I'm using this blog to to gather various papers and drafts in one place. It has pieces currently being worked on, and others from past years. The main current thinking is on metropolitan city planning and on climate change policy.
After a five day bridge closure, tomorrow morning the first cars will roll over the new Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge, built with an interesting innovation of a single tower suspension section, to replace the old span, a section of which fell down during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Unfortunately, construction of the new span did not go well, and in addition to taking 24 years, it was a total budget-buster. Once it got rolling, regional and state authorities never managed to control it until the final cost came in at $6.5 Billion! Here's one person's view of why.
September 2, 2013
Despite its gleaming single tower, the East Span of the Bay Bridge from its opening on September 3 is a huge white elephant, a fiasco of public investment. Leaving aside the 24 years it took to build, at $6.5 Billion the span cost more than three times a reasonable price, and ten times the estimated cost of the simple seismic retrofit that would have handled its transportation and safety functions.
A blow-by-blow study of this grim epic by Karen Frick has just been published in UC’s ACCESS transportation magazine. Lisa Vordebruegen in the Contra Costa Times has also covered it well.
In a coherent regional political system at least one executive head would roll for such a misspending of dollars in the billions, maybe that of Steve Heminger, staff chief of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). But that is unlikely to happen. With an ever-changing cast of characters, and with big technical issues that themselves proved problematical although they were never at the heart of the public policy question, too much time and too many committees have gone by. We will have a sunny ribbon cutting ceremony rather than a realistic project post-mortem.
Still, six and a half billion dollars for one bridge is a lot of money-- for comparison, over four times the cost of extending BART to SFO and Milbrae, an earlier regional transportation misfire.
Spending $6.5B of public funds for an infrastructure element that should have cost less than one billion for a seismic retrofit, or $2B for a reasonable new span, was a significant failure of the Bay Area decision-making process. It is a $4.5B setback in hard cash, but also an alarm bell, a symptom of a broader deficiency. If we are smart we will study, recognize, and fix it.
Ultimately the Eastern Span blowout is a result of the refusal for decades by the cities of the Bay Area to recognize that we are all in one geographic and economic boat and to allow the nine-county Bay Area to live and govern itself--and to plan--as the metropolitan region that it is. Population growth has been steady and will continue, but serious innovation in our region’s way of living has been turned into a steep uphill climb by the conservative resistance doggedly put up by many localities and agencies against any cooperation they see as weakening their prerogatives.
The two indivisible sides of regional management and planning are transportation and “land use.”
The new Eastern Span was shaped in a period, ending only in the last year or so, when transportation was planned by the MTC under an excessive lingering influence of the classic highway-building outlook, serving the automobile and the suburb.
The Bay Area’s land use planning function (deciding what is to be built where) was jealously atomized and guarded by each of the region’s 100+ cities, represented by ABAG. Brandishing the hallowed principle of “local control,” the cities did not much want either to coordinate land use among themselves nor to bring major building and development decisions into a rational relationship with regional transportation planning.
This impasse, and local resistance to seeing things regionally, gave an extended lease on life to the region’s traditional shape since World War II, based on the freeway, the car and on sending growth to its far outer edges. That formula is summarized by the expression “sprawl.”
Even after BART was built, good old sprawl, expensive in time, energy and money, rolled on through the seventies, eighties and nineties under the sway of cultural inertia and the contented gaze of vested interests that saw it not just as the best way, but the only way for Americans to live. Working planners had the slimmest licence to conceive a different future, and they didn’t much do it, although the Bay Area’s own professor Robert Cervero saw the need for post-suburban growth clearly in his planning classroom at Berkeley and his books had great sway in places like Scandinavia, Canada and the World Bank.
Planning was so balkanized and separated into silos that a transportation project could not be evaluated as an alternative to a land use project, or vice versa. Indeed, land use projects beyond the scale of an individual city, could not really be imagined. As the Eastern Span’s cost escalated wildly, it was no part of the process or the system to compare it to alternatives, to say, “Is this the best expenditure of billions the region can make in its future?”
Most specifically, there was no intellectual or institutional way to say: “The region’s central problem is its long-term shortage and high cost of housing. How does that need compare with its need for a second bridge to compete in sublimity with the Golden Gate Bridge?”
