Thinking notes parallel to main Centered Bay Area paper

                I am not posting here the sixty page draft of the Centered Bay Area (CBA) paper that I'm working on, intending to inject it into the Bay Area regional policy process as a self-published book in the Winter or Spring of 2011.   However, here are some notes of background thinking that is going along parallel to work on the CBA paper.   Some of this could go into the CBA paper.

                 I'm writing these notes out so that a reader does not see the CBA draft and the walkable transit oriented community it proposes as piece of aggressive hyper-modern barbarism.   That could happen, particularly through focusing on the density and the high-rise buildings.   There are actually four sizes of residential buildings in the plan, of which only two are tall, but the tall buildings will be visually prominent, and could become too big a part of the overall impression, particularly for someone coming from from more traditional, single-family house, even suburban, expectations.   (Californians pretty well universally are like this; "manhattanization" is an expletive, and the thought that follows it immediately is "Pruitt-Igoe," meaning the high-rise towers that failed as social housing in St. Louis in the 1970s and were demolished.)

                I.    First off, everything proposed in the CBA paper is for the yet-to-be-built future historical layer of construction in this region.   The Center is not is not thought of as substitute, replacing parts of the region existing now, which would be torn down.   It's rather a matter of changing how we'll build what we  build in the future.   If one thing is certain in the Bay Area, it is that there will be building in the future, so it's not changing that it will be built, but rather changing how it will be built.  There is no destructive side here.

                II.   Hyper-modern, hyper-urban and barbarian describe an approach that in the mind of many people is the antithesis of humane values we have for living spaces.   High-rise buildings are often seen that way.

                But the high-rises that I've called for are not that, in my mind, and they can and should be quite different.  Using high-rises actually is generated by quite distinct logics.  The first is to get green open space.  If you simply have individual houses side-by-side covering the space that is available (in this case about 285 acres created by the 2000 foot walking distance radius around the station), the dwellings very quickly cover all of the space.  But we want green, open space, seen as an essential for a humane setting.   We actively want green space in large quantities, generous quantities, elbow- room, soccer-playing, picnicking, expansive quantities as well as smaller tennis court and community garden quantities.   To get that open space, within the limitations of the total space, the housing spaces that you want must be stacked one on top of each other, and that stack is what a  high-rise really consists of.   So here the high-rise form is a price that we pay for green space.  It is proposed as a way of getting green open space, and not from an eagerness to have high-rises as such.   It's a trade-off, a justifiable one, I think.

                Secondly, the high-rises within their own footprint achieve great density.  On a 80'x80' footprint, which is quite small, there can be 300 people, if they are stacked up.   This is an intense and efficient use of land, and land, in square feet or meters, is one of the major "expenses,"  or constraints, of the project.   We are actively managing land, or space, which is one of the key things that architecture is about.

                The purpose of the Center is to accommodate people, and the target of putting 10,000 people in the 285 acres around the station is not accidental, arbitrary or capricious, but functional and necessary.  We want a large population of people and activities within a circumscribed space, and that is the simple formula for density -- or for urbanity.   We want that density not for itself, but for quite specific reasons: we have a lot of incoming people to the Bay Area to be housed, and the alternative is to house them on the margins in sprawl on heretofore agricultural land.  We could solve the high-rise problem simply by saying, well, we'll cut out a certain number of people, we'll go to a Center of fewer people.  But we don't want to do that.   Again, the price we pay for keeping our target numbers up is putting in high-rises.  

                But why does the Center have to have a lot of people?   Apart from the general one of its being its function to take a significant share of the large incoming regional population, there are several particular reasons that the Center must have a substantial size:

                -- The walkable Center has got to have enough space, enough capacity, not only to house a lot of new people, butalso  to absorb all the people who lived on its 285 acre territory before the Center was built.   There are to be no expulsions from that living space through the building of the center.   From the beginning, conceptual proposal stage we can approach the people who already live in the Center's locale and say, "you may have to suffer through two years of disruption during construction, but this new space will be here for you, actually better space than you are living in now, when it's all over and it's finished.  You are guaranteed not to have to move out, and you will continue to get your (improved) housing at essentially the same cost that you are paying now."   Being able to say that to existing residents is critical.  It is a very important part of the proposition in every location, and its costs have to be part of the budget.   Going to the Center form is not meant to mean gentrification and ruthless expulsion of existing populations.   Somewhat as a consequence of eschewing expulsions, since it gives us additional people to house in the Center, we will be building high-rises.    

                -- We want the Center to be hospitable to many niche communities, but we don't want the Center itself to be a niche community.   That "generality " itself drives up the numbers of people it must receive, and rules out the Center's being a small solution.   To take a realistic example, the Center, and even specifically the high-rise buildings, will have a particular suitablility for seniors.   The apartments represent an appropriate way of downsizing from houses that have grown too big for empty nesters or widows or widowers to manage, and within a Center there can easily be available for seniors the support of progressively increasing medical facilities that are now becoming widespread.   But we don't want, and the more vital seniors don't want, the Center to be for seniors only.   For every senior there should be three or four non-senior people or more.   That means it cannot be a small place, and thus your numbers for the Center rise into the thousands, and the scale that requires high-rises.

                -- If tall buildings are seen as invasive, impersonal and exclusive by people who have a familial,  child-raising orientation, they are not seen that way by many others,  who are not in the classic mother- father-children family unit.   The  classic nuclear family unit which was ubiquitous and dominant in our image of our society, is now more like a quarter (I recollect a statistic of 23%) of households.    High rises can serve well the other 75% , usually one person and pair households, including seniors,  who are adaptable to apartment living or even seek it.    The overall Center, specifically and very importantly, is designed to include and cater to children-raising families, who are the root stock of our society no matter how small their numbers, but not particularly  to house them in the high rise structures.   There will be a large amount of non-high rise space for families, and there are enough non-family households to make it reasonable to build high-rise structures to provide for some of them.

                III.    The high-rise buildings, indeed the whole urban settlement, are internally sociable, like a neighborhood or small town, not anonymizing and anti-social as in the negative stereotype of apartment buildings.  (On the sociability of large cities, see  Manhattan Diary, column on Mondays inthe NYT.)    This is a reason that the long double-loaded corridor has been avoided within the building, and the small number of apartments on each floor in a slender building are instead grouped around their own small foyer at the elevator well, which is thought of as a social space.  These are condominium or cooperative apartments, not rentals, which should mean that, without the rapid turnover of rental property, the occupants of a floor will have stable, neighborly relationships.   I could see people having dutch doors (with the upper half openable separately) which some people would choose to leave open onto the small foyer when they were at home in the daytime. 

                IV.   I want to draw attention to an observation which I make in a cursory way in the text but which is important.  That is that Americans (no differentiation intended between the U.S. and Canada, so read North Americans)  never paid much attention to spatial considerations in the design of cities, which actually were not so much designed as accumulated, or designed by markets, even just land speculation, as Mike Davis holds for LA.   Space at the regional scale was, as Peter Rogers' says of the traditional popular conception of water, always abundant and thought of as never being in scarcity, never in need of allocation, simply always available in plentiful supply, something which nature gives us, requiring no management by us.

                Such carefree expansiveness with regard to space was originally I suppose part of the outlook of Europeans coming to the New World, where space was in fact incredibly abundant relative to home, effectively unlimited.  (It was striking to see this spatial horizon transformation in Belgians when they came to the Congo, which had 80 times the area of the home country.)

                As we move along in the North American history in the buildup of populations, of urbanization, and urbanizing economies, the sense that space, land, was abundant, limitless and it didn't matter where things are located in relation to each other, was supported, and allowed to be perpetuated in a huge way, by the automobile.   This is  because it does not matter much where something is, because an automobile can always get to it.    Whether you have to go to a place once, or commute to a place every day, nothing  is unreachable or no space is unusable, because it can always be reached by car.  Distances, very large distances, for somebody who thinks in terms of foot or horse movements, can be reached easily and comfortably, or at least, so we told ourselves, by the car, which permits the geographic expansion of the city to be virtually without limit in America.   

