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- May 20, 2013
Central Corridor: A Good Plan, But It Needs More Height
By Sarah Karlinsky, Deputy Director
Last month the San Francisco Planning Department released a draft of the Central Corridor Plan, the result of several years of planning efforts. The plan represents an enormous opportunity to build on the substantial transit investment in the area, including the $1.6 billion Central Subway project, as well as existing transit in the form of the 4th and Caltrain station and the N-Judah Muni line, as well as many frequent local buses. While the plan is a great step in the right direction, it doesn’t go far enough in concentrating housing and especially jobs in this transit-rich location — one of the key areas in San Francisco, and the region, where going big makes sense.
With stations for Caltrain, BART, Muni and the new Central Subway, the Central Corridor Plan area is extremely well served by transit.
What the Plan Gets Right
Zoning
There’s much to like in the Central Corridor Plan, including greater flexibility in zoning, with an eye toward encouraging jobs. The plan proposes requiring commercial development on larger parcels, particularly since they can accommodate the bigger floor plates favored by tech companies seeking large, open work spaces. Given the presence of regional transit such as BART and Caltrain in the district, locating jobs here would make best use of the transit infrastructure and its ability to bring in a broad labor force from across the region. As the plan notes, people are more likely to take transit when it brings them very close to their jobs. In other words, to get people out of their cars, jobs need to be located on transit lines.
Walking and Biking
The plan proposes streetscape and circulation improvements that would make it easier to get around by foot and bicycle. Currently many streets in the area lack wide sidewalks and other amenities that encourage walking and help people feel safe crossing the street. While the area is flat and could be great for biking, the lack of bike lanes and the speed of traffic currently make cycling in the area very unpleasant. The plan proposes a series of improvements to address these challenges.
Open Space
One of the improvements SPUR would be most excited to see is a new mid-block open space similar in size and location to nearby South Park. This park would be located on a site between Freelon and Welsh streets (currently controlled by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission) one block west of South Park. Such a space could be a great addition to the entire area and should be pursued further.
Additionally, the plan focuses on alleys as a form of open space and includes ways to improve the flexibility of these spaces and make them more usable for everyone.
A new park similar in scale to South Park would help to provide badly needed open space in the district.
Sustainability
The plan advocates for making the Central Corridor an eco-district— a sustainability plan that operates at the neighborhood level. Approaching green systems at this scale offers many opportunities to accelerate sustainability, which we discuss in a recent blog post on the city’s plans for a Central Corridor Eco-District.
What the Plan Could Do Better
While the plan does rightly allow for a greater variety of uses, it doesn’t go far enough in allowing for taller building heights in the area. There will be two alternatives studied in the plan’s environmental impact report: the Mid-Rise Alternative and the High Rise Alternative. The draft plan asserts that the area should be maintained as a predominantly mid-rise district for two main reasons: first, mid-rise development is preferable because it reinforces the existing urban form characterized by older commercial and industrial structures, and second, the companies that would be drawn to locate in this area prefer buildings with larger floor plates.
But these ideas should be challenged. Many successful urban areas, including San Francisco’s downtown, benefit from a high degree of height variation, including the location of high-rise buildings next to mid-rise and even low-rise historic structures. The variation in heights is in part what amplifies the relationship of old to new and makes urban areas exciting. Second, the companies that seek to locate in this area in the next five years will likely have very different needs than the companies that might seek to locate here in the next 10 to 20. For example, tech companies are now beginning to take space in the high-rise Financial District (albeit in mid-rise, large-floor-plate buildings), despite earlier projections that these kinds of companies would not locate there.
SPUR believes that the most critical consideration for this district is the integration of transportation and land-use. This must be balanced against what companies want in the short or even medium term. For this reason, we argue that, at minimum, the High Rise Alternative should be put forward as the preferred alternative. However, even the High Rise Alternative could be improved from a height perspective.
These renderings show what development is allowed in the Central Corridor under existing zoning (the orange forms in the top image) compared to what development would be allowable in the district under the Central Corridor Plan (orange forms in the lower image). The proposed height changes are modest and may not be tall enough given the extensive transit infrastructure in the area.
Next Steps
The draft plan will begin the environmental review process in the next few weeks. SPUR will continue to analyze the plan, supporting all of its great aspects while advocating for improvements.
Tags: community planning - May 16, 2013
Why We Love Alleys
By Benjamin Grant, Public Realm and Urban Design Program Manager
Starting May 20, SPUR embarks on a week-long experiment in public placemaking in San Francisco. Working with the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District, we will close Annie Alley to car traffic in order to host a series of outdoor public events, including a picnic, a film screening, a concert and a discussion of the role Zuccotti Park played in Occupy Wall Street.What is it about an alley that inspires urban invention? As we kick off our week of investigation, we pause to reflect on the humble alley and its role in the city.
