Publications

Ever since regional government was first proposed for the Bay Area after World War II, leaders have debated the best governance model for managing a growing region. Today, the basic governance structure in place for regional transportation planning and funding has not changed since the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) was formed in 1970. Currently, all counties in the Bay Area have at least one seat on the MTC and larger counties have two. But the existing seats are not evenly distributed according to county size.

SPUR believes that reforming MTC governance is appropriate and that larger counties are justified in feeling under-represented. We endorse a legislative proposal that would give additional seats on MTC to San Jose and Oakland — but this is far from a complete solution. We think a more equitable reform would be to shift the way votes are taken within MTC, and we call for the commission to implement weighted voting. We think weighted votes should incorporate both the population and employment of each county and potentially include trip ends or other metrics of travel in the region. Weighted voting would make voting on MTC more objectively representative and also make MTC governance consistent with other regions throughout California.

High unemployment rates and slow employment growth continue to threaten our economy. Once-successful sectors are in decline. Even the workplace is in transition. New technologies and ways of working have disrupted everything from the speed of a typical product cycle to the amount of real estate a company needs.

But as our economy changes, the emerging story is also a positive one. While many formerly robust industries are struggling, the Bay Area’s knowledge services sector is growing quickly, led by companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. These firms are finding that they need the vibrancy and density of an urban-style environment in order to collaborate, innovate and stay competitive. Despite technology that allows us to work remotely, the role of the office is becoming even more important.

In this SPUR report, we make the case that there is a strong link between density and job growth. In fact, we believe that locating jobs closer to transit — and closer to one another — will be key to the Bay Area’s long-term economic growth. We recommend 20 strategies for increasing density, strengthening the regional economy and promoting job growth.

In a letter to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission on June 21, 2011, SPUR recommended that the scenarios for the Bay Area's Sustainable Communities Strategy/Regional Transportation Plan support more concentrated growth patterns.

California cities anticipating the rewards of new high-speed rail (HSR) stations may fail to reap the full economic and environmental benefits without key land-use planning, according to SPUR's new study.

For the 26 cities designated as future HSR stops, the new statewide rail system presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to reshape their local economies and set the course for more compact, less automobile-dependent growth. SPUR's study, Beyond the Tracks, identifies specific land-use planning strategies that will contribute to the success of HSR and help cities, and ultimately California, realize the full potential of the multi-billion-dollar system.

Each spring, SPUR takes an annual city trip to learn about urbanist strategies that are working — or not working — in other cities around the world. This year we turned our lense to our own region and hopped on a Caltrain baby bullet to San Jose. With a population of about one million, San Jose is now the largest city in Northern California. In a generation it could have twice the population of San Francisco.

Here's a look at the differences and similiarities today between the populations of San Jose and San Franicsco.

Click any image to enlarge.

Sources: All data from 2006-2008 American Community Survey, Census Quick Facts, except the following: Population: San Jose Planning Data, ABAG Building Momentum; Share of Region: Bay Area Census, Bay Area Census: San Francisco County, San Jose PLanning Data, ABAG Building Momentum; Work Location: 2010 San Jose Economic Develpment Strategy.

Today, San Jose is the third largest city in California and the 10th largest city in the United States, with a population of just more than a million people, well in excess of San Francisco's population of nearly 800,000. In contrast to the political culture of San Francisco, in which every building is fought over and where population growth is modest, San Jose's willingness to grow is extraordinary.

From its origins as California's first urban settlement (founded in 1777 as the first Spanish pueblo), to its role as the first state capital in 1850, to a period as an agricultural market center for Santa Clara Valley (similar, perhaps, to Modesto or Merced), San Jose grew slowly for its first two centuries. Then after WWII, as Silicon Valley turned the South Bay into one of the great economic centers of the world, San Jose grew from 95,280 residents in 1950 to nearly 460,000 residents in 1970. Apricot orchards to the north gave way to research parks, and the Santa Clara Valley needed a city to house its growing middle class workforce.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, San Jose expanded aggressively by annexing large tracts of land. Dutch Hamann, the city manager from 1950 to 1969, led the annexation movement, vowing to make San Jose "the Los Angeles of the North."

The core of San Jose and its surrounding neighborhoods were laid out before the age of the automobile. It had a downtown, an urban street grid and other attributes of traditional town planning. In fact, San Francisco and San Jose had somewhat similar transit patterns until the 1910s, even though San Francisco was significantly more populous at that time. San Jose's downtown electric streetcar network was extensive, as was the Peninsula electric interurban trolley network that connected most of Santa Clara County.

But in the 1910s, the cities moved in opposite directions: At the same time San Franciscans were voting to tax themselves to purchase their city's privately operated transit lines and operate them as a municipal service, the Southern Pacific Railroad was acquiring San Jose's streetcar lines. As Southern Pacific's streetcars declined starting in the 1920s, three private bus operators worked to put Southern Pacific out of the passenger business. They too declined as cities increasingly oriented their land uses toward automobiles after World War II, leaving San Jose with no strong transit framework along which to orient development. San Francisco, meanwhile, continued to make major transit investments throughout the postwar era, allowing the older pedestrian fabric to persist. In other cities, including San Jose, much of it was destroyed.

Most of San Jose's growth occurred after the beginning of the age of the automobile. Residential areas in this age were developed without neighborhood shopping streets. The city grew as a series of disconnected "projects." Uses were segregated from one another. Today, the dilemma for San Jose is how to retrofit this suburban fabric—to make the city more walkable, to reduce emissions from driving and to accommodate the enormous growth that is still coming to the region.