                But what was missed was the fact that car travel has costs, and in a city with a spreading  circumference, more and more places were remotely located from one another.   Expenditures on travel between them,  in energy, money, and especially in time, even when done by car, grew and built up.   

                In the absence of collective transportation, which required density, in order to have normal mobility around a large diffused metropolitan region it was necessary,  effectively obligatory, for each individual to have a car, rather than a matter of choice.  Growing affluence made cars more and more easily available not to an elite but to the great masses of the population, and the culture endorsed the pouring of that rising affluence specifically into cars and automobile culture.   And then came congestion, and while as alluring as ever, cars became in reality, more costly and less useful.

                That North Americans pay no attention to space and location is not literally true, and specifically not in an urban context within the reach of one city government, but at the metropolitan regional level you still don't get a design intention, a planning attention, to place things in spatial geographic relationship to each other that reflects their functional relationship to each other and minimized travel costs between places that are functionally related.   For example, where you work is one function, where you live is a second function, and if you locate them in different places from each other, then there is automatically a third function, that of moving between them, which is not free, but will have a cost.   

                In North America that cost has always been considered very very low or negligible.  Somewhat rightly so because the car was always at hand, at least it was to hand for members of the propertied middle class, and city designing, city building was always thought of basically in terms of the needs and capacities of the middle class.     

                Now, however, with the growth of cities, linked to the primordial fact of the worldwide growth of population, this abundance of  of good locations for functions is no longer true, because many many more people need to use, and are contesting for, a fixed amount of space.  (High rises are actually one of the relief valves.)   So land and space now have to be consciously managed, in parallel to the way Peter Rogers looks at water.    This is a sea change, that requires a huge adaptation by the public.  A whole new politics is created, with a million human dramas at every point on the spectrum between cooperation and friction.   But such management of space, and adaptation to it, is unavoidable.

                V.  Now we are going to manage space and learn to manage it in relation to movement and access among different uses of space.   With regard to movement among spaces, the basic unit is the trip,  just a matter of nomenclature,  conventional usage.    Let's look at two kinds of trips.   A word I want to stick into the vocabulary here is trunk, despite its slightly antique or British flavor.  A trunk trip is a frequent, mainline trip made by very substantial numbers of people with some steadiness and reliability.   Because of its volume and regularity, facililties for a trunk trip can receive  substantial investment, for example, you put in a big road, a trunk road, between two destinations with a lot of traffic between them. 

                 For the other kind of trip, a non-trunk trip, I think I'll use the word occasional, to describe a trip which is statistically relatively rare, most often connecting destinations at least one of which is quite small.   I have given illustrations elsewhere of the occasional, or low frequency trip, such as the cross-trip in a radial layout, or the trip on a trunk route which takes place at a time when traffic on the trunk is very low, such as a trip in the middle of the night.  

                 There's another division of trips, between collective ones and individual ones .   It is an assumption that there are economies of scale, that the per person costs of a given trip are lower if the trip is made collectively.   Collective transportation goes with trunk trips; occasional trips are more likely to be individual.   The car is an instrument above all of the occasional trip.   This is an important part of what the car is all about, both its "go anywhere" advantages, and also its high costs, since car trips have single or few passengers compared with a collective vehicle like a bus or train, and cars offer no economy of scale, rather the opposite.

                Therefore, if we want to minimize the cost of travel within a given region we will try to make as many trips as possible collective and as few as possible individual.   Although these categories obviously have gray zones between them, the transportation dynamics of a car-oriented region, say the proverbial Los Angeles, are that a very large proportion of trips are individual and a very small number are collective.   In  the design of a new region seeking efficiency and low cost of movement, basically we want to maximize the number of trips that can be made collectively at lower cost.  

The Centered Bay Area -- A Better Way to Grow

May 27, 2010


"Centers" for the San Francisco Bay Area

                The Bay Area is a thriving metropolitan region, the fourth largest in the United States, with three  anchor cities in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, and a complex, extensive and stunningly beautiful geographic setting of hills and water on the Pacific coast.   Its population is somewhat over seven million, and it expects another million people in the next fifteen years or less.    How will the Bay Area handle this growth?   Where will it put its next million people?  

                Our region now settles its new households mainly on its outer rim in single-family houses and townhouses linked by freeways  to the region's more central Bayside areas, where older settlement and jobs are concentrated.   Land and houses on the edge are less expensive than buying housing closer toward the center, but living in a dispersed way at a distance means long commutes, almost invariably by car.  Dispersion and commuting add up to great expense over time, not only in money from family budgets, but in many hours of time spent driving, and in gasoline, which becomes CO₂, and other forms of pollution.   Despite the initial apparent savings at the time of house purchase, in the end, the "sprawl" style of life, for  a large population and over decades, is extremely inefficient and costly.   Has our national  swoon since World War II for the car, and the way of life it brings, been a great self-indulgence that looks less smart and sound in retrospect?    We certainly still spend time, money and energy in driving which we could be using for education, healthcare, family life, or for greater social equality and ending poverty.  Can this huge bloc of "sprawl" expense in American life, monetary and beyond monetary, be reduced as the country inexorably continues to urbanize,  or, more accurately, to move into metropolitan regions?   

                Yes, this burden can be brought down.   The way to do it is to come together and settle in sufficient proximity to one another, that is, with sufficient density, that we can use much more collective rather than individual transportation.    Would this mean concrete-gray city life, with no privacy, security, open space and green nature?  No, it does not have to mean that kind of urbanization, which many Americans, and certainly Californians, traditionally shrink from. 

                The key to escaping from the car reliance that lays an annual tax approaching $10,000 per car on all of us, is for the region's cities to build in the form known as transit oriented development (TOD).  Or, much better, in the higher form of TOD which can be called walking transit oriented community  (WTOC),  in which people live close enough to their transit connection, and to most of their community services and activities, that they walk to them.  They do not take a car to a BART, Caltrain, MuniMetro or VTA station that is surrounded by big parking lots.  Density, of course, can be just thrown together, or accumulated over time, but a transit oriented settlement could also be structurally and carefully designed to be clean and safe for adults and children, and so that green and open space for sports and recreation, and for being outdoors in the California climate, can be abundant and very nearby. 

                How would that be done?    Such a walking transit-oriented community (WTOC) can be called a "Center, and will be built around a BART, Caltrain, or similar trunk transit stop.   If many Centers were constructed, we could speak of a Centered Bay Area.   In a network such Centers would strengthen the transit system and each other, and  collectively could take a good share of the million new people the region expects to receive in the coming decade-plus.

                What would such a Center look like?  It would be of substantial size, because it should not be a niche facility that serves a subset of the population, such as the rich, or the poor or the old.  Rather, it should have enough capacity to hold all sorts of people, many with their jobsites, and to mix them as much as they want in community life.   Let's say 10,000 people.   How far is walking distance to the transit stop (perhaps underground or elevated) that will be at the center of the Center?  Let's say at most  2,000 feet, or a little less than half a mile, with perhaps some provision also to use bikes within the Center.     A circle with a radius of 2,000 feet around a station gives an area of about 12 million square feet, or 288 acres.  Putting 10,000 people there gives a density of about 35 persons per acre, not remarkably high.   But, if we house that population in that space in the one-and-two story dwellings that are traditional in American suburbs, we basically cover all the area, and that's the end of the green space. 

                Here's  a turning point in the design.   The solution is to move the cultural middle-class norm from a single family house to a spacious, well equipped, owned apartment, and to harvest the huge space gain from stacking residences one on top of another.   Achieving space for "open space" is the first rationale for moving toward mid-rise and high-rise buildings.  But it is also true that a smaller proportion of the population than in the past now lives in the nuclear-family-with-children demographic group for which the single-family house developed.  Secondly, the life of many urban upper and middle class families in the last hundred years in the United States and Europe makes it clear that children can grow up just fine in apartments that have as much interior space as traditional single family houses and have safe access to green space nearby.