The Backstory on Back Alleys
Most alleys had simple utilitarian origins as ways to access buildings with goods and vehicles — especially where a socially decorous street frontage was desired. Commercial blocks in older American cities are often bisected by alleys. In Los Angeles, many retail streets have alleys for service and parking immediately behind the stores, with larger residential blocks behind. Residential alleys serve townhouse districts in Boston’s Back Bay and much of Washington, D.C., (but not New York). In Venice Beach, alleys make canals and “walk-streets” possible.
Beijing’s hutong and Shanghai’s longtang alleys are the basis of the traditional residential fabric. These narrow lanes host a rich mixture of local functions, including access to the modular courtyard houses they serve. The explosive growth of Chinese cities has made these districts and their way of life something of an endangered species despite belated efforts at preservation.
A traditional hutong in Beijing. Image courtesy flickr user tsc_traveler.
What Alleys Offer
Access
Alleys are the capillaries of the city’s circulation system — the smallest unit, where movement is the slowest and exchange the highest. Beyond the utility of loading, parking and rear access, alleys subdivide blocks into shorter segments, providing shortcuts and frequent route choices. In San Jose, the Paseo de San Antonio allows pedestrians to cut through blocks that would be 800 feet long, and in San Francisco, alleys allow pedestrians to navigate the outsized blocks South of Market. The finer grain of circulation provided by these small streets is one of the hallmarks of a walkable city.
In San Jose, the pedestrian-only Paseo de San Antonio cuts a diagonal line through several large city blocks, improving walkability downtown. Image courtesy Google Maps.
Sin
Often as not, alleys have been associated with fear, criminal activity, speakeasies, forbidden pleasures and creeping dangers. Hidden from view, away from the city’s more presentable facades, alleys offered fertile terrain for underground culture, marginalized groups and unsanctioned behavior. In the 19th century, the alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown hosted bordellos, opium dens and gambling parlors, all luridly chronicled in the anglo press. A century later, San Francisco’s gay leather scene thrived in the alleys south of Market, as did punk and electronic dance music. The back alleys of the city offer openings into the back alleys of our culture, charged with both the allure and the dread we project on unknown urban quarters.
Art
Alleys have also provided a ready canvas for street art, from Chicano muralismo andhip-hop bombing to wheatpasting and stenciling. Assertions of identity and resistance mix with personal visions, wit, and out-and-out vandalism, each defined in the eye of the beholder. Spots like Balmy and Clarion alleys, which started as handy surfaces away from prying eyes, have become urban galleries, first tolerated and then cherished as each layer of expression has drawn more in turn.
Murals on Clarion Alley in San Francisco's Mission District. Photo courtesy flickr user neeravbhatt.
Scale
Urban designers are preoccupied with “spatial enclosure” — the way spaces are given three-dimensional shape by the surrounding buildings, creating urban “rooms.” Suburbs have almost no enclosure, while the gothic quarter of Barcelona is its apotheosis. Alleys are one of the few reliable sources of enclosure in American cities. Where wide thoroughfares are the norm, these kinds of spaces provide the exception, a source of relief from the prevailing pattern, another stratum to explore. Some of the city’s keenest pleasures are offered by the transitions in scale — from the thrum of the grand boulevard to the quiet of the back streets. Nowhere is this more true than South of Market, where Jasper O’Farrell, the city’s first surveyor, laid out a tract of 100-vara lots — twice the size of the lots north of Market. Today these blocks sit among streets dominated by auto traffic. Here, alleys provide the saving grace, a human-scale refuge and an alternative network for the savvy pedestrian. Some have been choked off and built over, others artfully revitalized. But most remain just as they were: narrow, forgotten spaces, inviting exploration and reimagination.
Gathering
The enclosure and intimate scale of alleys shines when they are repurposed as gathering spaces, creating urban rooms that spring to life when filled with diners and revelers. Claude and Belden lanes, packed wall-to-wall with restaurant seating under festive lights, are the most celebrated San Francisco examples. Mint Plaza takes the idea far enough that it’s easy to forget the seedy alley it supplanted. Berkeley’s Trumpetvine Court and Stone Street in lower Manhattan are two more, but nearly every good city has a handful.
Restaurants activate the urban room of San Francisco's Belden Lane. Photo courtesy flcikr user Lynn Friedman.
At their best, alleys can combine nearly all of these functions, becoming containers for the particular magic of city life: discovery, creative expression, memorable spaces and life lived and celebrated out and about, in one another’s company.
Attend our Annie Alley events:
SF’s Long Range Transportation Plan, May 21 >>
Beyond Zuccotti Park, May 21 >>
Film Screening: TINY, a Story About Living Small, May 22 >>
Concert: Curt Yagi & the People Standing Behind Me, May 23 >>
- May 7, 2013
Fixing Transit in SF's Northeast Neighborhoods
By Lenka Belkova and Ratna Amin
How would you improve the transit system for neighborhoods in the northeast part of San Francisco? This was the key question SPUR asked at a transit planning workshop for the city’s northeast neighborhoods last month. The workshop brought together representatives from key public agencies, North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf businesses, the tourism industry and neighborhood advocacy groups, as well as transportation professionals.