San Jose is projected to add more growth within its limits than any other city in the Bay Area. If the environmental and social values of today were not enough to force a change to the planning context of the city, the need to accommodate this growth will certainly compel the city to take a new look at densities, land use mixes, parking requirements and all the other rules that govern new development.

San Jose's smart growth challenges

During the postwar years, San Jose grew outward rather than upward. It is now 174 square miles compared to San Francisco's 46. San Jose is not bound by water, and, in theory, could grow endlessly outward. However, an anti-growth reaction to the effects of rapid development emerged in the 1970s, ultimately leading to the adoption of an urban growth boundary at the base of the surrounding foothills. Then, in the 1990s, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure designed to lock in the urban growth boundary and restrict development in the foothills.

As the culture of planning in America changed to embrace "smart growth" in the mid- to late 1980s, San Jose civic leaders began the long process of figuring out how to create a more "center-oriented," walkable place. San Jose built light-rail lines. It rezoned areas next to light-rail lines. Densities gradually increased. By 2007, nearly 80 percent of new housing in San Jose was built to be occupied by more than one family. And compared with more anti-growth communities, such as San Francisco, the housing in San Jose remained relatively affordable. San Jose also worked diligently to channel growth into its downtown, making the entire downtown a redevelopment area to facilitate the reinvestment of future tax growth in downtown infrastructure. The commitment to downtown was so great, in fact, that San Jose merged all its redevelopment areas into one area, allowing it to funnel most of the tax increment from North San Jose into downtown.

According to the Association of Bay Area Governments, San Jose is projected to add roughly 400,000 people and 340,000 jobs between 2010 and 2035. The City of San Jose has done its own analysis, projecting that it will add 471,000 people between now and 2040. In fact, San Jose is expected to add more housing and jobs than any city in the entire region. (Compare this to San Francisco, which is projected to add 159,000 people and 238,100 jobs by 2035).

The City of San Jose is doing a remarkable job of planning for this growth on the backbone of its growing transit network. But there are incredible challenges to creating walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods in San Jose:

• Due to San Jose's rapid expansion in the postwar period, large swaths of the city are composed of auto-oriented, single-family subdivisions. The "bones" of these subdivisions resist retrofitting: There is no real street grid, no walkable mixture of uses and the parcels, having been subdivided, cannot easily be assembled for redevelopment at higher densities. It is not always possible to increase densities near transit. Instead, opportunities depend on a happy coincidence of uneconomic transit infrastructure—typically, underutilized commercial parcels that can be assembled for mixed-use development.
• Many of the major streets in San Jose are wide, auto-oriented arterials, and creating walkable neighborhoods would require major reconfigurations. Can the streets themselves be retrofitted when we know from our own experience in San Francisco that it often costs millions of dollars per block to widen sidewalks and put in street trees?
• The city has been able to attract substantial investment in new housing into its downtown, but has not been as successful attracting jobs there, with the notable exception of the Adobe headquarters. Areas such as North San Jose, Edenvale and Evergreen remain the employment centers—and, of course, Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Palo Alto continue to be significant employment locations for the broader region. Unless employment growth is redirected from these outlying locations, both in San Jose and around the region, San Jose's downtown will not emerge as a major employment center. Should the city keep trying, or should it treat its downtown as a residential core, more like Vancouver, British Columbia or San Diego—with the distinction that the city's job center of North San Jose is but a short street car ride away?
• Often, San Jose's neighborhoods with the best urban bones are older, prewar neighborhoods that are the least willing to accept new, denser growth. This dynamic is familiar to San Franciscans: Current residents of a neighborhood don't want it to change. The "pro-growth" attitudes of San Jose's civic leaders do not translate into a greater willingness of residents to tolerate physical change in their own neighborhoods.
• The success of Santana Row, a master-planned retail and residential development that emulates many traditional city design principles, competes with downtown. Santana Row is crowded with pedestrians in a way that downtown San Jose only experiences at night around key attractions. Again, San Jose is faced with the enormous challenge of creating a center when there are so many competing locations in the South Bay.

Boulevards and villages: a smarter growth pattern?

The City of San Jose is grappling with these challenges in an update to its General Plan now underway, organized under the name Envision San Jose 2040. The document proposes many of the ideas that constitute orthodoxy among progressive planners today: directing growth of both jobs and housing into "urban villages" and corridors. Urban villages are intended to include a mixture of uses and have a walkable and bikable urban form. Corridors will function like urban villages, in linear form.

The plan also calls for focusing on five "grand boulevards" as connectors among neighborhoods and places with their own unique identity, including North First Street and Monterey Highway; Capitol Avenue and Capitol Expressway; Alum Rock, Santa Clara and Alameda de las Pulgas and the San Carlos, Stevens Creek and Meridian corridors. The plan also asserts that every street in the city should be a "complete street"—no small order in a city with such an auto-oriented street network.

The work to be done to fulfill this vision is dizzying in scale and ambition. The "planned and identified growth areas" show an extensive network of proposed neighborhood villages and "transit areas." These areas are in addition to the specific plan areas and employment land areas, which are in varying stages of planning completion.

How will the city take its proposed growth targets, now overlaid on a series of neighborhoods and corridors, and ensure that the zoning and urban design controls produce the urban villages it seeks? How will the private sector react to the forward-thinking goals of the city? The answers to many of these questions are unclear, but two overarching strategies may help San Jose move closer to its vision for the future:

1. Investing in long-range planning to get the details right

Given the incredible amount of planning work it will take to get the details of each urban village and corridor right, the City of San Jose should invest resources in doing the planning and urban design work necessary to make these new places successful. This includes completing detailed zoning controls and design guidelines for each neighborhood and corridor in the planned and identified growth areas. Different areas and corridors may require different types of design guidelines in order to build on assets and address deficiencies. Moreover, public investment will need to be made in each of these areas in order to enable them to thrive. The City will need to create implementation plans and funding programs for each area. With the level of growth San Jose is projected to take on in the next 30 years, it will be critical that both planning work and infrastructure investments be funded. Where will these resources come from? At a minimum, the City should look at fee programs that allow it to recoup some costs from the beneficiaries of this planning.