                Now we're most of the way there in designing a better pattern of living for the next swathe of the Bay Area's growth between now and 2025.  Let's look to Copenhagen for the way to put density and open space together, using the very traditional form of the "street"  (which becomes a pedestrian/bicyclist path rather than carrying cars) arranged in a "fingers of the hand" pattern, but around a full circle.   This creates pie wedges of open space, which add up to about half of the Center's total area.   This open land will serve small uses such as community gardens, neighborhood swimming pools, tot lots and basketball and tennis courts toward its narrow point, and serve larger uses such as soccer fields, baseball diamonds and groves of trees in the wider outer portions.   Living sociably along the pedestrian "street" which leads to the transit hub, lots of people and kids are literally three steps from the open space.   It becomes their backyard.

                Automobile roads and parking are put entirely underground, not necessarily immediately, since excavation is expensive, but eventually.   This means that the Center's entire surface is free of the noise and danger of car and truck movement and also of the huge space encumbrance of parking, although there will be provision for rare use of the surface pedestrian walkways by emergency vehicles.    

                We want to make housing in a Center be of high quality, and also want very seriously to keep its cost down.    Although, as in Vancouver, B.C., some townhouses will be mixed in, a key building block of the Center is the prototypical mid- or high-rise structure, mainly residential, but often also with a couple of floors of "mixed use" at its base.   This building is a challenge for architects.  It is envisaged in this paper as a "slender tower,"  as pioneered by Hong Kong and  Vancouver.  The  slender tower form eliminates two unattractive drawbacks of most urban multi-story buildings: daylight that comes only from one side of the apartment, and a dismal internal corridor on each floor with doors on both sides.  The building aspires to be both "solid" in its feel, and light in its construction, using the newest materials and construction technologies available -- or even to be invented.   Apartment ceilings should be high, floor space allowances per person should be generous, and careful attention be given to acoustic protection of each dwelling space.   It could be possible to pre-fabricate, on-  or off-site, a set of highly designed light-concrete floor panels.   These, fitting into a steel or reinforced frame, would form the floors of apartments above them and the ceilings of those below, while carrying water, radiant heating/cooling, and electricity conduits, serving both upwards and downwards.   In the relatively mild climate of California at least, provision for radiant heating/cooling need not extend to the edges of the floor plate but could serve only an inner core to be used on our rare cold evenings and very hot days.   Every possible energy (and especially fossil  energy) efficiency in the use of the building would be sought and exploited--for example, HVAC based on heat pumps, permitting CO₂ -bearing natural gas supply to be omitted.  The goal is to supply good internal space for a construction cost as close to $200 per square foot as possible.   Since we are fighting high initial costs, apartments could well be sold in a loft-like unfinished state, with residents creating their interiors over time at their convenience.

                   If cost minimization is to extend to the very  substantial "soft costs" of such a project, common purpose and cooperation, rather than divergent interests and antagonism, between the developer and the local municipality is a critical need.   Thereafter, there are efficiencies in end-user financing methods, such as an initial rental period of hire-purchase when a household first moved in.  A regular extra payment above the normal rent, which a family could consider to be its savings program, could accumulate into an equity stake in the dwelling unit, eventually enabling the household to be in an ownership  position, and regular mortgage to come into force.

                 Indeed, if the WTOC features of a Center allowed a family to own only one car in place of the normal  two or more cars per household that are required when living in sprawl, the saved cost of not running one car over a generation would come close to paying off the cost of a generous condominium.   The family's residence would then be owned free and clear, which is a big part of the entry ticket to the middle class in our society.  It would be capital accumulated for the next generation of the family.   Such a transforming gain is far more than what is left after owning a series of rapidly depreciating second family vehicles over thirty years.   This provides an insight into the costs of sprawl, and the social and economic gains for a household from avoiding them.

                In the early 1960's as air traffic and airport construction boomed around the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration was troubled by the huge internal walking distances that were arising within airports.  The agency commissioned the renowned architect Eero Saarinen to develop an alternative prototype at Dulles Airport near Washington D.C.   Saarinen's airport was a strikingly beautiful compact structure in glass and concrete that used specially designed people-carriers to move passengers out to aircraft that  did not have to cluster around a lengthened periphery of the building, but rather parked at a distance and received passengers by means of the "mobile lounges."   The elegant building was highly efficient, certainly for the passengers, but the experiment did not succeed.  As new airports were built around the country, airlines dictated gigantic versions of the one-plane, one gate system rather than the Saarinen plan.  Eventually even Dulles itself built an annex in the old style.    Nonetheless, the experiment was an honorable and constructive one.  

                Similarly, since the various feature of a Center are interlocking, it should be built as a whole, and it is a very large whole --  a multi-million dollar investment that the traditionalist housing sector, with its municipal planning and zoning side as well as its finance-dominated market side, would not easily underwrite in the near future.   Although a Center incorporates many major long-term economies through its greatly reduced car use and its density and compactness, some of a Center's important elements, such as multi-story buildings and underground parking and car circulation, are indubitably expensive, although they will have long service lives.  

                Think about the huge daily costs, inadequacy and damage of our present "sprawl" metropolitan layout.   Support for building one, or a small number, of test prototype Centers in the Bay Area would be a potentially very rewarding intervention in the Dulles tradition by a higher level of administration, such as a full metropolitan region, a State, or even the Federal government.

(See following post for a Sketch-up drawing, and a table, supporting this text.)

Graphic and Table for preceding post: Centered Bay Area, A Better Way to Grow

Organizing and Modernizing Transportation in a Metropolitan Region

This is a note, done originally for RAFT (Regional Alliance for Transit), which makes certain administrative suggestions for the San Francisco Bay Area, with its particular organizations and history, but the broader principles advocating "Walking TOD," and the observations in the two boxes, should be applicable to any metro region in the developed countries.


Working Principles for the MTC
(SF Bay Metropolitan Transportation Commission)