Neighborhoods in Chinatown, North Beach and other northeast environs are some of the densest in the city — similar in population density to the Upper West and Upper East sides of Manhattan. Sixty-eight percent of residents in the corridor from Chinatown to the waterfront do not own a vehicle. And Fisherman’s Wharf enjoys 9 to 12 million visitors per year, meanwhile acting as a job center for thousands of workers. These levels of demand in a city are generally enough to warrant very high-capacity and high-frequency public transit. But public transit in this part of San Francisco is congested, unreliable and overcrowded. Existing routes also do not provide needed connectivity to growing job and activity centers to the west and to the south, such as SOMA.
Travel Times to Northeast Neighborhoods
Despite their population density and their role as tourist destinations, San Francisco's northeast neighborhoods are inconvenient to access from most other parts of the city. Image source: Google Maps
The workshop allowed stakeholders to analyze their existing transit needs and imagine improvements. Participants raised many concerns with existing mobility and offered both short- and long-term actions that would improve the use of travel modes other than the car to get to or from northeast neighborhoods.Suggestions included:
- Creating transit “hubs” that would provide connectivity between modes and routes — for example, better connecting bus lines, streetcars and cable cars.
- Better signage for transportation wayfinding, fare payment and station navigation, for both residents and visitors.
- Improving transit service between Fisherman’s Wharf and western neighborhoods such as the Marina, Cow Hollow and the Presidio.
- Putting transit lines underground in order to better use narrow streets and sidewalks for other activities and amenities.
- Advancing the E-Embarcadero project, which would extend streetcars from Fisherman’s wharf to Fort Mason, a service that will be piloted during the America’s Cup events.
- Adding a North Beach station to the T-Third subway light rail line, which is currently planned to end in Chinatown.
- Extending the T-Third light rail line to stations at Fisherman’s Wharf and possibly to the west or down the Embarcadero.
Community and business representatives at the workshop generally agreed that the densely populated North Beach, Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill neighborhoods, as well as Fisherman’s Wharf, would benefit from continuing the T-Third light rail line to provide a faster transportation choice for residents and tourists alike. Concerns with an above-ground extension were: making sure train length could be accommodated within the neighborhood block sizes, the need for a tunnel portal where the subway surfaces from underground, and visual or noise impacts. Challenges with continuing the underground subway included expense and the time required to fund and complete a project of this size.
The idea of a North Beach station was also discussed in some detail at the workshop. This concept drew attention after a recent controversy over the site for excavating the tunnel boring machines from the ground, originally planned for Washington Square. After local businesses disapproved of the long-term traffic disruption without any further benefit to the area, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency agreed to revisit its plan and pursue a more suitable excavation site at the former Pagoda Theater. Now locals have suggested that the theater, closed since 1994, could make a good site for a North Beach station. The change in the excavation site has added $9.15 million to the Central Subway budget, which — at $1.6 billion — is already viewed as problematic by some.
SPUR has previously supported analyzing an extension of the Central Subway into North Beach and beyond in order to maximize operational efficiency of the T-Third line and provide much needed high-capacity transit service to those neighborhoods.
- May 6, 2013
San Francisco Gets Its First Eco-District
By Laura Tam, Sustainable Development Policy Director
Over the last year, there’s been palpable buzz in San Francisco around eco-districts — essentially, sustainability plans that operate at the neighborhood scale. We’ve learned about different eco-district models and how eco-districts are working in Portland, Seattle, Brooklyn and Denver. The San Francisco Planning Department has been especially proactive in this learning process, putting together numerous presentations on district-scale infrastructure and sustainability throughout 2012. The largest of these meetings, held last August at SPUR, kicked off a planning process for an eco-district in the Central Corridor of San Francisco. This 24-square-block area south of Market Street, centered around 4th Street, is currently undergoing a neighborhood planning and rezoning process to better manage and support growth around the new Central Subway.What’s the buzz about? In areas of transition like the Central Corridor — once an industrial area and increasingly the home of the city’s high-tech sector — neighborhood rezoning creates many opportunities for new development. Some of this will be private development on sites within the corridor, and some will be public investment in transportation assets, water, wastewater, energy and neighborhood parks. The Central Corridor Eco-District was conceived to help the transitioning neighborhood perform well on the city’s environmental goals for greenhouse gas reductions, zero waste, water conservation and efficiency, stormwater management, renewable energy, transportation and more.
In a city where neighborhood edges are somewhat blurry, why focus on sustainability at this scale instead of an “all-of-the-above, everywhere” approach? After all, many of the city’s environmental goals make the most sense when implemented wherever possible and feasible. For example, SF has a rule requiring all residents to compost and recycle; as a result the city is well on its way toward achieving its zero waste goals. Properties in the Central Corridor surely will comply, and perhaps even innovate to exceed our current citywide waste diversion rate of 78 percent. But there is little magic to the boundary around the Central Corridor in accelerating our progress on this goal. Similarly, cooperation between properties is unlikely to boost energy efficiency upgrades, which are typically performed within the building envelope.