2. Creating a constituency for good urbanism

Part of creating great cities is promoting great cities. One of the very special characteristics of San Francisco is the fact that almost every San Franciscan has an opinion about what makes the city wonderful. The city is constantly celebrating itself and its very San Francisco-ness. Through organizations such as 1stACT Silicon Valley, San Jose is starting to do the same. But more will be needed as the city grows up. The city should continue to incubate groups that promote urbanism—such as SPUR and Livable City in San Francisco, or Great City in Seattle. Additionally, the city can continue its efforts to sponsor public lectures by great urbanists such as Jan Gehl and Enrique Penalosa.

Much of greater San Jose includes swaths of car-oriented, single-family subdivisions—where increasing densities will prove difficult, if not impossible.

Since the 1970s, San Jose has billed itself as the "Capital of Silicon Valley." It's a good tag line, but San Jose is more than that. It is a highly diverse city with an increasingly lovely downtown, great natural resources and a burgeoning urban culture, as evidenced by events such as South First Fridays (arts and culture events in San Jose's SoFA arts district) and the San Jose Bike Party (a monthly group bike ride). Given that innovation clusters—(or what the older economists would call "industrial districts"—such as Silicon Valley don't last forever, we can expect that San Jose will be an important city after Silicon Valley is history.

The fact that San Jose is so ambitious about its growth, making enormous investments in transit infrastructure while beginning the long process of retrofitting its suburban fabric, is something unique in American urban history. We admire the vision, plans and effort our friends to the south are putting into the urban transformation of their city.

Case Study #1: Santana Row
Retrofitting the suburban, car-oriented shopping center

One of the primary themes of the City of San Jose's 2040 General Plan Update is an emphasis on placemaking. One of the classic images of suburban development reflects large (and most often redundant) tract housing developments, separated by arterial roadways, with auto-serving shopping centers located at major intersections. In most cases, the neighborhood shopping center is completely separated, often by solid eight-foot walls, from the adjacent residential neighborhood, thus requiring folks to drive (even when one lives nearby, just on the other side of one of those walls).

As we strive to reduce dependency on the automobile, we must embrace plans that integrate rather than separate complementary uses, all while encouraging folks to walk, bike or use transit in lieu of their cherished automobile. This challenge is at the core of successfully retrofitting suburbia, not only here in the Bay Area but also nationwide.

The importance of placemaking

It's not surprising that San Jose is focused on this issue. There seem to be hundreds of neighborhood shopping centers citywide, almost all of them built during the post-WWII suburban era. The land beneath the now famous Santana Row is no exception. Prior to redevelopment, the 42-acre site was sprinkled with predominantly single-story, auto-serving retail buildings and large areas of surface parking—all owned and developed by a single entity.

Encouraged by the City of San Jose and taking into account the vastness of the property, plans were developed to create a vibrant village featuring great public spaces, mixed-use buildings, entertainment venues and, more recently, office space. Sound familiar? It should, as this was the approach to community planning before Henry Ford and his Model T came along.

At build-out, the development will include 18 city blocks, 680,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and entertainment space, 1,200 housing units, a hotel, parks and office space—all located along one of the most beautiful streets imaginable.

Lessons learned

Santana Row is outwardly very successful, attracting hipsters and Silicon Valley workers both day and night. Folks can shop, bar hop, eat and simply hang out and people watch in several places, and especially along the village's main street. Ironically, it's everything the City has been trying to achieve in downtown for the last 20 years. That said, it is also inwardly focused, turning its back on the adjoining streets and neighborhood. And implementation was so daunting that the original developers vow never to try it again. Although residential is the predominant land-use type, it falls short of feeling like a true neighborhood. Overall, it is a model worth repeating, primarily given its approach to sustainable land-use planning with an emphasis on placemaking and the public domain.

The big question is how this approach applies to more typical neighborhood shopping centers that are most often about half the size. As the City continues to retrofit the increasingly obsolete auto-oriented shopping centers, planners should consider these factors.

Case Study #2: Alum Rock Road
Retrofitting arterial roadways

Perhaps one of the most unsightly images of suburbia is that of a long, wide and congested arterial street supporting rows of low-slung, nondescript commercial buildings—most often with expanses of parking lots adjacent to narrow sidewalks. These corridors occur throughout the Bay Area and include such notable (and in many cases historic) street names such as El Camino Real and San Pablo Boulevard.

Up and down the west side of the Bay, El Camino Real connects San Francisco and San Jose, ultimately making its way to Southern California. Although there are exceptions, the predominant land-use pattern reflects post-World War II commercial sprawl. Since one of the main tenets of suburban planning is accommodating the automobile first and foremost, El Camino Real tends to be a very hostile pedestrian and bicycle environment.

Recognizing the need for public transit and pedestrian infrastructure, municipalities along El Camino Real are now in the process of re-envisioning how these corridors should transform over time. Common themes are emerging, such as high-quality commercial spaces adjacent to the pedestrian domain, a mix of uses (most often with high-density housing above retail spaces), transit nodes and a design that emphasizes pedestrians and bicyclists in lieu of the automobile.