That’s the sort of question that answers itself -- if it can be raised. Obviously, less costly housing is more important for the region’s people and its economy. Moreover, a way of investing public funds to lower the costs of both housing and transportation exists in the fostering of “transit oriented development.”
But asking to compare housing investments with spending to add elegance to a bridge is a question that could never be asked under the old dispensation of a Chinese wall between land use decision-making and transportation planning. The outrageous cost of the Bay Bridge’s Eastern Span was a case of being dragged deeper and deeper, for lack of an alternative, into an investment project that wasn’t working out. In this case, it was not even a matter of a “shovel-ready” alternative, but just a conceptual one.
As the slippery slope was carrying regional and state officials working on the replacement bridge past the two billion mark, then the four billion mark and finally to six billion dollars, no one could say a firm “No!” That was because the region had no vision of the needed different future. There was no list of future-shaping projects, such as a serious TOD program, or even “bringing electrified Caltrain downtown,” whose settled merits made it obviously crazy to spend the whole kitty on just a fancy form for one bridge.
Until the recent passage of California Senator Darrell Steinberg’s SB 375, the Bay Area really had no concept of a purposeful vision for itself that went much beyond more of the same old sprawl with a dollop of BART extensions.
But now, thanks to California’s newly-required Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS), and thanks to the state’s path-breaking anti-carbon legislation, and to the just-completed Plan Bay Area exercise which attempted at long last to integrate land use and transportation planning, we are in a better place.
We can move toward slaying the dragons of high-cost housing, the long family-sapping commute in congested traffic, high carbon emissions, and the $8,000 annual cost for each of a household’s second, third and fourth cars. More of us will be riding an improved transit system more often, and more of us will be living, working and going to school in a somewhat more urban style that feels a little more like a European city and less like 1970’s Los Angeles.
Independent market trends, including the culture of our smarter younger people, are moving in that direction.
If MTC and ABAG can step up their leadership by following this modern crowd from the front, bringing good engineering and sharp pencils, there should be no further wandering into quagmires like the East Span of the Bay Bridge.
P. Lydon, Berkeley
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
A letter sent to the NYTimes on May 3 concerning the Chen Guangcheng affair:
To the Editor,
Chen Guangcheng surely makes valid criticisms of his society and government,
and should be able to speak more freely, but this is a Chinese matter among
Chinese citizens and authorities.
Harboring internal dissidents from
their own government is a leaping extension of the immunity granted to our
diplomats in China in order to create a protected space for communication
between governments. It is reciprocal, of course, with the immunity from
American law which we grant the Chinese embassy in
Washington.
Extending U.S. diplomatic
protection to Mr. Chen is unmistakably an interference in Chinese internal
affairs. There are far more important issues than Mr. Chen’s case
between our governments: first and foremost the slow but steady building
of a relationship of trust and cooperation with China’s government that
will obviate a cold war, or any form or war, as China rises at home and
internationally.
How can letting Chen Guangcheng inject
himself into US-China relations help this central agenda? We have
mis-stepped. Keeping the matter at the level of Secretary Clinton’s State
Department, we should decisively close this episode as quickly as possible, if
necessary giving an apology.
In March, I read Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level , Why Greater Equality makes Stronger Societies. It is a marvelous book, presenting what I thought was very correct thinking on a broad social issue of the greatest importance. It contains some discussion of climate change policy, however, that was not adequate, I thought, to the similar gravity and importance of the global warming danger. I wrote this letter to the authors, who did not, at least to date, reply.
Dear Professors Wilkinson and Pickett, Have just read your "Spirit Level" (U.S. edition, as of 1/2011) with the greatest admiration, and entire support for your call for movement toward more equal, more social and more trusting societies, starting with ours in the United States. But your perceptive presentation would be strengthened by reconsidering the section on climate change (p. 215 ff.)