But at the neighborhood scale, some things stand out as real possibilities to accelerate sustainability. In these cases, proximity to a specific project or opportunity — and to property owners interested in making it happen — could make all the difference. A neighborhood-scale focus can bring two unique opportunities to the cause of sustainability:
1. Neighborhood-scale aggregation of resource demand, such as energy and water. An eco-district organization in the Central Corridor might be able to enroll numerous properties in a solar group purchase, which secures discounted pricing, or in community-shared solar, possibly using the buildings in the district. An eco-district could also set up an efficient district energy system, which produces steam, heated water and chilled water at a central plant and distributes the energy to multiple connected buildings, so they do not need to have their own boilers or chillers. An eco-district organization could facilitate water reuse between properties, too, such as harvesting rainwater from multiple properties to irrigate a neighborhood park or street landscaping. New buildings that incorporate onsite water treatment or that are plumbed for recycled water (already a requirement in the Central Corridor) might soon be allowed to supply or use another property’s captured and treated wastewater for non-potable uses. In general, community-scale systems can offer lower development costs, reduced capital and operating costs, and higher property values.
2. A coordinated approach to meeting environmental goals, especially where there is a mix of existing land uses and building projects being developed under different time frames. While not all renewable energy or water reuse opportunities require neighborhood-scale participation to succeed, an organization dedicated to furthering sustainability goals within a neighborhood — especially following rezoning — may be able to find opportunities to invest in more sustainable systems. The SF Planning Department is already working on an evaluation of the Central Corridor’s energy use today, and what it might look like with changes from future growth; it is also planning a district energy system in the Transbay Redevelopment Area, another mixed-use, high-density development area that could benefit from a shared, closed-loop system. Eco-district organizations can engage existing property owners to identify a hyperlocal sustainability vision and goals, assess needs and opportunities, and identify the right timing and funding sources to build out the new infrastructure. They can be very proactive about local public engagement and in educating new property owners and managers about sustainability activities the district may require or encourage.
Optimal Energy Use at Different Scales
Different energy systems and infrastructure are most optimal — delivering the greatest benefits for the least cost — at different scales. Heating and cooling networks are two systems that provide the most benefits at the district scale (represented here as "Block" and "Campus.") Image courtesy SERA, Sherwood and Arup.
In the Central Corridor, there are several studies already underway to assess the potential for such sustainable infrastructure as district energy, district water, greening and habitat connectivity, and waste management. Over the next few months at SPUR, Central Corridor stakeholders, including property owners and city agencies, are meeting to establish an ecological vision for the neighborhood, and to figure out how an eco-district organization should be run. There are several models for this, including business management associations, and special tax districts, like community benefits districts, that allow property owners to tax themselves while keeping control of how pooled funds are spent.Through it all, we should not forget that downtown San Francisco is already the most sustainable job center in the region due to its walkable, compact nature and its rich transit infrastructure. Besides making the Central Corridor more sustainable, we should make sure that the larger neighborhood rezoning process provides enough housing and employment space to meet our future needs. At SPUR we will be following these parallel processes to ensure the best possible outcome for the Central Corridor, the city and indeed the whole region’s sustainability goals.
- April 29, 2013
What You Need to Know About Plan Bay Area
By Egon Terplan and Ethan LavineSPUR has written several times about the development of Plan Bay Area since the planning process was kicked off a few years ago. Last month, the draft of the plan was finally released. What are the highlights in this 158-page plan and the accompanying 1,300-page environmental impact report? This post provides a summary of the Plan Bay Area draft and some of its key points. Keep an eye on the news feed at spur.org in the coming weeks for our official comment letter on the plan and what we think could be done to make it even stronger.
Update: SPUR's comment letter is now published >>
Recap: What Is Plan Bay Area, and Why Is It Important?Plan Bay Area is a regional statement and projection about what the Bay Area could look like in 2040. Over the next 30 years, the Bay Area is projected to add 2.148 million new residents and 1.12 million new jobs. The planning questions inherent in Plan Bay Area are: Where will these new residents live? Where will they work? How will they get around? What percentage will live in apartments? What percentage will work in dense transit-oriented job centers? Accommodating this growth in a more sustainable way is at the heart of Plan Bay Area.
The emphasis on sustainability is a requirement under Senate Bill 375, California’s 2008 Climate Protection Act, which required that regions in California produce a Sustainable Communities Strategy (ours is Plan Bay Area). These strategies are intended to do the following:
1. Identify where all of the region’s future population — at all income levels — will work and live over the next 25 years.
2. Set forth a forecasted development pattern, know as the “preferred scenario.”
3. Accommodate the future growth in a way that reduces per capita greenhouse gas emissions. The Bay Area is tasked with reducing per capita emissions by 7 percent in 2020 and 15 percent in 2035.
4. Describe a transportation investment strategy and transportation network that supports the regional land use pattern and reduces per capita greenhouse gas emissions.
Plan Bay Area formally combines two existing regional planning processes, the Regional Transportation Plan and the Regional Housing Needs Allocation. The goal is to better link regional transportation planning and funding with a projection for future land use. The Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) is a multi-decade statement of the region’s likely transportation spending projects and needs, produced every four years. This year’s RTP identifies $289 billion of likely funding over the life of the plan. The Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) identifies the number of market rate and affordable housing units that each jurisdiction in the region is required to plan for over the upcoming seven years. The RHNA will be updated several times during the life of Plan Bay Area.
