The "transit oriented development" lie
Dick Spotswood in the Marin Independent Journal:
...Let’s see if transit-centered housing works as promised in Marin. Presume our typical commuter lives at Corte Madera’s Tam Ridge Apartments, aka WinCup. The four-story 180-unit high-density complex is exactly the housing envisioned in SB 50. When approved, WinCup was touted as transit-centered housing next to a Highway 101 trunk line bus stop.
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| Photo: Frankie Frost |
The time selected for this exercise is the 8 a.m. morning weekday commute. The destinations are six Bay Area employment centers. It’s a fair time for a test, because traffic is heavy and transit frequencies (public transportation such as bus, train or ferry) at their maximum.
Travel time from WinCup to each destination by auto and transit is estimated using the smartphone Google map app.
From WinCup to:
• Montgomery and Market streets: auto, 33 minutes; transit, 55 minutes.
• UC Mission Bay Medical Center: auto, 42 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 18 minutes.
• UC Berkeley: auto, 28 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 40 minutes, via San Francisco.
• Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square: auto, 41 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 43 minutes.
• San Francisco State University: auto, 28 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 13 minutes.
• Oakland’s Alameda County Courthouse: auto, 27 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 17 minutes.
...To promise that a high proportion of high-density transit-centered housing residents will regularly use transit without first providing a comprehensive transit network is intentionally misleading.
For many destinations, you simply can’t conveniently get from here to there by transit, and MTC planners know it.
They push the bogus concept because there’s no other plausible rationale for constructing high-density units far from job centers.
Big city politicians, big business honchos, developers and tech titans---the folks who pull the regional agencies’ strings---need more housing for their expanding workforce.
Whether the transit-centered housing theory works in practice is irrelevant to them. They’ll be enjoying big profits while average Bay Area citizens pay the price with increased traffic congestion, higher taxes and crowded schools (Planners keep pushing the bogus concept of transit-centered housing).
See also Whose fault was the WinCup disaster?
• Montgomery and Market streets: auto, 33 minutes; transit, 55 minutes.
• UC Mission Bay Medical Center: auto, 42 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 18 minutes.
• UC Berkeley: auto, 28 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 40 minutes, via San Francisco.
• Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square: auto, 41 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 43 minutes.
• San Francisco State University: auto, 28 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 13 minutes.
• Oakland’s Alameda County Courthouse: auto, 27 minutes; transit, 1 hour, 17 minutes.
...To promise that a high proportion of high-density transit-centered housing residents will regularly use transit without first providing a comprehensive transit network is intentionally misleading.
For many destinations, you simply can’t conveniently get from here to there by transit, and MTC planners know it.
They push the bogus concept because there’s no other plausible rationale for constructing high-density units far from job centers.
Big city politicians, big business honchos, developers and tech titans---the folks who pull the regional agencies’ strings---need more housing for their expanding workforce.
Whether the transit-centered housing theory works in practice is irrelevant to them. They’ll be enjoying big profits while average Bay Area citizens pay the price with increased traffic congestion, higher taxes and crowded schools (Planners keep pushing the bogus concept of transit-centered housing).
See also Whose fault was the WinCup disaster?
Labels: Bay Area, California, Gavin Newsom, Marin, Scott Wiener, Smart Growth
posted by Rob Anderson @ 1:57 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Usually Spotswood isn't so flaky in his analysis, e.g. once you get to Montgomery and Market you still have to park your auto and that ain't cheap. Seems he should know, it was the Marin County commuters that drove across the bridge, parked in the Marina and then took Muni to their jobs that caused the Residential Parking program to be instigated.
But his assumption that transit-oriented development is bullshit is sound.
Inadequate parking is usually part of TAD so developers can build more units and make more profit. It's not like they use the cost savings of too little parking and charge below market prices.
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