1. Land use and transportation should be analyzed and managed together, not isolated from one another in the bureaucratic tradition that MTC and ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) clung to for years. Integrating land use and transportation in regional planning reflects the basic reality that good land use and transportation are in fact mutually dependent and totally entwined with each other. It is beyond obvious that in the real world major transportation efficiencies can be achieved through coordination with public and private land use investments. Reciprocally, land uses succeed or fail depending on transportation investments that do or do not support them. For MTC, coordinating transportation and land use implies cooperation with ABAG and working persuasively with local bodies.
2. The MTC, with its substantial data and analytic resources, should work on the Bay Area's nine counties as a true region. In developing its Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) every four years, and its other plans, it should move away from "stapling together" local or special interest projects and investments. At the Commission level, the MTC needs to fight the log-rolling bias that comes with its composition by locally elected officials. Working within a modernizing regional vision (discussed below), the MTC should be more analytical, comprehensive, and long-range in its planning, and less responsive to particular local and institutional interests. An aspect of this is that the MTC should prioritize regional transit connectivity. When a project, such as the TransBay Terminal/Caltrain DTX, is within one city or county but has connectivity implications that are region-wide, MTC should define the project as regional, not local, and be ready to be active.
3. In a situation of huge unmet demand for transportation and smart growth capital, the MTC should work harder to get performance from every dollar of investment. It is good that the Commission often chooses transit investments over road spending, but all transit proposals are not created equal, and each requires hard-eyed cost-benefit analysis in its design. Every feature, not just the overall concept and function of a project, should justify its costs. The region should stop gold-plating some transit projects, and recognize that such gold-plating is always at the expense of other meritorious and needed projects that go unbuilt. It should be understood by all parties that transit agencies can propose anything, but the MTC disposes. To live up seriously to the responsibility that this implies, the MTC should analyze all proposals more stringently and be much readier to quash bad projects. At the same time that it accepts national kudos for investing in transit, MTC's failures on this score cause waste in the billions. Examples are the BART extension to SFO, extending BART to San Jose, the Oakland Airport Connector, and the Muni Central Subway in San Francisco. Building a new East Span of the Bay Bridge, rather than seismically upgrading the existing bridge, appears to be an extravagant version of a necessary project. Although responsibility is not entirely clear, at $6+ billion the East Span now stands as a major misallocation of resources within the MTC's territory.
4. MTC should whole-heartedly advance the sustainability purposes of SB 345 and AB 32. Carbon dioxide emissions from human energy use are a main cause of global warming. Therefore, systematic reduction and early elimination of carbon emissions a critical and urgent goal of public policy in all spheres, very much including land use and transportation planning. An informed public now knows, and the general public is learning, that the most important damage from mass automobile use is the very large scale emission of CO2 from petroleum-burning engines. Since the Bay Area has little heavy industry, the share of CO2 from cars is particularly high here. Greenhouse emissions alone are a sufficient reason, to reduce, and to end as soon as possible, mass use of fossil-fueled cars and trucks. The long-range way to do this, and to achieve other important objectives as well, is to move toward a transit-oriented metropolitan area, since public transportation emits less CO2 than do petroleum-fueled cars. When it is electrically driven (rail service or electrified buses), transit can emit virtually no CO2 if it uses power that is generated without fossil fuels.
5. However, in a shorter time range, the MTC should seize a new and quicker way to cut fossil greenhouse emissions from cars: the plug-in electric vehicle, either hybrid or entirely battery powered. The Bay Area, with its relatively low-carbon electricity (2% coal, 45% natural gas) from a relatively responsive electric utility (PG&E), is well positioned to use electric drive to cut its transportation greenhouse emissions. An "electric mile" that replaces a "gasoline mile" in this region eliminates between 90% and 100% of a vehicle's CO2. Vehicle electrification, consequently offers rapid and deep cuts in regional greenhouse emissions, and this is without prejudice to the necessary longer-range steps toward a Bay Area focused on transit-oriented development (TOD). Working with the Air District, the State government and PG&E, MTC should go to work immediately to prepare the Bay Area for the earliest and quickest possible diffusion of plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles.

Framework: A long-range vision to steer towards
The Bay Area as a whole should be moving toward a transportation future which is very different from a business-as-usual extrapolation of its auto and freeway-based present. All the nine-county organizations, such as MTC, ABAG, BAAQMD and BCDC, should be employing their regional reach, and the professional skills of their staffs, to work out the implementing specifics of that goal and to encourage steady movement toward it.
What is this new goal situation? Population growth is inevitable for the Bay Area with its mild climate, vigorous modern economy and attractive and complex geography of water and hills. As it grows, the Bay Area should not resist urbanization, but should move decisively toward transit-oriented land use planning and much greater reliance on high-quality public transit. This is a purposeful change from our primary historical pattern that transportation planning and investment maximize auto mobility, and the region grows through outward geographic extension (sprawl). In a large region such as the Bay Area, with both cities and suburbs, this change of course means moving from a suburban vision to one that is more urban, stressing for example, maximizing personal access to destinations, often through walking proximity, in place of endless efforts to increase motorized personal mobility across the substantial distances within the region. In a new regime, population density will rise in selected and well prepared locations, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) will go down.
Taking into account the Bay Area's quite particular geography--and also its substantial existing transportation infrastructure--the MTC should look ahead to a region in which transportation is more collective, easier to use and less expensive. This goal-vision, to be achieved over perhaps thirty years, should strongly influence land development and transportation investments starting now.
What would a "new" region look like?
A. It will be based on carefully designed nodes (Centers) of high population density built within about 2,000 feet (walking distance) around transit stations. Centers will be linked together by frequent very high quality transit service, mainly rail or Rapid Bus, forming a regional network.

B. The bulk of transportation will be provided between Centers by high quality transit (in most cases, heavy or light rail), and within Centers by walking or bicycling, not by cars. This is walkable TOD (WTOD), in which housing and other destinations forming a complete community are grouped close enough to high-frequency transit that people walk to their station or transit stop, rather than drive. Such stations/stops are likely to have compact plazas around them, closely surrounded by shops, civic facilities and housing. They are not surrounded by large parking lots.
C. This creates a map to be overlaid on the existing (and largely to be undisturbed) map of the region, featuring Centers (typically 10,000 people within walking distance around a transit station/stop) and their connecting transit links. Such nodes should receive as much of the region's incoming population in the next thirty years, and their connecting transit lines should receive as much of the transportation invest-ment, as possible.

D. Improving trans-portation does not mean simply multiplying transportation options. Transportation policy should seek complemen-tarity and connectivity, rather than competition, among modes. This means that for a given kind of trip or corridor, a judgment should be made and the "best mode" should be favored for investment and optimization, rather than trying to treat modes "evenhandedly" and maintain a range of options for every transportation situation. A corollary of this is that policy, scheduling, and station design should make transfers between modes (bus-rail, car-rail, bus-car, air-rail) as easy as possible.

E. In choosing a "best mode" among different kinds of transportation to be favored in a given case, the region should confirm and exploit "natural" relationships and hierarchies which are familiar. Externally, travel beyond 500 miles in length will normally be by air, while inter-regional travel between significant cities more than 100 miles, but less than 500 miles, apart will normally be by rail, eventually High Speed Rail. Within the metropolitan region, travel among nodes will be by frequent high quality transit. Travel between Centers/nodes and "the field," (that is, surrounding non-node territory), and between two destinations which are both in the field, will be by car. (There will also be middle options and territories: the hourly or daily rental car, bicycles, taxis, buses and the bus-served spur from a main network route. These are omitted from this very summary discussion for simplicity.)
F. Proximity of destinations (bringing them to walking distance, and walking as such) is to be maximized. Richard Register's good motto is "The shortest distance between two points is to bring them closer together." Most people's house or apartment should be within walking distance of their supermarket, for example.
G. Beyond walking/biking distance, we will recognize two types of trips within the metropolitan region: Trunk trips (as in trunk line) and non-trunk trips. Trunk trips are trips which are common and frequent and for which significant public capacity is provided. Trunk trips generally include most home to work trips (commutes), radial (center-periphery) trips in a radially organized region, or trips between two nodes. MTC's land and transportation planning policy for the coming decades should systematically: 1) use land so that the share of trunk travel is maximized (i.e., pull people into nodes or Centers), and 2) optimize/max-imize the capacity, frequency and quality of public transit service on trunks. Such trunk transit can be highly specialized, and can be highly capitalized since it serves large numbers of people.
H. Non-trunk trips are all the other trips, a giant miscellany or residual category. Although in aggregate there may be more non-trunk trips than trunk trips (certainly, say, in a Los Angeles), each non-trunk trip is of low frequency, and they have little in common, which is why they cannot be grouped into trunks. Sideways trips in a radially organized region, multi-destination trips (since mode choice for a trip is controlled by the lowest frequency segment), trips with origins or destinations, or both, outside nodes (that is, in the "field" area), and significantly, trips, even on a trunk route, at a low-frequency time of travel, such as late at night, are generally non-trunk trips. Non-trunk trips are handled by cars, including small electric networked vehicles as recently proposed by MIT and GM experts.
The MTC, ABAG and the BAAQMD should advance the implementation of WTOD in the Bay Area, both through fostering WTOD projects as these arise from other entities, and by intensely sponsoring particular experimental/demonstration WTOD projects, as the FAA funded Eero Saarinen's Dulles Airport in the 1960's.