San Jose's built form includes a number of such transit corridors, including a 2.25-mile stretch of Alum Rock Road that historically served as one of many neighborhood business districts in San Jose. Unfortunately, as is the case for most of the Bay Area's commercial corridors and particularly for those in San Jose, most of the built form occurred after World War II and, as a result, caters foremost to cars. After extensive study of the corridor, City staff recently adopted a "form-based code" to correct the suburban planning ills referenced above. In a sense, form-based codes take a step back in time, when places like El Camino Real served horse-drawn carriages and people on foot or horseback.

Anticipated outcomes include strong street walls framing a more pedestrian-oriented street with wider sidewalk areas, complete with café seating and other pedestrian amenities. Building stock will include mixed-use with housing typically encouraged above the ground floor. The new code streamlines the development process and is designed to insure a more urbane future for this important commercial resource in San Jose.

Lessons learned

As a region, we must re-think these abundant commercial corridors. Our environment is counting on us. The good news is we needn't look too far. There are countless examples throughout the Bay Area of sustainable land use—that is, development done so right initially that we now wish to preserve and protect it.

Case Study #3: Vision North San Jose
Retrofitting a single-use office park

In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, some 60 million square feet of office space sat vacant across Silicon Valley, raising further concerns about what to do with increasingly obsolete office and R&D parks. In response, the City conducted interviews and focus groups with high-tech companies and quickly learned that the original vision of North San Jose—as a single-use field of low-slung tilt-up buildings—was no longer reflective of the needs of the business community.

Although small steps had already been taken, such as the addition of eating establishments and semi-isolated housing developments, more significant change was in order to refashion the corridor into an urban, transit- and pedestrian-oriented mixed-use district.

In response, San Jose re-designated North San Jose to significantly intensify office development along the main light rail spine (raising floor-to-area ratios fivefold from .25 to 1.25) while allowing development of higher-quality buildings in the core areas up to 18-20 stories. Office development capacity along the corridor jumped from 42 million to 68 million square feet. In addition, more than 32,000 medium-density housing units will be added over time, helping meet demand from a more diverse market, specifically for smaller units close to high-tech workplaces and transit. Amenities for working and living will be added—more restaurants, business services, shopping, and improved trail access. Planners are modifying the street grid to break up large blocks into a more urban, pedestrian-friendly grid to encourage transit, enhance walkability and promote recreational use. A central park and other quality public space are reflected in the vision to provide spaces for urban placemaking.

The planned result: over the next few decades, a suburban-style R&D park will be transformed incrementally into a more vibrant, urbane district where innovative people work, live and mingle in a setting that promotes social interaction and sustainable living.

Lessons learned

Implementing Vision North San Jose is critical for successfully transforming suburbia. Similar to the lessons of Santana Row, an emphasis on placemaking and designing for the pedestrian are paramount. But there are many obstacles to overcome to make the vision truly successful. How will the City implement these visions predicated on the pedestrian when the vast majority of residents and office users rely today on cars? At what point will the City mandate transit use or other modes of transportation, such as walking or bicycle use? How are design guidelines developed to promote a more organic district to help capture the smaller-scale development patterns reflective of pre-World War II neighborhood development?

"The lowest farebox recovery in the country." That was the unfortunate tag line for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority through the 1990s and early part of this century. Spurred by envy of other areas' light-rail systems, the VTA made big bets on a light-rail system shaped by a politically driven agenda and a belief that riders would simply flock to whatever the VTA built.

Commute Mode Share to Work (Year 2000)

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Source: Census 2000

In its early years there was a tax base to support the transit system, but with the dot-com crash and change in economic fortunes in the Valley, the continued support for a modern light-rail system became untenable. This is the backdrop of the story of transit in San Jose and Silicon Valley. Mistakes were made: There was little connection between land use decisions and transit provision. and while there was strong political support for transit, there was little public support for actually using it. Despite all the investment, the Valley continued to suffer from chronic congestion and the transit alternative wasn't viable. Transit dependent communities continued to show reasonable ridership, but to satisfy all the cities—and in the interests of perceived fairness—transit services were provided to respond to geographic equity rather than market need.

The legacy of a backbone transit infrastructure is undoubtedly a benefit. But as the City of San Jose and the VTA look to the future, there is a sober recognition that the rules of cities still apply: Transit works best when it is driven by smart land use. And however much money is invested, transit will only work if it is designed to be competitive, draws significant ridership and is driven by proactive policy decisions on land use, transportation and parking.

In recent years the area has notched some successes, particularly in the development of bus rapid transit. And Diridon Station has the potential to be one of the region's most successful transit hubs. But there is a lot of work to be done. There is no culture of transit use in Silicon Valley, and this will be the most significant obstacle to success.

The first public transit agency in the Valley was formed in the 1970s: the Santa Clara County Transit District, later to be known as the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency.1,2 Its initial purpose was to absorb three financially strapped and privately owned local bus companies and to maintain a small, but essential countywide transit service for those who did not have access to a car.

During its early years, the agency concentrated efforts on maintaining and improving bus service. By the 1980s, many cities in the United States were planning and constructing light-rail systems, and the agency decided to aggressively pursue light rail as a way to build ridership and bring new life to San Jose's historic downtown.3 Planning for the agency's light-rail system started in 1982 and the first line, a nine-mile segment between Santa Clara and downtown San Jose opened in 1987, only seven years after Muni's first modern light-rail line became operational. By 1999, the light-rail network covered 29 miles connecting Mountain View with downtown.4 Other transit services were also developed in this period, with the Capitol Corridor service starting in 1991 and the Altamount Commuter Express in 1998.

The VTA was formed in 1995 and ridership peaked in 2001, which coincided with the dot-com boom. Peak ridership was 156,000 bus and 30,000 light-rail users per weekday, but with a farebox recovery of only 13 percent. This compared with Muni ridership of 311,000 bus and 164,000 light rail users and a farebox recovery of 25 percent.5 At the same time, transit trips in Santa Clara County were only 1 percent of all trips, compared to 4 percent in Alameda and 14 percent in San Francisco.