This chapter title explicitly links equality and sustainability, and the closing sentence of the opening section says, "...governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality." Unfortunately this is not true--it is quite possible to end carbon emissions from coal, petroleum and natural gas by replacing them as energy sources with nuclear and renewable energy and with energy efficiency, regardless of the degree of equality in a society. For entirely different reasons, but with no reference to social equality at all, France achieved close to this for electricity production in the 1970s, to give one example. Secondly, this statement links carbon emission elimination with the broader, and entirely meritorious social equality agenda in a way which will tend to retard urgently needed action against carbon.
The text shows little feel for the quite particular structure of the climate protection issue. Although you give due weight to its gravity, you lump curbing fossil carbon emissions in with the broader subjects of energy in general, sustainability and an overall respect for the environment. It is doubtless true that more equal societies, less committed to competitive material consumption, would consume energy less gluttonously and would treat the environment better. However, global warming damage to the climate from the use of fossil carbon energy, although it is massive and likely of greater long range importance than other forms of environmental abuse put together, is a separate and discrete matter.
Advancing to modern societies that are more equal and cooperative is both a deeply historical and deeply political issue, but climate change is not like that. It is authentically new and sui generis, and has its own structure (which follows from the way carbon dioxide performs in the atmosphere), quite different from traditional issues. In the United States, the right is tragically and abusively turning climate protection into a left-right political issue, but it is of the greatest importance that the left not cater to this by acting reciprocally. This is not a matter of whether a family follows the best socialist or the worst capitalist principles, but rather whether it responds to the fact that its house is burning down.
Greenhouse damage is caused not by the use, extravagant or otherwise, of energy, but by the use of specifically fossil energy, a distinction which should not be lost from sight, although much energy today is still fossil energy. Climate protection depends on ending the use of fossil energy, and the core way to do this is to replace it with renewable and nuclear energy. Energy conservation and efficiency have important roles to play in going off fossil energy, but it is only cutting the emission of CO2 that counts for climate change.
Technical means to replace fossil energy are available, and more and better ones are coming from researchers. Since the share of electricity in overall energy consumption is steadily rising, a main focus is rightly on the generation of electricity, where and wind, solar and nuclear power (cf. Sweden, Japan and California) are making major inroads, along with the high-capacity and intelligent transmission grids which will be necessary. A summing of numerous local schemes, or a concentration of resources on a few massive ones, such as solar power from the Sahara, both remain possibilities to generate the requisite large volumes of non-fossil energy for existing uses, and early future one such as electricity to replace petroleum in the transportation sector (which includes the doomed Chelsea tractors!)
Creating a large non-fossil energy production capacity will be an expensive investment (though not overwhelming -- say, for the United States on the scale of one war like Iraq). A moderate rise in energy costs will be necessary during the investment period, although it will be reducible for families and firms by energy efficiency and conservation steps. But in the longer range, after the durable capital machinery has been put into place, marginal energy costs will drop since the sun and wind as energy sources are free and reactor fuel is a small component of nuclear power.
Although those working in the energy sector will have to innovate and exert themselves strenuously, during and after the conversion to non-fossil energy it is quite likely that there will be few if any perceptible changes in the daily life of ordinary people. Driving a hybrid car is effectively identical to driving a gasoline one, and the same will be true of full-electric automobiles, which should quickly replace petrol powered ones.
Climate change is an immediate and very grave threat for the human race and the habitability of the earth, but the danger arose from the application of industrial technology, and technical fixes are available for it. The remedy cannot be applied too quickly--the nature of the problem, with carbon continuing to accumulate in the atmosphere and remaining there for long durations, means that time is of the essence. Disseminating sufficient understanding of the problem in the general public/political circles to secure the necessary carbon taxation or other funding and to apply the large tech fix is proving difficult enough--in fact, desperately difficult. Therefore, it is of the greatest importance that climate protection not be linked and made hostage to other issues no matter how meritorious, especially not broader social and cultural restructurings, inevitably slow, which would have the effect of delaying the technical and investment measures which are necessary to deal with global warming.
I hope that you will reconsider your coverage of this subject in your excellent book, perhaps consulting specialists in the matter.
Ken Kirkey, Planning Director, Association of Bay Area Governments
Lisa Klein, Planner, Metropolitan Transportation Commission
Dear Mr. Kirkey and Ms. Klein,
For twenty years or more, many leaders of the Bay Area have struggled to turn our region toward a coherent pattern of growth to succeed 20th century sprawl.