The MTC and the Bay Area should look ahead, see the basic logics, and plan to speed up the system transition/replacement task and make it less painful, rather than wait passively for economic forces blindly to work their course. If this modernizing change can be made quickly, and in a planned rather than a helter-skelter way, the available gains, in money, time and quality of life, are huge.
A metropolitan region -- a Bay Area -- in which most trips by most people are handled by either walking or trunk transit, will be a better region--and more socially equal region--to live in. The fossil-burning car and light truck, which today cause much waste and adverse side effects, will be far less intrusive. There will be as much mobility and access as ever, or more, but getting around will cost less in both money and time, and the savings will be usable for other things, like education, health care, family life, recreational and cultural life, husbanding the environment, and ending poverty.

Box One

The Transition from an Auto-Suburban system to a Transit-Urban system--the Pitfall of Going Gradually
The FOCUS program of the regional agencies' Joint Policy Committee, which has marked out Priority Development and Priority Conservation Areas (PDAs and PCAs), is the product of a long debate in the Bay Area about Smart Growth. FOCUS is headed in the right direction toward increased transit oriented development, but it is too gradualist. Its pace is slow because many people in the region are opposed to the modern form of growth, for reasons of traditionalism, direct short term economic interest, or other. There is a still greater number of people, probably a majority, who have not heard or thought about growth and transportation issues. Their default reaction, when they are first aroused, is to resist change from the familiar. So change is slow, site by site, and within sites.
Gradualism, however, in this field raises its own important problems because the amount of land in the Bay Area around transit stations/stops which can be used for TOD, especially serious, walking TOD, is physically finite. Once a transit-adjacent parcel of land is developed only partially, or at a low level of intensity, it is extremely hard to redevelop it again within a couple of generations, because first-generation residents come to have a vested interest in resisting further or new development. This means that the initial low intensity development around a transit node which is characteristic of a the present gradualist approaches, effectively rules out higher density development for the indefinite future. But the Bay Area is a growing, already significantly urbanized region with extremely high housing costs. Its core, the Bay-touching cities, needs a major expansion of housing supply, which is to say that it needs quite high-density TOD development, despite traditionalist and NIMBY resistance. It is important to recognize that gradualist, sub-optimal projects are systematically harmful for the needed much denser land development at good transit sites. This gradualism is clearly seen in the restrictions imposed on the Hayward Park development at a Caltrain station in San Mateo, and by the struggles about density increases and the height of buildings in downtown Berkeley, with its major BART Station.
A solution for this impasse is for the region (while continuing to lay the groundwork for smart growth gains in the 120 PDAs) to support one full "walking TOD" settlement as a test-prototype in one location, using regional, state and federal, as well as market, resources. A Center for 10,000 people in a radius of 2000 feet around a Bay Area rail station should be built, as the Federal Government hired mega-architect Eero Saanrinen to build Dulles Airport near Washington D.C., as a proof of concept project. As we look for post-suburban forms of urban structure, there would be a lot to learn from such a project even if it did not succeed. Success, however would soften current fearful opposition, and reassure investors and city officials throughout the region. That would allow WTOD developments to spread more broadly and provide a path for the region out of its growth dilemmas.


Box Two

What's wrong with cars?

Due to its individual, retail character, transportation by private car is expensive. Collective transportation, in contrast, is in effect purchased wholesale, and systematically costs less if use levels are high.
The attraction of the automobile is its flexibility. Combined with the road system that has been built for it and that now exists as a fixed asset, the car can go anywhere at anytime. It is genuinely an agent of personal freedom, which is part of its very deep and great appeal. It is great for non-trunk trips, which are by definition retail and individual, rather than collective.
There are limits, however, to the rational scalability, or appropriate "market share", of the car-based mobility system. These limits differ in rural, suburban and urban settings, and therefore, the boundaries of the car-based system are inevitably an issue when urbanization is going on, as it is here. The present huge annoyance and expense (in time as well as money) of traffic congestion and parking make it clear that with automobiles providing 90+% of transportation, we have reached or exceeded the optimal automobile mode share in many important parts of the Bay Area.
The automobile functions as the default, residual mode of mobility, but the problem now is that the retail residual mode has become the universal mode. When the private, often single-occupant, car is used for trunk travel within a metropolitan region, the misfit presents itself in the form of high expense, frustrating road congestion and the onerous burden of providing and using enormous volumes of parking.
In that case, the car is an unspecialized mode or instrument being used for a task that has grown large enough that it could be handled by a specialist instrument, and there is an inevitable loss of efficiency. This dysfunction is masked by the other roles that the car plays in our culture: status symbol, protective personal carapace, and so forth, but the bad fit in an urban setting between the car and its most basic function of point-to-point transportation nonetheless takes a steady toll. As wholesale COSTCO is outcompeting retail Macy's, the car will be inexorably forced out of cities as urbanization intensifies, due to the "retail" car's own inefficiency in "mass" situations.
Rather than suffer through years of resisting such a fundamental trend, we should anticipate and exploit it. Major long-term economic gains can be harvested by stopping marginal tinkering with the automobile system (for example, Shoup-style reforms of parking, HOT lanes, and discussion of "intelligent highways"), and instead evolving purposely toward a structurally different and more urban system. Our region should focus, under MTC leadership, on designing and building a new, more efficient and more sustainable system of transportation, complementing and supported by appropriate land uses. The MTC, in fact, has considerably accepted this thinking, but its new vocabulary still masks much inertia and resistance to change.

Letter to Bay Area Regional Agencies on Climate Protection -- Urges subsidized charging points to help electric cars spread rapidly

After some coordination with Nils Moe of Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates's office, and after giving it in oral form at the January 15 Joint Policy Committee meeting at the MetroCenter, this is a letter sent to the head of the Air Quality Board on a rainy Monday,(and MLK Jr Day), January 18. I think that by electrifying the transportation sector, notably the millions of vehicles that now run on gasoline, huge and rapid gains can be made in decarbonization, potentially running far ahead of the "targets," that are now so laboriously and grindingly being negotiated and (attempted to be) implemented at state, national and international levels. Vehicle electrification may need help to get past innovations' "valley of death," but it should then be propelled solidly forward toward the 100% level by the fact that electricity is fundamentally a third of the cost of petroleum as a fuel. Technology will advance both on the side of the electric drive vehicles and on the side of generating and distributing the renewable power that is the essential and massive back-up step.

January 18, 2010
Jack Broadbent
Air Pollution Control Officer
Bay Area Air Quality Management District
939 Ellis Street
San Francisco, CA 94109

By Email

Dear Mr. Broadbent,

It is a great achievement that the BAAQMD and the MTC now have a settled mandate to reduce CO2 emissions in the Bay Area. The immediate strategy at the regional level offering the most rapid permanent carbon reduction is to accelerate the replacement of fossil-fueled vehicles by fully or partially electric drive cars and light trucks. An "electric mile" replacing a "gasoline mile" here can eliminate between 80% and the entirety of vehicular CO2, which, as you know, is now cumulatively a massive volume in our region.

As a point for policy intervention, this is especially promising in light of:

-- the preponderance of transportation in the Bay Area's energy consumption mix compared with other regions of the United States,

-- the relatively low carbon content of the electric power available here, and the good prospects that our power will be increasingly carbon-free in the future,

-- virtually the entire region's being supplied by one electricity producer, PG&E, a utility relatively "environmental" in its outlook.

The most effective step available to the regional and local level of government could well be to assure that a slow availability of charging points does not discourage the immediate purchase of plug-in hybrids and fully electric cars as they become available soon from manufacturers.

The Air Board, along with MTC and PG&E (perhaps with representation from others such as Caltrans, EPRI and ABAG), should form a study and action group aiming to provide one charging outlet free per each purchaser of a plug-in car. Sharing the subsidy expense primarily between PG&E and the MTC, this "intelligent" electric outlet could be installed by PG&E either at the electric car owner's house, or work site, or in a public location.