With the dot-com crash ridership declined further and the operating budget came under significant pressure, exposing the fundamental problems inherent in VTA's operations: low ridership, low productivity, and the lowest farebox recovery in North America. This had implications not just for the VTA but for the region as a whole. Investing in and funding a transit system that didn't work meant that the underlying issues of traffic congestion and lack of mobility were not being addressed in consideration of implications for the economy and community in general.

A New Mindset

Measure A, a 30-year half-cent transit sales tax, was passed in November 2000. And while it still included investment in light-rail extensions, Measure A also held the prospect of investment in more competitive and cost-efficient bus services. At the same, the VTA was moving through programs and policies to support a new approach to transit provision. The emphasis was on building ridership from the ground up—integrating transit and land-use strategies, placing greater reliance on market research, making some tough decisions on service provision and developing more efficient services that made better use of capital and operational dollars. These programs and policies were set out in the VTA's Community Design and Transportation Program and the Transit Sustainability Policy.

The Community Design and Transportation Program was one of VTA's first steps toward critically re-examining the patterns of dispersed growth and moving toward creating places that support transit and invite pedestrian activity. The manual that emerged from this program was a best practice guide for integrating transportation and land use—particularly around bus and rail transit, and station areas. The program funded projects including the streetscape and intersection improvements along El Camino Real and at the Stanford Avenue intersection, as well as the Downtown Sunnyvale Streetscape Project.6, 7

The Transit Sustainability Policy was adopted in February 2007. The policy focused on turning VTA service into a cost-effective service that met market needs. The goal was a system-wide farebox recovery ratio of 20 to 25 percent. Service performance standards were established for various modes, to identify which mode was best suited for a given corridor or service area based on ridership, cost, land use and development patterns. This represented the first instance in which the VTA specifically defined bus rapid transit as a separate mode with its own unique operating characteristics and service parameters. They also established desired levels of development and density along the particular corridors and at stations.

VTA vs. Muni and Other Agencies

Measured against six other comparable transit agencies in the United States, including Muni, the VTA's system underperforms on ridership as well as resource efficiency. Despite having one of the most populated service areas and one of the highest population densities by service area, the VTA serves the second lowest number of bus and light-rail trips annually. From an operating perspective, the VTA serves the fewest bus trips and light-rail trips per revenue hour of the six operators, while also having very high costs per revenue hour for both bus and light rail. The VTA has the lowest farebox recovery rate, at 12 percent, and the highest cost per trip served. In addition to low productivity, the VTA's fixed transit infrastructure is poorly used: It has the lowest trip density per light-rail route-mile of the six transit agencies.

Santa Clara County is expected to add nearly 500,000 residents and 400,000 jobs by 2035. New roads will not be sufficient to meet the resulting transportation demand, and the various cities and agencies recognize this in their development plans. San Jose, for example, has targets to accommodate growth without any increase in driving, instead relying on trips shifting to transit and other non-driving modes. This represents a shift in transit mode share from 4 percent to 20 percent by 2040.

At a glance: The future regional rail network and Diridon Station hub

Diridon Rail Map

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Source: Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority

2050 Regional Rail Map

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Source: Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority

When all the pieces are finally in place, Diridon Station will be one of California's great stations and great places. Diridon will be the South Bay's answer to San Francisco's Transbay Terminal, anticipating similar passenger levels and bringing better transit connectivity to the rest of the Bay Area. Already, Diridon serves a regional transportation market and plays a role as an important transit front door for San Jose and Silicon Valley. The addition of high speed rail, BART, and an automated people mover link to the airport will transform Diridon into a significant multimodal hub, accommodating some 1,200 trains, buses, and light rail arrivals and departures, and more than 35,000 riders each day.10

As of today, it is not yet clear if San Jose will manage to get transit-supportive land uses next to the station. It may have to settle for long-planned stadiums, which will generate episodic—not consistent—ridership. That doesn't mean that the transit hub will be underused; it could mean that the problem of transporting passengers to and from the station must be overcome through shuttles, park-and-rides and other strategies.

Where to Now?

Mode shift targets

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Source: National Transit Database 2008.

Average Light Rail Trips per Route Mile (Year 2008)

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Source: National Transit Database 2008.

In San Jose today, the missteps of the past are easier to see than are glimpses of a transit supportive future. And yet it's interesting that there is BRT in San Jose but not yet in San Francisco, and that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission transit sustainability study is relying as much on input from the staff at the VTA as it is from Muni or BART. It's also interesting to see Diridon Station as a regionally significant opportunity for smart growth and transit-oriented development.

But in spite of ambitious goals to reduce reliance on the automobile, the big threats are political and cultural. How do you break the connection between car use (as distinct from car ownership) and quality of life, and how do you develop a robust and time competitive alternative to the car? The extension of BART to San Jose, the continued extensions of light rail and new BRT lines will be a test of the Valley's commitment to transit, to see whether these investments will be fully leveraged. Successful, high-profile projects will go a long way toward building a transit culture, and this will mean not simply investing in the system but supporting that investment with appropriate land-use planning and managing parking.

It remains a challenge to convince many people that taking transit is as much a part of life as taking the car. To date, the car culture has proven to be resilient—but at least now there are signs of a willingness to change.

