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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.

Could the Caltrain station and railyards at 4th and King streets be San Francisco’s next big planning opportunity? The current station is the node that links San Francisco to Silicon Valley and the peninsula. It’s also the hub of an extraordinary network of Muni rail lines: the N Judah, the T Third and soon the Central Subway, which will run down 4th Street before heading underground to Chinatown and North Beach. In addition, the area is served by numerous Muni bus lines. Very few places in the country enjoy this level of transit accessibility.

On the same site as the station are the Caltrain railyards: 19 acres stretching from 4th Street to 7th Street between King and Townsend. The railyards form an enormous barrier between Mission Bay and SoMA. Pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles can only cross the site at one intersection, and a tangle of 280 freeway ramps clutters the southwest edge of the site. Putting the right type of development here could knit together the surrounding neighborhoods, capitalize on the extensive transit access — and even help pay for important transportation projects.

The Caltrain station and railyards at 4th and King and surrounding neighborhoods. Image courtesy SF Planning Department.

A significant amount of regional transit planning is currently taking place in this area. Caltrain will be extended from 4th and King to San Francisco’s downtown, terminating at the new Transbay Transit Center. Caltrain itself is undergoing a transformation, replacing diesel cars with electric ones that will run more quickly and allow for faster turnarounds, thereby enhancing service. And high-speed rail will ultimately connect San Francisco to Los Angeles, with multiple trains per day stopping at 4th and King before heading to the Transbay Transit Center.

In our 2007 report A New Transit First Neighborhood, SPUR explored the opportunity to develop new buildings over the Caltrain station (using air rights, the rights to develop over a piece of land or infrastructure) as an opportunity to pay for expanding Caltrain and bringing high-speed rail into the Transbay Transit Center. Maximizing the transit oriented development opportunities at the 4th and King railyards could support one-time and on-going revenue for both transportation projects while also helping to better weave together Mission Bay, West SoMA and the Central Corridor.

Now the San Francisco Planning Department is considering ways to build on the railyards. The department recently released a report analyzing development opportunities for the site as a means to pay for transit improvements while knitting together the fabric of the adjacent neighborhoods at the same time.

Developing the Railyards: Three Options
The study outlines two development scenarios for the site: one where the air rights above the railyards are developed while the railyards remain in use (which would require decking over the railyards), and another where the railyards are moved to a new location allowing the entire site to be developed as a blank slate. The second scenario has two variations.

Here’s a summary of the three options:

Scenario 1: Decking Over the Railyards
The air rights scenario is consistent with existing high-speed rail and Caltrain plans, which presume that the railyards will remain in their current location. However, the need to deck over the railyards presents significant design and construction challenges, curtailing the ability to do good urban design along the edges of the site and limiting the amount of money the city could recapture for transit and other public infrastructure improvements.

Scenario 2.1: Moving the Railyards, Keeping the Freeway
The two “no railyards” scenarios present much better options to develop the site. The first of these assumes that the freeway ramps will remain as they are. This option allows for a better mix of uses and a better pedestrian experience than Scenario 1. It also allows for much more development capacity. However the value of the land is hampered by its proximity to Highway 280.

Concept for Scenario 2.1, in which the railyards are moved. Image courtesy SF Planning Department.

Scenario 2.2: Moving the Railyards, Removing the Freeway to 16th Street

This scenario is similar to the one above, except that the urban design and pedestrian experience would be even better due to the removal of the freeway ramps. Development becomes even more valuable when Highway 280 is replaced with a surface boulevard, allowing for greater value recapture.

Concept for Scenario 2.2, in which the railyards are moved and the freeway ramps are removed. Image courtesy SF Planning Department.

In Scenarios 2.1 and 2.2 the potential value that could be created for the public sector ranges from $148 million to $228 million, presenting a substantial opportunity to fund transportation improvements in the area.

SPUR is excited about these proposals, particularly the ones outlined in Scenario 2. We hope that that San Francisco will begin to take the steps needed to bring them to reality.

Read the 4th and King Railyards Study >>

It’s been an interesting month for BART. Not only did the transit system mark its 40th birthday on September 11, but during the week prior it experienced four of its top-ten most crowded days ever. Ridership exceeded 400,000 on three of those days, and the fourth, September 6, was a day with no special events to boost regular numbers.
 

BART's 10 All-Time Highest Ridership Days

Chart courtesy Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)

This explosion of ridership followed on the heels of a pilot project that, every Friday in August, lifted the commute-hour restrictions on bringing bikes onto BART. The experiment was a test of the feasibility of relaxing the existing rush-hour bike blackout, and by all accounts it went smoothly, aided by the generally low ridership of Fridays in August.

BART’s bike plan, published in July, aims to double the number of passengers who reach the system by bicycle (from 4 to 8 percent) by 2022. The hope is to attract more bikes and fewer cars, which would reduce the need to build expensive car parking and contribute to regional goals to reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions.

On its face, a plan to make trains more accommodating to bicycle commuters sounds great. But in terms of transit capacity, bikes present a challenge. One bike generally takes up the space of three people. And with ridership up, the system is increasingly struggling to fit commuters onto crowded trains and manage platform circulation during peak hours.