Rapid agreement is clearly needed on a standardized plug covering all car manufacturers. A charging outlet should be wired through, or incorporate, a "smart meter," with electronic linkages to both the car and the supplying utility so that under software control power can be delivered on peak-shaving timing and be charged to the appropriate consumer's account. The Ford Motor Co. in August 2009 announced completed development of an intelligent vehicle-to-grid communications and control system for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles. Other firms, including Bay Area ones such as Coulomb Technologies are also active in this work. Through time-sensitive pricing, such intelligent controls can rule out an increase in peak-hour demand for power arising from electric cars. Supporting the first purchasers of electric vehicles could well be a $20 to $40 million program, with the public agencies' portion drawn mainly from the Climate Grants Program under the MTC's $400M (25 yrs) Transportation Climate Action Campaign. Mayor Villaraigosa in Los Angeles on December 1st announced a broad program in Southern California, including a subsidy for home charging devices of up to $2,000 for the first 5,000 plug-in vehicle purchasers.*

Subsidizing charging-points is urged on the regional agencies specifically because this particular task is well adapted to regional execution. The regional agencies cannot convert our electric supply to wind, solar and nuclear power. That is a job for the state, the Feds, and the utilities. But the regional agencies can provide a strategic incentive to push electric vehicles over a market tipping point in our large metropolitan region.

Existing administrative hurdles such as local building codes and parking regulations could also impede early and widespread availability of charging points. ABAG should lead its members in updating such regulations so that they allow PG&E's timely diffusion of "smart" charging points on private and public property. Purchasing and using an electric car should be hassle-free, and with foresighted work now by the regional agencies, it can be. ABAG should obviously urge its city and county members to electrify their own vehicle fleets, and PG&E should be encouraged to continue to sell night-time power for vehicle charging at the reduced rates justified by its lower cost. Again, in Los Angeles, off-peak electrical charging is to be at 8.5 cents/kWh.* Looking ahead, wind power in particular usually shows night-time surpluses.

Regional policy-making on hybrid and electric vehicles is reportedly now being discussed by a public-private collaborative hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Given the strong response to vehicle electrification in Bruce Riordan's public consultations, it would be good to intensify the SVLG's mandate and level of action, or, perhaps better, to create a fully official, nine-county wide working group among the Air Board, MTC, PG&E, ABAG, EPRI and Caltrans to design and fund an aggressive incentivizing program to take effect in 2010.

A solid charging point subsidy is a chance for the BAAQMD and the MTC to move into the fast lane and to accomplish public goals more quickly and thoroughly than older approaches permit. Our regional and local agencies should rapidly evaluate the opportunity for a high-leverage intervention, and seize it.

Sincerely yours,


Peter Lydon,
1584 LeRoy Avenue,
Berkeley, CA 94708
(510) 644-8064
ptrlydon@sbcglobal.net


* http://mayor.lacity.org/PressRoom/PressReleases/LACITYP_007366 . Interestingly SCAQMD is listed as a participating organization, while, the MPO, SCAG, is not.

Basic Principles for re-organizing (modernizing) Transportation and Land Use in the Bay Area

I am a member of RAFT, the Regional Alliance for Transit. We were asked to propose principles for RAFT to advocate in the coming period, leading up to the next Regional Transportation Plan, to be published by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in 2013. This is a slightly revised version of a paper with which I responded originally in the Fall of 2009.


January 16, 2010

Proposed principles for RAFT

RAFT urges these principles on the MTC and other regional agencies:

-- Reflecting on-the-ground practical realities, land use and transportation public policies and investments should be fully integrated.

-- Using both land use and transit policy, all new growth and settlement intensification should advance the region toward a Bay Area that is much less automobile-reliant. This means purposefully replacing the old goal of maximizing motorized mobility by instead prioritizing walking and bicycle access, and steadily reducing individual auto movement by supporting and improving collective (transit) travel. This is intensified "smart growth," a long-range, post-suburban vision of a Bay Area that avoids sprawl and pursues "walking transit-oriented development" (WTOD), creating carefully designed high-density "Centers" around transit stations and stops.

-- In its planning work, MTC should advance in letter and spirit the sustainability purposes of SB 345 and California's legislation for climate protection, AB 32. Responding vigorously to the imperative of climate protection, the Bay Area should aim strategically for the earliest possible carbon-neutral transportation system and region. Immediately foster the earliest possible replacement of unsustainable fossil transportation fuel (petroleum) by electric vehicles. This implies supporting state and national investment in non-fossil electric power supply to our region.

-- In service of the principles above, regional agencies should operate in a true regional perspective, not see themselves as coordinating and stapling together local and special interest projects.

-- The MTC and other agencies should practice transparency to the public in accounting and policy-making.

-- The MTC should seek functional improvement for every dollar of investment. Apply cost-benefit analysis in selecting all projects, and to all parts and levels of all projects. It should end the present practice of gold-plating some transit projects at the expense of other meritorious ones that go unbuilt.

-- In the management of regional circulation, the policy should be "Transit First," and connectivity of public transportation should be prioritized. Where needed in mixed situations, transit should receive operational priority, for example in bus control of traffic signals.

Discussion:

1. Michael Kiesling would like RAFT members to shape the wide range of their thinking into a set of principles. We'll then apply these principles as agreed standards to the proposals and projects that flow continuously through the region's public transportation policy process, particularly decisions by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

2. One RAFT member has proposed "transparency," particularly financial transparency, as a principle that we could call for regularly as we observe the MTC in action.

3. Another principle is surely that the MTC, with its very substantial data and analytic resources, should work on the Bay Area's nine counties as a true region. Greatest good for greatest number for longest-time span region-wide. In developing its quadrennial RTP and other plans, the commission should abandon its tradition of largely "stapling together" a collection of the essentially local or special interest projects and investments that are insistently advocated to it.

4 Land use and transportation should be analyzed and managed together, not isolated from one another in the bureaucratic tradition that MTC and ABAG clung to for years. This just reflects the basic reality that land use and transportation are in fact and on the ground totally entwined with each other.

5. In a region-wide, long-term perspective, MTC should apply cost-benefit analysis more consistently and and also more broadly. Working within the modernizing vision of our second principle, the MTC should generally be more technical, analytical and long-range in its planning, and less "political," meaning less responsive to narrower local and institutional interests which often dominate regional planning and investment now, and which generate many sub-standard investments. The commission needs to learn to fight the bias that comes with its composition by locally elected officials.

6. The Commission should avoid what might be called internal violations of cost-benefit standards. This means that in a situation of huge demand for transportation and smart growth capital, the MTC should avoid wasteful goldplating of the projects it selects once they are agreed upon. Every feature, not just the overall concept and function of a project, should justify its costs. This is where some of the most expensive and egregious errors are made. The MTC invests in transit, which at the strategic level is correct and meets the cost-benefit criterion, but at the tactical level, actual transit projects, including major ones, are often wasteful, parochial and inefficient. Because the merits at the strategic and the tactical levels diverge, this kind of waste is much more difficult for transit advocates to fight, although its costs mount into the many billions. Examples are the BART extension to SFO, extending BART to San Jose, the Oakland Airport Connector, and the Muni Central Subway in San Francisco. (Building a new west span of the Bay Bridge from scratch for $6 billion, rather than seismically upgrading the existing bridge, can be also be seen as an extravagant version of a necessary project, and is a major mis-allocation of resources.)

7. "A region-wide perspective, technical scrutiny, systemic cost-benefit analysis, and a long range view," however could be seen as process improvements, not substantive goals. Beyond calling for them, RAFT believes that the region as a whole, and specifically MTC, should point toward a vision of the region's future which is very different from a simple extrapolation of the status quo. Although our focus is on the MTC, RAFT believes that all the regional organizations, such as MTC, ABAG, BAAQMD and BCDC, should be employing their regional reach, and the professional skills of their staffs, to work out the implementing specifics of that goal, the "New Bay Area," (is this overall name good or bad? Centered Bay Area?) and to encourage steady movement along a path toward it. RAFT has clear thoughts on how that goal situation differs from the present situation, and what it should look like.