Of the nearly 60 Fortune 1,000 companies in Northern California, only one-third of them are based in our megaregion’s central cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Oakland. This sprawling pattern of job growth poses great challenges as the boundaries of the megaregion expand outward, resulting in unsustainable commute patterns and increased levels of greenhouse gas emissions. While many key industries of our megaregion’s economy are now based in these car-oriented suburbs, this sprawling pattern of employment must change if we wish to meet regional and statewide targets for addressing climate change.

In particular, the recent California state Senate bill 375 aims for transportation planning that reduces driving through better-coordinated land use planning. While the bill specifically discusses planning for housing, it is just as important for employment. We will not be able to reduce daily driving unless we investigate the matter of where jobs are located, and develop effective strategies to shift more work to locations that can be served by regional public transit.

In addition to its impact on the environment, the location of jobs is a key variable in the economic competitiveness of our regional economies. Long commutes on congested freeways reduce productivity. The spread-out pattern of work makes job access a challenge for people in lower-income households, who have fewer choices of where to live. Yet dense employment districts benefit employers as they share ideas, workers and clients. Proximity to other businesses — particularly in related industries — is an important factor in a firm’s competitiveness. This is best achieved when jobs and businesses are concentrated into centers.

This article outlines the problem of job sprawl, and offers a framework to address it. Our overall goal is to slow the continued outward growth of jobs from already developed employment centers, and to shift more commuters — wherever they work — into sustainable commute modes. We propose a four-part land-use solution to:

1. Shift more work back into traditional transit-served downtowns, such as the central business districts in San Francisco and Oakland.¹
2. Concentrate more employment at suburban transit stations in "edge cities" such as Walnut Creek, Concord, Sunnyvale and Mountain View.
3. Remake existing low-density office parks and scattered office buildings along highway corridors into higher density employment districts with the potential to be served by transit.
4. Reform the self-enclosed, car-oriented corporate campus into a more sustainable model that may include increasing employment density while also bringing in other uses, additional shuttles and new transit.

Achieving these four goals requires policy interventions that shift the incentive structure for employers, developers and individual commuters.

Ultimately, we envision a polycentric megaregion where the various employment centers serve different roles, yet are all connected in a transit network. The shifting of work to transit-served areas reinforces each center (including the traditional downtown) as more businesses become connected to each other. This vision recognizes the multi-centeredness that is a permanent feature of our megaregion, but tries to reshape this geography for a 21st century in which non-driving alternatives are increasingly important.

This graph is a jobs index comparing the jobs located more than 10 miles from CBDs to jobs located within three miles of CBDs. The dark blue sections show the difference in this ratio between 1998 and 2006. (For instance, the ratio for Phoenix is 1:1, meaning Phoenix experienced 100 percent more growth at its urban boundaries than it did in its city center.) The lightest areas show the values for cities within the Northern California megaregion.

What is job sprawl?
Over the past few decades, employers have followed residents to the suburbs as the share of jobs in central cities has declined. In fact, most workers now live in one suburb and work in another, rather than commute back to the city. This process of job decentralization is the key factor that has facilitated job sprawl.

Yet what we call "job sprawl" is simply the spread-out organization of work into locations where the density is too low or that are too poorly designed to be effectively served with transit. As a result, the vast majority of commuters drive to work. Put most simply, the primary problem with job sprawl is that as work decentralizes, it puts more jobs in non-transit-served locations and means most commuters are unable to access work without a car.²

By contrast, when most jobs are in the core of a region, the "commute shed" — or the geographical area from which a region’s commuters originate — is fairly contained, and a higher percent of all commuters have overlapping commutes. Not only do most commuters live within a reasonable distance of their job (a commute of approximately 30 minutes), but many of them also have similar commutes, thus making transit investments highly effective.

But as more jobs move to the suburbs, each new job site has its own distinct commute shed. Suddenly, a "reasonable" 30 minute commute to this new suburban location can include a much more remote community now at the edge of the region. Because many of the edge communities have few economic development options, they often have city councils that are distinctly pro-growth and therefore willing to accept any development. In a region such as the Bay Area, where many of the core communities are generally anti-growth, pressure at the edge becomes even more intense. For example, as more work shifted to Concord and Livermore in the East Bay, commutes from places such as Brentwood, Antioch and Tracy became much more reasonable. The same holds true for job-rich Sacramento suburbs such as Rancho Cordova and Roseville, which makes living in the Sierra foothills viable.

Yet it is not the outward movement of jobs alone that is the problem. Instead, it is the disorganized, low-density form of employment that forces most people to use a car to make the trip between home and work. The more job locations there are, the harder they will be to serve efficiently with transit, particularly when the region’s commute patterns begin to look more and more like a spider web. In this situation, the most effective way to get from one place to another (or from home to work) is the private automobile. Public transit can almost never work where job density is too low and the residential origins are too scattered.

Over time, this process becomes self-reinforcing. As more jobs move to the suburbs, the commute sheds become more stretched out, and the edge sprawls farther out into farmland or natural habitats. And as workers increasingly move farther toward the edge of the megaregion, more employers will follow them and continue to perpetuate this cycle.

Today, the suburbanization of work is now a key driver of residential sprawl as the commute shed defines the edge or boundary of a megaregion. Reversing residential sprawl necessitates stopping job sprawl. Yet with more than half the U.S. population now working in the suburbs, stopping job sprawl is no longer about limiting the movement of work to the suburbs, but instead about reorganizing work within the suburbs to better meet the needs of a sustainable region.


Many of the jobs facing the highest decentralization rates nationally are key industries in the Northern California megaregion. For some industries, such as transportation and warehousing, decentralization is not surprising. But why are industries such as management, information and education moving away from central cities?

Why job sprawl is getting worse
As evidence that job sprawl is getting worse, we analyzed three trends: the decentralization of jobs, declining transit commute patterns, and increasing congestion and vehicle miles traveled.