Plan Bay Area is the product of two regional agencies:
· The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the regional transportation funding agency for the Bay Area and the agency that historically produced the RTP.
· The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), the council of governments responsible for growth projections and housing allocations and the agency responsible for RHNA.
Plan Bay Area is important because it seeks to describe a future Bay Area where the average person produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions from driving and where we plan for enough housing for the region’s expected growth. Importantly, it must accomplish those two goals in a way that reduces per capita emissions. Managing these important goals is intended to change the way existing regional agencies go about their planning work and lead to a more holistic approach to transportation planning. Once the plan is adopted, future housing and mixed-use projects that are consistent with the adopted plan will have a more streamlined approval process under the California Environmental Quality Act.
What Plan Bay Area Isn’t
An important caveat about the plan’s powers: Though it is regional in scope, Plan Bay Area does nothing to change local land use decisions or powers. ABAG and MTC have no direct power to decide where future development will actually occur or what natural lands will be preserved.
Plan Bay Area is perhaps misnamed since it is not a “plan” in the traditional sense of describing specific zoning changes at a neighborhood scale. Instead, the plan is more of a statement about growth that local governments can look to when making land use and development decisions. The plan has slightly more direct power to affect travel patterns because it prioritizes transportation investments such as transit projects and policy suggestions, including increased bridge tolls and a potential driving fee based on miles traveled.
What Are Highlights of the Draft Plan?The Plan Bay Area draft includes performance targets, long-range demographic and economic forecasts, and investment strategies for everything from road maintenance to climate projection programs, such as a regional electric vehicle charger network.
What are the most significant elements of the plan? Let’s take a closer look at how the draft seeks to shape and reshape the region’s land use patterns and transportation network.
Land Use: Almost no greenfield development
A major highlight of the Plan Bay Area draft is that it accommodates virtually all new development within the existing urbanized footprint of the Bay Area. In other words, it projects a region that does not sprawl further. It assumes continued protection of agricultural lands and enforcement of existing urban growth boundaries.
Where will all of the new growth happen? The Plan Bay Area draft directs growth first and foremost to the jurisdictions that have expressed a willingness to accommodate new housing and employment centers. In recent years, some local governments have worked with MTC and ABAG to identify and establish priority development areas, or PDAs, in their jurisdictions that will accommodate infill housing development and employment centers. The plan projects that PDAs will accommodate 80 percent of housing growth and 66 percent of job growth.The central cities also become a major recipient of growth under the plan. Nearly 40 percent of new jobs will be accommodated in San Francisco (190,740 new jobs), San Jose (146,680 new jobs) and Oakland (85,240 new jobs) between 2010 and 2040. Two-thirds of housing would locate in just 15 of the more than 100 cities in the region.
The draft of Plan Bay Area would direct two-thirds of the growth in housing between 2010 and 2040 to 15 cities in the region. Source: Draft Plan Bay Area, March 2013. Pg. 11.
Transportation: Almost all funds for maintenance, not expansion
Plan Bay Area identifies $289 billion in available funds for transportation projects over the next three decades and prioritizes how they should be spent. More than half of the total funding (53 percent) comes from local sources, like sales taxes, that are often already dedicated to specific investments. An additional 32 percent come from state and federal sources. MTC directly controls the remaining 15 percent of the funding. However, the agency also has significant influence on how the federal and state funds are directed because it serves as a gatekeeper of sorts for directing funds to regional transportation projects.
How would the draft of Plan Bay Area spend this $289 billion? By adopting a “fix it first” policy, MTC is dedicating the vast majority of funding (86 percent) to the maintenance and improvement of the region’s existing transportation system. While the Bay Area already devotes more of its funding to maintenance than other regions in California, this is an increase from about 80 percent in prior plans.
Of the $289 billion in funding, $232 billion is already committed to existing projects. This leaves $57 billion in so-called discretionary funds that can go to one of many projects based on future policy decisions and criteria. For example, the draft plan also includes $14 billion in the new One Bay Area Grant program, which will provide flexible funding for transportation infrastructure largely to support growth in the PDAs. The grants are intended to assist jurisdictions to plan for new transit-oriented housing projects, and also to invest in improvements to infrastructure necessary to support infill development, such as new bicycle lanes and more pedestrian-friendly sidewalks.
Overall, 62 percent of the plan’s funding is devoted to transit, with most of that going to maintenance and a small share for expansion. The plan identifies $114 billion for transit operations and argues that this level of investment will fully fund transit operating needs. It also identifies $30 billion for transit capital projects out of a total need of $47 billion (leaving a shortfall of $17 billion). And it includes a new $500 million “Transit Performance Initiative” whose goal is to support improvements on major transit corridors that will likely see future growth.