8. RAFT wants the relevant regional transportation and land use planning authorities to move decisively away from the region's traditional automobile-freeway transportation system toward transit-oriented land use planning and much greater use of high-quality public transit (electrified, mostly rail-based and already existing). This implies reversing the long standing pattern that the region grows through outward geographic extension (sprawl). Population, as well as qualitative, growth is inevitable and desirable for the Bay Area with its vigorous very modern economy and attractive and complex geography of water and hills. Exactly contrary to further outward sprawl, the region, should be increasing population density in its already urban areas, which will make the provision of transit more economically feasible and self-supporting. In a large region with both cities and suburbs, it means moving from a suburban vision to one that is more urban, stressing for example, maximizing personal access to destinations, often through walking proximity, in place of an endless effort to increase motorized personal mobility across the substantial distances within the region. Within the cities, this goal is sometimes sloganized as "Transit First." In this regime sought by RAFT, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) will go down.

9. Land use and transportation planning strongly influence each other. The land-use corollary of "Transit First," is Transit Oriented Development (TOD), and the strongest form of TOD is walkable TOD (WTOD), in which housing and other destinations are grouped closely enough to high-frequency transit service so that people can walk to their transit station or stop, rather than use cars to reach them. Such stations/stops are likely to have plazas, then mixed uses, civic facilities and housing around them. They are not surrounded by large parking lots.

10. Carbon dioxide from human energy use is the main cause of global warming, the great threat of our age. For RAFT this makes systematic reduction and early elimination of carbon emissions a critical and urgent goal of public policy in all spheres, very much including land use and transportation. In California, agencies at every level of government and society should suport AB 32 in letter and spirit. Public transportation emits less CO2 than do petroleum fueled cars. When it is electrically driven, as in the case of rail service or electrified buses, transit can emit virtually no CO2 if it uses power is generated without fossil fuels. Bay Area power is already more renewable than the national norm, and should be made entirely renewable as soon as possible.

11. It should be MTC's mission to provide the most possible access and mobility at the least possible cost. Due to its individual, retail character, transportation by private car is expensive. Collective transportation is in effect purchased wholesale, and systematically costs less.

12. There are limits to the rational scalability, or "market share", of the car-based mobility system. These limits differ in rural, suburban and urban settings, and therefore, the limits of the car-based system are inevitably an issue when urbanization is going on, as it is here. The present huge annoyance and expense (in time as well as money) of traffic congestion and parking make it clear that with automobiles providing 90+% of transportation, we have reached or exceeded those limits in many important parts of the Bay Area. Major long-term economic gains can now be harvested by stopping marginal tinkering with the automobile system (for example, Shoup-style reforms of parking and talk about "intelligent highways"), and instead evolving toward a structurally different and more urban system. RAFT believes that as the Bay Area moves into and through the next stages of its urban development, our region should avoid the temptation to overspend on mending and preserving the exhausted automobile system, and instead should focus, under MTC leadership, on designing and building a new, more efficient and more sustainable system of transportation, supported by appropriate land uses. In fact, MTC has to some considerable extent come over to this way of thinking. It now has a whole bubbling vocabulary about the thrills of change, but in fact this lip-service masks much inertia and resistance to change.

13. SB 345 is good. RAFT supports its vigorous affirmative implementation in letter and spirit, rather than the present cautious efforts to go very slowly and bureaucratically, despite the just mentioned "change" and "sustainability" window dressing.

14. The FOCUS program of the regional agencies' Joint Policy Committee, with its Priority Development and Priority Conservation Areas, (PDA and PCAs) is good. It is headed in the right direction toward TOD, but is too gradualist.

15. Gradualism in this field raises its own important problems because the amount of land in the Bay Area around transit stations/stops which can be used for TOD, especially serious, walking TOD, is physically finite. Once a transit-adjacent parcel of land is developed, but at an inadequate level of intensity, it is extremely hard to redevelop it again before at least a couple of generations have passed, because first-generation residents living at a relatively low density come to have a vested interest in resisting further or new development. This means that the initial low intensity development around a transit node, which is characteristic of a the present gradualist approaches, effectively rules out higher density development for the indefinite future. But the Bay Area is a growing, already significantly urbanized region with extremely high housing costs. Its core, the Bay-touching cities, needs a major expansion of housing supply, which is to say that it needs quite high-density TOD development, even though there is much traditionalist and NIMBY resistance to high densities. This significant point --that in this case gradualist sub-optimal projects are systematically harmful for needed denser good projects-- is clearly illustrated by the restrictions imposed on the Hayward Park development in San Mateo, and by the struggles about density increases and the height of buildings in downtown Berkeley with its major BART Station.

16. We can think of a much more transit-rich "New Bay Area", to be achieved over the coming thirty years. The "New Bay Area" is a vision, concept, or a "goal situation" which should control the land development and investment principles applied starting now. What would it look like?

A. It will be based on carefully designed nodes (Centers) of high population density built within about 2,000 feet around transit stations. They will be linked together by frequent very high quality transit (HQT) service, mainly rail or Rapid Bus, forming a regional network.

B. The overwhelming bulk of transportation will be provided between Centers by HQT, and within nodes by walking or bicycling, not by cars.

C. This creates a map to be overlaid on the geographic map of the region, featuring Centers (typically 10,000 people within walking distance around the transit station/stop) and their connecting links. RAFT believes that nodes and linking transit systems should absorb as much of the new incoming population of the next thirty years, and as much of the transportation investment as possible.

D. Among different kinds of transportation, the region should accelerate and exploit certain patterns which are already emergent, strengthening certain relationships, divisions of labor, and hierarchies. As between modes, transportation policy should should seek complementarity rather than competition. This means that for a given kind of trip or corridor, a judgment should be made and the best mode should be selected and favored for investment and optimization, rather than trying to treat modes "evenhandedly" and maintain a range of options for every transportation situation. A corollary of this is that connectivity should be stressed, and policy and station design should make transfers between modes (bus-rail, car-rail, bus-car, air-rail) as easy as possible.

E. Travel beyond 500 miles in length will normally be by air, while inter-regional travel between significant cities more than 100 miles, but less than 500 miles apart will normally be by rail, eventually High Speed Rail (HSR). Within the metropolitan region, travel between nodes is by frequent HQT. Travel between nodes and "the field," that is surrounding non-node areas, and between two destinations which are both in the field, will be by car. (In real life, there will be a set of middle options and territories: the hourly rental car, the taxi, buses and the bus-served spur from a main network trunk route served by HQT. These intermediate situations and facilities are omitted from this discussion to bring out the main ideas as clearly and simply as possible.)
F. Within metropolitan regions, proximity of destinations (bringing them to walking distance, and walking as such) are to be maximized. Richard Register's good motto is "The shortest distance between two points is to bring them closer together." A classic instance of this is that most people's house or apartment, and their supermarket, should be within walking distance of each other.
G. Beyond walking/biking distance, we will recognize two types of trips: Trunk trips (as in trunk line) and non-trunk trips. Trunk trips are trips which are common and frequent and for which significant public capacity is provided. Trunk trips generally include most home to work trips (commutes), radial (center-periphery) trips in a radially organized region, or trips between two nodes. The most basic principles of land and transportation planning policy for the coming decades should be two: 1) to use land in such a way that the share of trunk travel is maximized (i.e., pull people into nodes), and 2) to optimize/maximize the capacity, frequency and quality of public transit service on trunks. Such trunk transit can be highly specialized, and can be highly capitalized since it serves large number of people.
H. Non-trunk trips are all the others, in a certain sense a giant miscellany or residual category. Although in aggregate there may be more non-trunk trips than trunk trips (certainly, say, in a Los Angeles), each non-trunk trip is of low frequency, and they have little in common, which is why they cannot be grouped into trunks. Sideways trips in a radially organized region, multi-destination trips (since mode choice for a trip is controlled by the lowest frequency segment), trips with origins or destinations, or both, outside nodes (that is, in the "field" area), and significantly, trips, even on a trunk route, at a low-frequency time of travel, such as late at night, are generally non-trunk trips.
17. The attraction of the automobile is in its flexibility. Combined with the road system that has been built for it and now exists as a fixed asset, the car can go anywhere at anytime. It is genuinely an agent of personal freedom, which is part of its very deep and great appeal. It is great for non-trunk trips, which are by definition retail, one-off, and indeed it functions as the default, residual mode. The problem with the car comes when it comes out of that retail residual mode in relation to an adequate transit system, and the car becomes the universal mode, as it has in most of America. When the private car is used for trunk travel within a metropolitan region, rather than as the back-up, utility infielder in a system with transit, the misfit presents itself in the form of high expense, frustrating road congestion and the onerous burden of providing and using parking. In that case, the car is an unspecialized mode or instrument being used for a task that has grown large enough that it could be handled by a specialist instrument, and there is an inevitable loss of efficiency. This dysfunction is masked by the other roles that the car has come to play in our culture: status symbol, protective personal carapace, and so forth, but the bad fit in an urban setting between the car and its most basic function nonetheless takes a steady toll. As low cost, wholesale oriented Costco is gradually outcompeting and capturing the functions of true-retail Macy's, the car will be inexorably forced out of cities through its own inefficiency and the operations of the fundamental "natural" economy. But RAFT is urging the MTC and the Bay Area to look ahead, see the basic logics, and plan to accomplish the transition/replacement task faster and with less pain, rather than wait passively for economic forces blindly to work their course. If this modernizing change can be made quickly, the available gains, in money, time and quality of life, are huge.