After many years of effort, we are now seeing the MTC, Air Board, BCDC and ABAG moving into better consultation, as California in SB 375 calls on the region to act effectively for sustainability and against climate change. The creation of the Joint Policy Committee several years ago, and current work on the RTP/SCS (Bay Area Plan), are clearly landmarks in this movement toward cooperation.
I would like to suggest an addition to the Place Types of the Station Area Planning Model in the excellent Initial Vision Scenario, which you presented on March 11.
The present list of Place Types at this early stage does not seem to go much beyond a rather unspecified intensification of housing and worksites at existing nodes. There should be added to the list of Place Types a new kind of intensification to be designed expressly to optimize transit-oriented living and working. Less dominated by existing city forms on the ground, this additional place type, a full-fledged walking transit oriented community, tries instead to work out an optimum modern settlement for business and housing on the Bay Area’s existing rail network. It would directly advance the SB 375 goals to house expected new population within the region and to reduce carbon emissions. By purposefully lowering automobile reliance, it will make other environmental gains as well, and bring down our excessive costs of housing.
Attached is a six page paper on the concept of such a walking transit oriented community, or “Center.” I am working on a longer version in short book form which I hope to finish in the Spring, but am sending this to you now, since the RTP/SCS policy process is developing momentum.
It would be useful to include one or two examples of such Centers in the coming RTP/SCS as prototypes to test their long-term utility to the region and acceptability to the market. Support for such a center can be seen as an expansion of the MTC’s TLC program. It will reflect the Commission's and the region’s realization that it is mainly through land use improvement, not direct transportation investment, that regional vehicle miles traveled (VMT) can be reduced.
Centers" for the San Francisco Bay Area Walking Transit Oriented Communities
The Bay Area is a thriving metropolitan region, the fourth largest in the United States--and growing. How will it handle its growth? Where will its next million people live? New households now settle mainly on the region's 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 are less expensive on the edge than closer to the center, but living at a distance means long commutes, usually by single-occupant car. Over months and years, such dispersion and commuting add up to great expense, not only in money from family budgets, but in many hours of time spent driving, and in gasoline, which becomes CO2 and other pollution. In the end, the "sprawl" style of life is extremely expensive -- AAA says owning a car costs very close to $10,000 a year, and in most of the Bay it Area is a requirement, not a choice. Month after month, long-distance commuters are spending money and energy, and especially time, in driving which most of them would rather use better, for example, for family life, education, sports, health or culture. Escaping Sprawl, a New Pattern This paper advocates a different pattern of development, based on living where we can walk to many of our destinations, and where we can use collective instead of individual transportation for most longer trips, especially the commuting trip. The solution is for the region's core cities to build their new housing for growth closer to public transportation--in transit oriented development (TOD). The Bay Area has a remarkable set of existing transit rail lines, and, after years of regional debate, is now embarked in this direction under efforts such as One Bay Area and the Bay Area Plan, whose Initial Vision Scenario has just come out. But TOD comes in many varieties and intensities, with corresponding gradations and thresholds in the benefits that different levels of TOD bring. The full benefits of TOD come at its most intense level, when the concept of TOD is carried to its full extent. Such settlements are expressly designed and built to be economical and safe places to live for adults and children, framing and encouraging a full range of their personal and social activities. Internal destinations should be walkable, and green and open space for sports and recreation, and for being outdoors in California's great climate, should be abundant and very nearby for everyone. From its transit linkage and its density, such full walking TOD can offer metropolitan urban access and efficiency, and from its careful, thorough design come the open space and sense of community that people traditionally seek in the suburbs. In "walking TOD," people live close enough to their transit connection and to most of their local activities that they walk or