Some of the big transit projects in the plan include $8.3 billion for BART to San Jose, $4.2 billion for extending Caltrain to the Transbay Transit Center and $1.6 billion for Muni’s Central Subway. The plan also includes nearly $6.7 billion for expanding MTC’s express lanes (i.e., freeway carpool lanes) in more parts of the region and $1.5 billion for Valley Transit Authority express lanes in Santa Clara County. Other road projects include nearly $2.3 billion in freeway performance funds (such as metering lights) and $2 billion for the Presidio Parkway.
Source: Draft Plan Bay Area, March 2013. Pg. 13.
Policy: The plan acknowledges that some policy changes will be necessary for it to suceed
Without changes to the region’s policy structure, the plan will not likely be achieved. For example, Plan Bay Area assumes a continuation of the same level of investment that took place under California’s redevelopment program. But with redevelopment agencies shuttered last year, there is no such funding mechanism in place today.
Plan Bay Area identifies some of the initial policy projections worth considering. Many of these are ideas SPUR has advocated:
- Reduce the fiscalization of land use (by exploring tools like tax-base sharing).
- Establish a replacement for redevelopment.
- Support lowering the threshold for local transportation sales tax measures from two-thirds to 55 percent.
- Implement some form of road pricing, both through charging for single occupant vehicles to drive in carpool lanes and establishing a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee, where drivers would pay an annual fee based on how many miles they drove that year.
What Are the Alternatives to the Plan, and How Do They Differ?
If you’ve been following Plan Bay Area, you may have heard about the alternatives to the plan — variations on the draft version that put forward policies designed to achieve somewhat different objectives and outcomes. As part of the environmental review process for Plan Bay Area, ABAG and MTC review the environmental impact of their draft against the three alternative plans as well as a business-as-usual approach.
The Plan Bay Area draft provides a summary of the differences between the alternative plans (pg. 114):
In addition to the “preferred scenario” described in the Plan Bay Area document and a control scenario of adopting no plan at all, there are three other scenarios tested:
- The Transit Priority Focus alternative, which focuses more growth in areas with higher densities and existing transit.
- The Enhanced Network of Communities alternative, which projects a more dispersed land use pattern and higher population, housing and employment totals.
- The Environment, Equity and Jobs alternative, which focuses more development and low-income housing growth in jobs-rich communities near transit that are often located farther away from the urban core.
Some of the key policy variables tested in the different alternatives are:
- Instituting a development fee in areas with high VMT rates and using proceeds to invest in growth in lower VMT areas
- Establishing higher tolls for peak traffic times on the Bay Bridge
- Changing funding for transit
- Deciding whether or not to build new carpool lanes
- Increasing the projection for total housing production (which would result in higher overall job growth
On most measures examined in the EIR, the differences between the draft plan and the various alternatives are fairly slight. All four plans are projected to reduce per capita carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks, house the region’s projected population growth and increase the gross regional product. These often-minor differences in performance make sense, as all four plans overlap a great deal in their proposed policies for land use and transportation investments. The great challenge in weighing the merits of the draft plan against the alternatives comes in making sense of the impact of multiple, sometimes overlapping, policies aimed at achieving the same general goals.
What Happens Next?
Now that the draft is out, the public has an opportunity to provide comments in response to both the Plan Bay Area draft and the EIR. Public hearings on the draft plan are underway, with one scheduled in each of the Bay Area’s nine counties. Public comments can also be submitted by email. The comment period ends May 16, and final adoption of the plan is schedule for this summer.
SPUR will respond in detail to the Plan Bay Area draft in a comment letter to MTC and ABAG. Keep an eye on the newsfeed at spur.org for our full analysis.
- April 25, 2013
Can SF’s Transportation Task Force Point the Way Forward?
By Ratna Amin, Transportation Policy Director
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has selected SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf and Monique Zmuda of the SF Office of the Controller to co-chair his 2030 Transportation Task Force. While the mayor has made it clear that fixing Muni one of his top priorities, the group will look broadly at both local and regional transportation needs. Like other task forces the mayor has convened, this one will tackle a seemingly intractable problem: transportation funding.
The group’s goal is to “identify transportation capital priorities for the city and connect these plans and priorities to existing and new funding sources.” This will include evaluating existing capital plans, proposed capital plans and visioning for other potential plans. By the task force’s final meeting in October, the body is expected to present recommendations to the mayor. The group will meet eight times, not including scheduled site visits to bus and trolley facilities and a light rail site tour.
San Francisco’s local and regional transportation infrastructure is largely deteriorating. This includes streets, transit vehicles, rails and numerous other facilities, all of which have enormous funding needs just to maintain current conditions. And that doesn’t even address the capacity increases needed to accommodate the 2 million new people expected in the Bay Area by 2030.
While local funding sources can be cultivated to address some of these needs, it will be nearly impossible to fund them all. At the most recent task force meeting, city staff detailed a number of competing priorities:- The Department of Public Works (DPW) explained what happens to streets if you don’t “fix it first.” A street block costs $240,600 over 75 years to maintain at excellent condition on average. However, allowing it to deteriorate until it reaches poor condition, then maintaining it at only fair condition on average, would cost $872,800 over 75 years. Street quality affects all travel modes: walking, cycling, transit, autos and trucks. DPW has more than $1 billion in deferred capital renewal needs, i.e. investments that preserve or extend the useful life of facilities or infrastructure.