18. A metropolitan region -- a Bay Area -- in which most trips by most people are handled by either walking or trunk transit, will be a better region--and more socially equal region. The world of the fossil-burning internal combustion engine automobile, today a large domain of waste and negative side effects will be substantially reduced in scope. In a "New Bay Area" there will be as much mobility and access as ever, or more, but they will cost less in both money and time, and the savings will be usable for other things, like education, health care, family life, recreational and cultural life, husbanding the environment, and ending poverty. Moving on as straight a path as possible toward this better city and region is what RAFT is all about. It is the task of transformation in which we are trying to enlist the MTC and other relevant public policy bodies.

A proximate climate protection target of opportunity.

19. Advancing these principles for a better metropolitan city is RAFT's purpose, and there is no reason to let go of it. The goal of a better Bay Area as RAFT sees it is a valid one. However, science and technology have in the last couple of decades have also revealed a major new problem and also created a major new set of policy options in metropolitan transportation. Familiar negative side effects of private transportation using the internal combustion engine (ICE), such as congestion were mentioned above. But now we have major new knowledge. An informed public knows, and the general public is learning, that the most important damage from mass automobile use is the very large scale emission of CO2 from petroleum-burning engines. The proportion of CO2 from cars is particularly high in the Bay Area. Greenhouse emissions are in themselves one of the most important reasons, and, alone, a fully sufficient reason, to reduce, and to end as soon as possible, mass use of the ICE car and truck. The long-range way to do this, and to achieve other important objectives, is to move as rapidly and decisively as possible toward the transit oriented metropolitan area that RAFT advocates as discussed above, in the context of a twenty year time-span running to 2030.

20. However, independent of progress toward more rational and efficient cities, a new and potentially much quicker way to end fossil greenhouse emissions from cars in a metropolitan region has emerged. This is the plug-in electric vehicle, either hybrid or entirely battery powered. With its relatively low-carbon electricity (2% coal, 45% natural gas) from a single, relatively progressive electric utility (PG&E), the Bay Area is well positioned to use electric drive to cut its transportation greenhouse emissions. Although the "New Bay Area" continues to be justified by other goals, if the introduction of vehicle electrification is smooth and rapid, it could promise quicker and deeper cuts in greenhouse emissions than steps toward a "New Bay Area."

21. There will doubtless be suburbanites, land use traditionalists and other interest groups eager to create an either-or relationship between the two policy paths of WTOD, on the one hand, and rapid diffusion of electric vehicles, on the other. That would be a mistake. They can and should be complementary. The two policies, WTOD and vehicle electrification, both target decarbonizing transportation, which is a RAFT goal, although switching to electric cars does not have all the positive results that RAFT seeks, notably in improving collective transit and in a more social and egalitarian urban layout. Both policies fall potentially within the operating area of the MTC and other agencies of the regional Joint Policy Committee, such as ABAG and the Air Board. The two policies differ mainly in their respective time ranges: vehicle electrification could be a seen as a short-range policy, an effective quick-fix or tech fix, while TOD is longer range, and in a sense more thorough, although even the most dynamic TOD policy will not remotely end car use for non-trunk trips and in the large non-node ("field") areas of the region. RAFT should vigorously advocate both policies to the MTC and other regional entities, including the cities and counties.

22. The regional agencies obviously cannot market electric drive vehicles. For the MTC and the other agencies, regional support at this stage in the emergence of electric cars (see Economist's September 3 review article) would present itself as a policy to hasten regional readiness. If effective, it is quite possible that the agencies could make our region the national leader in the introduction of electric vehicles. The MTC should put together a team with the Air Board, a few relevant state officials, and PG&E to review what the regional, county and city levels of government in the Bay Area can do to bring in BEVs and PHEVs as quickly as possible. The team could, for example, 1) propose public/private subsidies to make a free (and hands-free) plug-in point ready for each new BEV/PHEV buyer, either in their garage or in a public location, and 2) assure that owners of electric drive vehicles or plug-in hybrids will continue to have reduced rates for night-time off-peak power. A third step is debatable: the MTC has an unused public authorization to raise taxation on gasoline. This measure would increase the comparative cost advantage of both transit and electric vehicles region-wide, but it would be fraught with political risk. The Commission is unlikely to impose it without a great struggle.

23. Let's conclude with an alternative formulation of principles for RAFT to urge on the MTC:
1. MTC should practice financial and planning transparency.

2. MTC should plan for the region as a whole, not staple together a package of sub-regional projects.

3. MTC should actively cooperate with ABAG, BAAQMD and BCDC in integrating land-use planning and transportation planning. The interdependence of land use and transportation should be fully recognized. Public awareness that transportation savings can be realized through personal and public land use investments, and vice versa, should be increased.

3. MTC should practice cost-benefit analysis of both projects and policies, and also of the functional components of projects and policies. It should maximize functional performance of all its investments, and scrupulously avoid gold-plating in both whole projects and component projects and details.

4. In its planning work, MTC should advance in letter and spirit the sustainability purposes of SB 345 and California's legislation for climate protection, AB 32.

5. The MTC, ABAG, and the BAAQMD should move beyond its verbal commitments to Smart Growth and A Region of Villages, and should study and endorse the concept of Walking TOD (WTOD). Integrating land use and transportation planning, the regional agencies should systematically and operationally advance the transition toward a "New Bay Area" made up of a network of high density WTOD nodes in their planning and investment work.

6. MTC, ABAG and the BAAQMD should advance the implementation of WTOD in the Bay Area, both through fostering WTOD projects as these arise from other entities, and by intensely sponsoring particular experimental/demonstration WTOD projects.

7. MTC should give serious support to regional transit connectivity. When a project such as the TransBay terminal/Caltrain DTX, is within one city or county but has connectivity implications that are region-wide, MTC should define the project as regional, not local, and be ready to intervene or invest for regional goals.

8. MTC should seek to reduce, not increase automobile Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT). It should do this by supporting land use planning that increases citizen access to frequent destinations through proximity rather than mobility, and by channeling regional mobility demands toward optimized trunk (high frequency) transit services.

9. In cooperation with BAAQMD, the State government and PG&E, starting now, MTC should invest to prepare the Bay Area proactively for the earliest possible diffusion of plug-in (partially or completely) electrically driven vehicles in order to reduce and eventually virtually eliminate the now massive greenhouse emissions from the region's transportation sector.