bike, rather than drive, to them. Everyday local foot movement is made easy, safe and attractive for children and adults by putting cars underground and creating a lively social environment of stores, civic buildings and abundant green open space as well as housing. Motherhood no longer means chauffeurdom. A transit station serving a walking TOD opens into an active public square surrounded by civic buildings, stores, cafes and homes, not parking structures and big parking lots. In such full TOD, or"walking transit oriented community," the long-term cost-benefit ratios become the most favorable--very favorable indeed. Here we call a walking transit oriented community simply a Center. If many Centers were constructed, we could speak of a Centered Bay Area; a network of such Centers would strengthen the transit system and each other. A Center will be of substantial size because it should be capacious to hold all sorts of people, many with their job sites, and to mix them as much as they wish to mix in community life. It is not a niche development for a subset of the population, such as just the rich, just the poor, or just the old. Rather it is the framework for complex lively community of, say, 10,000 people which will have a lot going on. Walking distance from the outer edge to the transit stop (either underground or elevated) in the middle of the Center's "downtown" will be about 10 minutes (2,000 feet, a little less than half a mile) with perhaps some biking. A circle with a radius of 2,000 feet around a station gives an area of about 12 million square feet, or 288 acres. But, if we house that population in the one-and-two story dwellings that are traditional in American suburbs, we basically cover all the area, with little room for open space. The best response is to move away from the middle-class cultural norm of a detached single family house for all households and look instead to spacious, well equipped, owned apartments (either condominiums or coops). The ground gained from placing residences one above another becomes green open space, and this is the main reason for using mid-rise and high-rise buildings. But it is also true that a smaller part of the population than in the past now lives in the nuclear-family-with-children group
for which the traditional single-family house developed. Most of the apartment dwellers in a Center will be drawn from the three quarters of households which are not nuclear families with kids. As in Vancouver, two-story townhouses will be available for families with children, although many urban middle class families in the U.S. and Europe know that kids grow up fine in apartments that have as much interior space as a traditional single family house and have good access to green space nearby.
Early Garden City designer Ebenezer Howard showed how to put density and open space together, using the very traditional and social form of the "street" (which becomes a pedestrian/ bicycle path rather than carrying cars) arranged in a "fingers of the hand" pattern around a full circle. This creates pie wedges of open space, which add up to about half of the Center's total area. Toward the narrow point of each wedge, this land will host small-scale outdoor uses such as community gardens, neighborhood swimming pools, tot lots and basketball and tennis courts. It will serve larger uses, such as soccer fields, baseball diamonds and groves of trees in the wider outer portions. Although people live and move conveniently and sociably along the pedestrian "street" which leads to the transit hub, everyone is also a few steps from uncrowded open green space, which becomes the kids' expansive backyard. Automobile roads and parking are put entirely underground, although not necessarily immediately, since excavation is expensive. 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. Emergency and service vehicles will use the surface pedestrian walkways, but rarely. Housing Housing in a Center is generous, sustainable, and of high quality, but it is a serious goal to keep its cost down. Although town-houses will be mixed in along the pedestrian "spokes of the wheel", a key building block of the Center is the mid-rise or high-rise structure. It is mainly residential, but often also has a couple of floors of "mixed use" (stores and offices) at its base. This building is a major challenge for
the architects. It is seen in this paper as a "slender tower," as pioneered by Hong Kong and Vancouver, which eliminates two drawbacks of most urban multi-story buildings: daylight that comes only from one side of an apartment, and a dismal double-loaded corridor on each floor. With a floor plate of 80' by 80', and envisaged here in two versions, of 13 and 26 residential stories respectively, the building aspires to be both "solid" in its feel, and light in its construction, using the newest materials and construction technologies available -- or now in development.
