato if we allow any development.

It is clear from their imaginings that these partisans don’t realize how dense the mandates actually are or how dense their own city already is.  To imagine 30 units per acre, think of two-story rowhouses on a tree-lined street.  Each is a three bedroom, one bath home with a backyard, parking along a back alley, and a deck.  The example above is about 22 units per acre, more than the requirement.  This means the homes could be 10% wider, or could have small side walkways.

The higher of the density requirements is 30 units per acre, we can look to duplexes with front garages.  These three-story duplexes on Forbes Avenue in San Anselmo count, and are about 30 units per acre.

If we want to go really crazy, take a look at those rowhouses above.  Each has what's known as an English basement - a small, basement apartment, the equivalent of an in-law unit.  This 22-unit development is actually 44 units per acre!  Skyscrapers?  Hardly.  And if you think these are sardine cans, look at the profile local real estate blog DCMud did on a similarly-sized place near the Supreme Court: 3 bed, 2.5 bath.

California Mandates Explained

Although density itself should not be a problem, there's a reason Marin has the mandates.  The State of California has mandated that regions “share the load” of accommodating for future population growth and has entrusted regional organizations, such as ABAG or the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), with determining how the region’s counties and municipalities will share.

In 2008, ABAG released its Regional Housing Needs Allocation, describing how much it believed the Bay Area population would grow and projecting regional demand for affordable housing.  (If you’re really curious about the process, you can read all about ABAG’s decision on their website.)  However, those mandates say that jurisdictions need to zone, not build, affordable housing of a certain type, with certain ratios for very low, low, moderate and above moderate income levels.  That means that a city can meet its quota by zoning that all new development in an area meet or exceed the ratios given by ABAG.

Does This Make Sense?

There is no doubt that the Bay Area is an expensive place to live.  Rents in Marin are as high as Washington, DC and parts of New York City, running about $900 per month per bedroom.  If one factors in the cost of car ownership and transportation, renting in Marin can easily be more expensive than San Francisco.  People, it seems, want to live here, but the price is too high for most.  At first blush, creating affordable housing seems to be a good answer.

Affordable housing does have a certain logic to it: prices are high, so control the price to make it lower so more people can afford it.  Unfortunately, what this really creates is a housing shortage, driving up the market price even further.

The economics of supply and demand say that when a commodity is scarce but demand is high, the price of the commodity goes up.  When the commodity is plentiful or demand is low, the price goes down.  In either case, there is enough of the commodity to go around among the people that can afford it; there is equilibrium.  When there is a cap on the price, it’s not as profitable to create the commodity so less is made, but it’s more affordable so more people can buy it.  With less being made and more being sold, there is a shortage.  This is what happens with affordable housing.

When San Rafael mandates that, say, 20% of a housing project must be below the market price, the developer has that much less incentive to build the project.  Often, the developer will entirely forgo the project and no housing is made, whether affordable or not.  This means that everyone that would have lived in that building has to look somewhere else for their housing, driving up competition, and therefore price, for those units that do get built, forcing more shoppers to the affordable housing alternative.  California’s mandates create affordable housing, but they also drive up the price of market-rate housing and increase the pressure to build more affordable housing.  It’s a vicious cycle.  The more demand there is for affordable housing, the higher the price goes.

Interestingly, affordable housing does serve one purpose well: income diversity.  Housing markets, if left alone, create affordable housing ghettos – think “the wrong side of the tracks”.  For the poor, the ghetto multiplies the problems of poverty and reduces opportunities for those that live there.  As well, ghettos are typically far from jobs, increasing the cost of transportation for those that can least afford it.  For the rich, their own wealthy areas insulate them from people unlike themselves, increasing prejudice against the chronically poor, such as new immigrants or minorities.  For both the rich and poor, the isolation means they cannot empathize with the other: the poor child can’t see herself being a doctor like her friend’s dad and the wealthy child can’t understand how much she has.  Economic segregation can be just as damaging to a society as racial segregation.

Affordable housing mandates are not the only tool in the legal toolbox to combat the problem.  Although California mandates affordable housing, it offers concessions to developers that do more than their mandated share, including increased units per acre variances from local zoning regulations.  California should replace the mandate system entirely in favor of a concessionary system, allowing developers to choose how much housing to make affordable and how much to make market rate.   A concessionary system would decrease the intensity of affordable housing construction but increase overall housing supply, driving down prices and affordable housing demand.

California’s mandates aren’t nearly as bad as they appear, but they are significantly more wrong-headed than one might imagine.  They won’t make Novato into the Tenderloin but they cannot solve our housing shortages.  That job is up to governments and developers; for the moment, though, the State is just getting in the way.