Transit best practices aim to maximize rider capacity in the most constrained parts of a transportation network. This usually means making more room for people on trains at peak times by removing the things — including seating and bikes — that reduce space for riders. This is the same argument that supports replacing automobile lanes with more room for bikes, which consume a tenth of the road space per person that cars do. 

BART Manager of Access Programs Steve Beroldo acknowledges that the more crowded the system gets, the more difficult it is to accommodate bikes. He says some of the first lessons BART is taking away from the pilot concern ways to make more room for bicyclists by removing seats near the doors in all cars and encouraging modifications to queuing on platforms, in order to improve flow.

Optimizing bicycle accommodation on board trains is only one of BART’s strategies to improve bike access. Others include improving cyclist circulation within BART stations, increasing the amount of bicycle parking, helping to assure bicycle access beyond BART’s boundaries and supporting programs to encourage bike safety and awareness. SFStreetsblog provides great analysis of the plans, noting its emphasis on expanding secure bike parking.  

For everyday commuting, secure, sheltered bike parking is a strategy many modern countries prioritize. The Dutch rarely allow bikes on any of their trains, instead providing abundant secure, affordable, front-door bike parking at almost all rail stations. BART’s bike plan notes that “providing plentiful and convenient bike parking is also the most effective tool BART has to encourage as many passengers as possible to leave their bicycles at the station, rather than bringing them onboard.” Bike stations at Embarcadero, Downtown Berkeley and Fruitvale BART stations are a small start toward an excellent network of bike-parking facilities. Additional bike-parking at Civic Center is expected to come online by the end of the year.

Bike parking in Amsterdam. Image courtesy Flickr user Crystian Cruz

A strong regional bike-sharing program could also play a role in improving the number of users who reach BART by bicycle without needing to bring their bikes onto trains. Washington, D.C., Paris, Montreal and other cities have demonstrated that bike-sharing programs work very well in conjunction with transit, particularly for irregular trips (errand-running, meetings, etc.). According to Peter Harnik, a longtime biking advocate with the Trust for Public Land, “The bike-sharing program in D.C. has been spectacularly successful and is physically transforming the area into a much more bikeable and bike-friendly region.” So far, BART’s approach to bike sharing has been to adopt a wait-and-see approach as a long-anticipated regional pilot gets underway this year in San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.

On its first day of operations in 1972, BART drew 15,000 riders. To transit advocates, it’s encouraging to see the great growth in ridership numbers that had led to the 415,000 experienced on Monday of this week. Getting more people to leave their cars at home and ride transit is good for public health, equity, environmental quality and productivity.

But as BART looks forward to hitting 500,000 riders in one day, we have to weigh carefully how bikes are integrated with increasingly crowded trains. The reality of the Bay Area’s development pattern is that, after their transit trip ends, people will often still need to travel several miles to their final destination. Our mild weather makes bicycling a great way to solve this “last mile” problem. Whether we redesign future BART cars to hold more bikes during peak hours or instead focus on a better system of secure bike parking or bike sharing at stations is an important debate.

Oakland and San Leandro have voted to approve a 9.5-mile bus rapid transit (BRT) line in the East Bay. The $150 to $175 million project will include dedicated center lanes for rapid buses on International Boulevard between downtown Oakland and San Leandro. Although the project will only have dedicated lanes for two blocks in San Leandro and excludes a direct rapid connection to Berkeley, the project is now closer to final approval from AC Transit’s board of directors. With this approval, AC Transit can begin preliminary engineering and design work, with construction to begin in 2014 and service to start in 2016. 

BRT projects are in the works around the Bay Area, but progress has been intermittent. After a delay, San Francisco recently approved a preferred design for Van Ness BRT and has conceptual designs for Geary BRT. The Van Ness project is expected to open in 2017, and the Geary project in 2019.

Meanwhile, the South Bay's plan to implement BRT on El Camino Real hit a hurdle when the Sunnyvale City Council voted not to study dedicated lanes for the project’s environmental impact report. The cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View and Los Altos have not yet decided on a preferred street configuration, but Mountain View and Los Altos have indicated a preference for buses to mix with cars and trucks in the far right lane, next to curb parking. This has prompted Vally Transportation Authority staff to recommend continuing the project with dedicated transit lanes only in Santa Clara, as the revised project would still provide benefits of faster travel and increased ridership with lower operational and construction costs.
 

Status of Bus Rapid Transit Projects in the Bay Area

Sources: AC Transit, SFCTA’s Van Ness and Geary pages, Valley Rapid, VTA
 

The mash-up of dedicated, curb-side and mixed-flow lanes for BRT lines is indicative of the difficulty in gaining consensus on a transit corridor that spans multiple neighborhoods and cities. However, dedicated median bus lanes are the standard for BRT, as they minimize conflicts with other vehicles and increases reliability, thereby increasing transit speeds and saving transit agencies money. While we recognize the need to consider local conditions and concerns, we hope cities will keep in mind the regional benefits of providing a rapid transit corridor. BRT with dedicated lanes could form the backbone of a regional bus network that would connect and complement existing and future transit and land use investments.