Trend #1: There has been significant increase in job growth outside traditional downtowns
Since the 1990s, the share of jobs located within three miles of central business districts has steadily declined. Based on an analysis of the decentralization of work from the four central business districts or primary downtowns of Northern California (San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Stockton) during the eight-year period between 1998 and 2006, these CBDs experienced a net loss of more than 22,000 jobs, while jobs located 10 to 35 miles from these CBDs increased by more than 225,000.

Nationally, job growth out from the center has become a significant trend. Of metropolitan areas with more than 900,000 jobs within 35 miles of the central business district, all have experienced a decline in the share of jobs within three miles of the CBD and an increase in jobs 10 to 35 miles from the CBD.

Also, the rates at which jobs move outward in certain industries in the United States are increasing. Nationally, some of the most rapidly decentralizing industries are the same industries that are most important to the Northern California economy, and particularly to its traditional central business districts. Industries such as management, information services and education are experiencing the greatest share of relocation to areas 10 to 35 miles from CBDs. While it may not be surprising that manufacturing, transportation and warehousing are moving out into the suburbs and beyond, the trend of less cost-sensitive industries (for instance, knowledge services such as management of companies and finance) moving out poses yet another challenge for traditional downtowns, given that these are industries where the CBD is also most competitive. For example, nationally, 46 percent of jobs in "management of companies" and 42 percent of jobs in professional, scientific and technical services are located 10 miles or more from a traditional CBD.³


Over the last 8 years, central business districts in Northern California have lost over 22,000 jobs. Meanwhile the number of jobs located 10 to 35 miles from the CBDs has increased by over 225,000 (that’s more than half the number of jobs in downtown San Francisco).

Trend #2: The number of commuters who drive alone to work has increased dramatically.
The share of commuters in the Northern California megaregion who drive alone to work has been increasing since the 1980s. Even in San Francisco, where transit ridership is historically and significantly higher than elsewhere in the megaregion, the share of commuters who drive alone has grown. This increase is in part due to the movement of jobs from urban cores to suburban office parks that are not as easily accessible to transit. It is also due to the growing number of professionals living in San Francisco and commuting to information and technology jobs in the Peninsula and South Bay.

Among counties in the Northern California megaregion, San Joaquin County in the Central Valley and San Benito County south of Santa Clara County stand alone in experiencing a decline in the share of drive-alone commuters — due in no small part to the advent of transit access in these areas. San Joaquin County saw a significant increase in transit ridership following the 1998 creation of the Altamont Commuter Express, which links Stockton to San Jose with daily rail service. San Benito County also experienced an increase in the number of commuters who use transit to get to work, once Caltrain was extended to Gilroy in 1992 and transit from San Benito County to the station was introduced. This suggests that improving transit access to areas where it previously did not exist can have significant impacts on commuter travel behavior.

Despite the increase in drive-alone rates, there is hope. More than 30 percent of commuters who live within half a mile of a regional rail station take some form of public transportation to work. Improving transit access for commuters, on both the home and work trips, can have major impacts on traffic congestion, the number of vehicle miles traveled, and greenhouse gas emissions throughout the megaregion.

Trend #3: There has been a rise in VMT and traffic congestion across the megaregion.
The spreading of jobs across the megaregion has led to major increases in daily freeway vehicle miles traveled, the percent of commutes spent on congested roadways, and the personal cost of congestion that those who drive alone to work must bear. In 1982, only 35 percent of peak hour travel in the megaregion was congested. Today, that number is closer to 80 percent. Congestion costs each peak hour traveler more than $1,000 a year in wasted time, fuel and resources. As jobs continue to move farther away from both central business districts and transit nodes, this trend is only going to get worse.

Increasing congestion has been a consistent feature in Northern California commutes. Not surprisingly, the total transit ridership per capita has scarcely changed. With future population growth, just maintaining our current high levels of congestion will require shifting many more people and jobs to places served by transit.

How to solve job sprawl
While reinforcing traditional downtowns is a key goal of the megaregional planning agenda, suburban job locations increasingly are a part of our economic landscape and thus invariably a part of the solution. Job sprawl cannot be stopped or reshaped without acknowledging this and finding a way to make more suburban jobs transit-accessible.

We propose four solutions:

1. Put more jobs into existing transit-rich downtowns.
2. Shift more work to suburban transit-served employment centers, often in or near "edge cities."
3. Remake multi-tenant suburban office parks and scattered office buildings along highways corridors (our "edgeless cities") into more clustered, transit-served destinations.
4. Redesign the corporate campus to accommodate significantly more work and to further reduce drive-alone rates.

All four of these land-use approaches are necessary to reduce the harmful impacts of job sprawl. But each also has limitations.

Solution #1: Put more jobs into existing downtowns with high transit ridership.
First, the simplest solution is to create more jobs and encourage more businesses to be situated in downtowns that already have high transit ridership, mixed uses, mobility and infrastructure. This was the argument SPUR made in its "Future of Downtown" policy paper. In Northern California, San Francisco and Oakland are the best examples of downtowns with healthy transit ridership: San Francisco has more than 50 percent and Oakland around 24 percent. Downtown Sacramento and San Jose trail significantly, but are ideal places to add jobs, particularly because both are investing heavily in transit and asserting themselves as the economic and cultural centers of the surrounding areas.

The key to making this model work is the right combination of transit infrastructure, market-based parking pricing, good urban design, a well-maintained pedestrian environment and, depending on the city, the overcoming of other non-physical business-climate issues — such as perceptions about Oakland’s public safety or San Francisco’s costs.