Apartment ceilings should be high, floor space generous, and living areas full of daylight. Careful attention will be given to acoustic protection of dwelling space. It could be possible to pre-fabricate, on-site or off-site, intensely designed floor panels of lightweight concrete or other new material. These plates, fitting into a steel or reinforced concrete frame, would form the floors of the apartments above them and the ceilings of those below, while carrying water, radiant heating/ cooling, and electricity conduits, serving both upwards and downwards. Every possible energy efficiency (especially for fossil energy) should be exploited--for example, HVAC based on heat pumps, ending the need for fossil natural gas supply. A further example: in the mild climate of California: piping for radiant heating/cooling need not extend to the edges of the floor plate but could serve only an inner core for our infrequent cold evenings and very hot days. The goal is to offer spacious apartment homes for a construction cost as close to $250 per square foot as possible. To keep down initial capital costs, apartments could be sold in a loft-like unfinished state, for residents to create their interiors over time at their convenience. Costs and financing Purposeful cost minimization includes the substantial "soft costs" of such a project. Common goals and cooperation between the developer and the local municipality is essential. 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 their dwelling unit, enabling the household after a little time to be considered owners, not renters, and a regular mortgage to come into force. Savings and Sustainability The Center's walking proximity to schools and stores, and to transit to the wider region, should allow a household to own only one car, or even none, in place of the typical two or more cars when living in sprawl. The saved expense of not running a car over a generation would come close to paying off the condominium' s mortgage. The family's residence would then be owned free and clear, becoming capital accumulated for the next generation of the family, and a major step into the middle class. This transformative gain is far more than what is left after owning a series of rapidly depreciating second family vehicles over thirty years. It offers an insight into the costs of sprawl, and the social and economic gains for a household that avoids them. The Center's garage is ideal for a car share program, serving enough people that the service could be of high reliability and offer a variety of cars. In particular, availability in the Center of long-range hybrids through the car share pool would let Center residents own pure electric vehicles for their local auto trips, reducing both fuel costs and emissions. The public interest, and an analogous example The good walking access to high-intensity transit and to local services is basic, but the various features of a Center interlock, and ideally one should be built as a whole. It is a very large whole -- a multi-million dollar investment that the traditional 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. A Center will bring major long-term savings in money (as well as time and energy) for its residents through its greatly reduced car use and its compactness. However, some of its important elements, such as the multi-story form of construction and underground parking and vehicle circulation, are indubitably expensive in initial capital. If the hard and soft costs of housing in a Center can be kept to a total of $400 per square foot, a 1,200 sq ft apartment will cost about $500,000. This is a reasonably affordable family dwelling in relation to the Bay Area housing market, especially in view of the transportation savings it permits. But it does not count the undergrounding of parking and roadways, which is capital-intensive. The excavation required to handle Car Share and private vehicles for residents, and trucks supplying Center stores, and also the cars of outside users of the BART station, will be extensive, but the normal BART insistence on above-ground parking structures near its stations ruins TOD sites. Costly undergrounding of these common facilities is essential for a full walking TOD, but may necessitate some form of public subsidy or loan guarantee. As part of California's AB 32 drive against climate change and carbon emissions, the Bay Area's regional agencies have made commitments to the State of California under SB 375 to plan to reduce CO2 emissions from cars and light duty trucks by 7% per capita by 2020, and 15% per capita by 2035. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) also now officially aims to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita in the same period, in place of the normal rise in VMT. Both these interrelated goals require more use of public electric transportation, such as BART, and soon Caltrain, and reductions in the overwhelming present use of cars and light trucks. But the MTC has learned that by far the most important and effective way to increase transit's mode share is to increase housing and jobsites near transit services. For this reason, the MTC's mission shifts away from transportation investments, toward also influencing land use policies and decisions within the region. Land use policy-making is traditionally under the control of local cities rather than regional bodies. Bay Area-wide organizations, such as the MTC, have only recently begun to try to influence local land use decisions toward the density that supports public transportation. Leapfrogging the present gradualism and building one or more full walking transit oriented communities, or Centers, as demonstration prototypes, would be directly effective for the region in meeting its climate protection and sustainability targets under SB 375, and is therefore a proper candidate for regional public investment. In the early 1960's, the Federal Aviation Administration attacked the problem of long walking distances inside airports by commissioning renowned architect Eero Saarinen to develop an alternative prototype at Dulles Airport near Washington D.C. Saarinen's compact but strikingly beautiful structure in glass and concrete used special buses, known as "mobile lounges," to move passengers out to their planes. It did cut internal distances, and was efficient for the passengers. Although eventually not followed by other airports, the project was a perceptive and constructive public investment in innovation. Thinking about these administrative and legal considerations, but, more importantly, thinking about the great daily expense, unsustainability and climate damage of America's sprawling metropolitan cities, it is clear that support for a prototype Center in the Bay Area would be a merited intervention by a higher level of administration, such as the full metropolitan region, the State of California, or the Federal government.
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 itsslightly 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 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.)
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.