- The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) explained that its network, fleets and facilities are in urgent need of upgrading in order to meet the city’s ambitious goals to increase transit ridership. SFMTA delivers $828 million in services annually but needs $50 million more per year just to deliver its current transit service plan — and it will need another $20 million to deliver other key services like “complete streets,” i.e. amenities that accommodate pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. At the same time, SFMTA needs $510 million per year to maintain its assets in a “state of good repair” but is currently funded at $260 million per year. As with streets, delaying maintenance on assets like trolley buses, or waiting for them to fail before repairing them, results in far greater lifetime costs.
- SFMTA’s Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP), if funded, would create 13 rapid and 10 frequent Muni bus routes. Meanwhile Muni provides services that may not be cost effective: 70 percent of Muni’s stops exceed the agency’s stop-spacing standards. (All of the rapid and frequent routes will meet those standards.)
- SFMTA showed that the city’s significant mode shift to bicycle use (a more than 71 percent increase in the number of people biking between 2006 and 2011) has come at a very low capital and operating cost. But a $170 million gap remains to fund the bicycle network scenario in the agency’s strategic plan. SFMTA also explained its process challenges: inter-agency coordination and capital project delivery continue to be slow, particularly for pedestrian projects. A task force member suggested that a pedestrian bulbout that costs the SFMTA $260,000 to construct costs half as much in New York City due to more efficient process.
The competing priorities are not limited to San Francisco: Future meetings will investigate how county capital needs are impacted by high-speed rail, the plan to modernize Caltrain and extend it to the new Transbay Transit Center, and other large transportation projects. We will report back on the recommendations that the task force develops.
- April 24, 2013
San Francisco Passes Landmark Earthquake Retrofit Law
By Sarah Karlinsky, Deputy Director
Last Thursday, on the 107th anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake, SF Mayor Ed Lee signed the mandatory soft-story retrofit program into law. SPUR has long advocated for this legislation, which will help make San Francisco more resilient in a major earthquake.
Soft-story buildings are those with large openings for storefront windows or garages, which cause the ground floor to be weak, leaving it vulnerable to damage or even collapse in an earthquake. The legislation focuses on wood-frame apartment buildings with three or more stories and five or more units that were built before modern code changes adopted in 1978. San Francisco’s Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety (CAPSS) estimates that at least 2,800 of these buildings have a soft-story condition. Combined they are home to roughly 58,000 people and 2,000 businesses.
Currently, these buildings pose a significant threat to San Francisco’s ability to recover from a disaster. The city estimates that between 43 and 85 percent of the 2,800 soft-story buildings would be tagged as “unsafe” after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake on the San Andreas fault, and a quarter of those would be expected to collapse. If these buildings are retrofitted, however, the people living in them will be much less likely to risk being killed, injured or displaced by a disaster.
The new law requires that buildings with potential soft-story conditions be screened and evaluated. Those determined to have soft-story conditions will then need to complete upgrades over a period of several years.
SPUR has written several reports about the role that the existing housing stock can play in enhancing or undermining the city’s resilience. Resilience — the ability to respond to an earthquake emergency and to recover without lasting disruption — can be measured by the speed and completeness with which essential functions, and eventually routine operations, are restored. We identified a goal that 95 percent of San Francisco’s housing should be strong enough that people can stay in their homes after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake. One of our key recommendations to achieve this goal was the development of a mandatory soft-story retrofit program for wood-frame multifamily housing.
Estimates show that only 75 percent of the city’s current housing stock will provide adequate shelter for residents after a major earthquake. This means that San Francisco is at risk of losing its most important asset — its people. This new law helps to greatly increase the amount of housing that will be safe enough for people to inhabit after the next earthquake.
We thank the mayor and the SF Board of Supervisors, as well as the earthquake safety implementation team including Patrick Otellini, Laurence Kornfield and Micah Hilt, for their leadership on this important issue. - April 2, 2013
Three State Bills Worth Watching: Urban Ag, Farm Protection and a Soda Tax
by Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager
Of the many food and agriculture bills California legislators have introduced this year, three stand out for their potential impact on the Bay Area’s food system: a tax incentive to promote the use of private land for urban agriculture; a change to CEQA to require agricultural land preservation for certain projects; and a statewide sugary-beverage tax. Here’s a closer look at these bills, which we will be tracking this year.
Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone Act (AB 551)
Introduced by San Francisco’s recently elected assembly member Phil Ting, this legislation would incentivize the use of private land for urban agriculture by reducing the property tax assesment on qualifying parcels dedicated to city farming. The bill would permit counties to pass ordinances establishing “Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones” within their boundaries. In these incentive zones, private property owners would be eligible to apply to enter a contract with the county restricting their undeveloped property to urban agricultural use in exchange for a revised tax assessment based on the agricultural use of the land. The program is loosely modeled after the Williamson Act and, as with that legislation, counties could opt into the program but will not be required to do so. Similarly, private landowner participation would be completely voluntary.