This approach is easier said than done.⁴ It is very rare in American urbanism to successfully restore a continuous pedestrian fabric to central city landscapes that have already lost their historic buildings and replaced them with blank facades and surface parking lots, but that is the ambitious planning agenda we call for. This approach also requires significant investment in peak-hour transportation infrastructure, keeping in mind that it is generally less costly than the auto-centric infrastructure required by other employment models. The successful central business district model of good transit and a pedestrian environment with limits on parking is the most successful and proven way to get commuters out of their cars.

While some may argue that the idea of shifting more jobs back downtown is an attempt to return to the pre-automobile pattern of the early 20th century, when each region had a more monocentric form with a single large downtown, our notion actually is more of an acceptance of the polycentric form of the contemporary region. Given the three types of downtowns considered in this essay, the solution of adding more jobs to downtowns results in a widely differentiated set of transit-served downtowns that range from Oakland to Berkeley to San Mateo to San Rafael.

But today, this model must coexist with other ways of organizing work.

Solution #2: Channel more suburban jobs into transit-served nodes and edge cities.
The second-best locational solution to job sprawl is to shift more employment adjacent to rail or regional transit stations in the suburbs. Suburban transit-oriented development nodes are emerging and have created the foundation for increased transit commuting to suburban job destinations. This can be achieved through a variety of strategies, such as building on surface parking lots next to stations, rezoning nearby areas and reworking the street grids, and ultimately by influencing more businesses to locate near these established nodes.

There are some drawbacks to the suburban transit-oriented development approach. Even a successful suburban job center likely will not approach the density levels of a traditional downtown, and thus it will be hard to achieve high transit ridership. Further, commuters will be coming from scattered places, thus making it easier and faster to go from home to work via car, even if work is at a suburban TOD. Ultimately, the level of transit ridership to these places will be based on the availability and price of parking at the job center, the pedestrian experience from the station to work, and the density and transit accessibility of the commuters’ homes.

Solution #3: Create denser suburban job corridors.
The third locational solution is to remake existing car-oriented employment centers. These places are the low-density office, lab, retail and industrial spaces that spread along or near highway corridors and proliferate throughout suburbia. The places include buildings such as the Zhone headquarters along I-880 or Vacavalley Business Park. These edgeless areas are the hardest to address, in fact, because their employment densities are low and their employees are spread out. Additionally, in some places the land values are low, thus making it harder to increase densities.

Some of these edgeless cities do not have any rail transit today, but may be getting close to appropriate levels to support it. According to a well-known 1977 study, 8,000 people per square mile is the minimum residential density necessary to support rail investment.⁵

Solution #4: Reimagine the corporate campus.
The fourth locational solution is about remaking the traditional corporate campus, which is typically a relatively dense job center with a single tenant. There are several ways to accomplish this. First, there should be an expansion of the successful shuttle programs of employers such as Genentech, Apple and Google. For example, as many as 50 percent of workers employed at these companies (who live in San Francisco) take shuttles to work. This rivals the share of commuters taking transit to downtown San Francisco.

Second, there should be an increase in the number of jobs at each campus by building on the seas of parking and landscaping that surround existing buildings. With less parking, companies could begin to charge for parking and provide the revenue to transit commuters. Less parking and landscaping is also a cost-saver to the company. As employment density increases over time, new transit could be brought to the campus.

Third, the self-enclosed design should be opened and better integrated with the surrounding community. University campuses remain places of innovation and intellectual protection while also being more open to outsiders. This remaking of the campus could also involve integration of other uses such as retail and even housing to the campus and the areas immediately around it.


The number of Northern California commuters who drive alone to work has been steadily increasing since the 1980s, except in areas where regional transit access has been improved. For example, after the creation of the Altamont Commuter Express (ACE), transit ridership in San Joaquin county rose by 1,137 people daily. Similarly, when Caltrain was extended to Gilroy in Southern Santa Clara County — with shuttles linking San Benito to the station — ridership in San Benito jumped from 302 to 2,248 commuters per day.

Conclusion
As this article argues, solving job sprawl does not involve a single approach. We live and work in a polycentric region with a wide range of employment locations, each with a slightly different opportunity to capture future job growth. We also cannot be naíve and assume that the traditional central business districts will regain a majority share of regional jobs, even if this would be the most effective strategy to reduce overall driving. But we certainly can push to make sure that employment throughout the region shifts to more appropriate places. This strategy is the only viable approach to solving the worsening challenge of job sprawl, which in turn is one of the major causes of residential sprawl. Over the next year, SPUR will explore this issue further, refining its approach and developing policy solutions. If we are serious about stopping sprawl, we need to be just as focused on jobs as we are on housing.

ENDNOTES

¹ See "Recentering Work: The Future of Downtown San Francisco," March 2009, where we argued for channeling job growth into transit-rich cores, like downtown San Francisco.
² We are focused primarily on office sprawl. While many jobs in an economy do not require offices (retail, distribution, construction, production, etc.), the majority of work in the megaregion is directly tied to an employment center that is primarily a collection of office buildings.
³ Kneebone, Elizabeth. "Job Sprawl Revisited: The changing geography of metropolitan employment." Brookings, 2009.
⁴ An example from the City of Oakland demonstrates the challenge of increasing parking prices. When prices were raised to help fill a budget hole, local businesses staged a strike by shutting down their businesses, thus forcing the City Council to reverse the parking rate increases indefinitely. While well intentioned, this approach of ramping up parking costs can backfire if residents and local business owners perceive the increase to be more about paying local salaries and less about managing congestion or ensuring that there is always a free parking space. Reversing a poorly executed increase in parking prices can push back an improvement to parking management for years.
⁵ See: Pushkarev, Boris S. and Zupan, Jeffrey M. Public transportation and land use policy, 1977.