One of the biggest obstacles to expanding urban agriculture within California is access to land. This legislation provides an incentive to private landowners to make more land available for urban agriculture, while at the same time enabling them to do so at a lowered cost, which is especially critical for the viability of commercial urban farms.
California Farmland Protection Act (AB 823)
According to the American Farmland Trust (AFT), each year an average of 30,000 acres of farmland is converted to non-agricultural use in California. The California Farmland Protection Act, supported by AFT, the California Climate and Agriculture Network and the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, aims to address this. The bill would require developers to either 1) permanently protect an acre of farmland for every acre they develop as part of the mitigation process in the California Environmental Quality Act or 2) build more densely. Developers could protect agricultural land through either direct purchase of a conservation easement or payment of a fee to a public or private agricultural land conservancy to purchase a conservation easement. For projects that develop farmland within city limits, the developers could also meet the requirements by demonstrating that the development achieves a density at least twice that of the statewide average. The legislation recognizes that agricultural land preservation complements infill development as a smart-growth land use strategy and attempts to permanently preserve agricultural land while also increasing the cost of sprawl.
Sweetened Beverage Tax Law (SB 622)
Though proposals for city-level taxes on sugary drinks in Richmond and El Monte failed at the ballot box in November 2012, momentum continues building for public health legislation targeting sodas and similar drinks. The Sweetened Beverage Tax Law would require distributors to pay a one-cent tax for every fluid ounce of bottled sweetened beverage or concentrate they distribute. The revenue from the tax, estimated to be more than $1.5 billion annually, would go toward a Children’s Heath Promotion Fund. The fund would then distribute 65 percent of the money through the state Department of Public Health for childhood obesity prevention efforts and childhood dental programs, run by the department, community groups and medical providers. The remaining 35 percent would go to school districts for public health initiatives that improve childhood nutrition and physical activity.
As the bills have only recently been introduced, SPUR has not yet taken a position on any of them. Though the fate of each of these bills in the legislature is unclear, each illustrates that California continues to be at the forefront of developing food and agriculture policy that intersects with the areas of land-use, economic development and public health.
Read Earth Island Journal's article about the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone legislation >>
- March 25, 2013
Bay Area Bike Sharing Moves Closer to Reality
By Molly Schremmer
After a number of delays, the wheels are finally turning on a bike-sharing program for the Bay Area. Earlier this month, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) signed a contract with Alta Bike Share, which runs successful programs in Washington, D.C., and Boston. A Bay Area pilot program will launch this summer for two years of testing with 700 bikes at 70 locations from San Jose to San Francisco.
Bike sharing allows anyone to rent a bicycle from a self-serve kiosk and drop it off at another location, providing guaranteed bike access without worries about damage, theft or maintenance. Programs have been geared toward tourists in cities like Paris, but they also have great potential to help locals solve the “last mile” problem — the difficulty of getting commuters from a transit hub to their final destination.
The Bay Area’s pilot will be the first regional program in the country — a detail that created complications and delayed the program, originally expected to begin in 2012. Structured around Caltrain, it will put an estimated 50 locations in downtown San Francisco and about two dozen more near Caltrain stations in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose. BAAQMD is seeking sponsorships to expand the system. Meanwhile, SF Supervisor Scott Wiener is lobbying to extend the dowtown San Francisco part of the pilot across the city. A successful bikesharing program requires a strong business model and considers: close proximity to increased population and job densities; an optimal distribution of bikes (ideally around 50 percent bikes to 50 percent open docks); locations no more than one-half mile apart; and affordable and strategic pricing that promotes ridership.
Locating the bike sharing stations around Caltrain has the potential to change the state of commuting in the Bay Area. As we noted in our report The Urban Future of Work, 80 percent of office buildings in the Bay Area are within three miles of regional transit, but only 11 percent of commuters take transit to work. The option to add a short bike ride to the end of a trip could turn rail commuting into a viable option for a much greater number of people. Though it’s focused on Caltrain stations, the program’s concentration of downtown SF locations could also make it useful to BART riders, who are not yet allowed to bring bicycles on trains during rush hour. We look forward to testing the possibilities this summer.
- March 22, 2013
Good Government Awards: How Ted Egan Fixed the Business Tax
SPUR’s 33rd annual Good Government Awards, held March 19, 2013, honored City of San Francisco employees who have performed exceptionally, becoming models for other agencies and cities around the country.
Ted Egan was a key player in the effort to reform the payroll tax system in San Francisco. His work culminated in Proposition E, the fall 2012 ballot measure that created a tiered gross receipts tax. Prop. E’s passage, which ended a decade of attempts to devise a tax structure that supports business growth, is the result of more than six months of outreach and negotiations with businesses of all shapes and sizes by the Controller’s Office. Ted has served as the chief economist for the Controller’s Office for five years and is a trusted voice for good government in San Francisco.
Watch our video on Ted’s work:
Tags: good government
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