Transit/LandUse FYI from Palo Alto CEAP: Climate Change Changing Assumptions on Land Use, Energy

[Bruce England]

For what it's worth; the CEAP folks often come up with useful bits of into...

At 2:44 PM +0000 7/7/08, wjhediger wrote:
>Interesting article.
>
><http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/01/DDM411GD8J.DTL

I agree.
For summary and link to article and related articles, see

Climate Change Changing Assumptions on Land Use, Energy

(http://planetizen.com/node/33791)

The New York Metropolitan area has more than half of the daily
transit riders in the entire country.  It got that way because of the
tremendous jobs/housing imbalance.  You don't promote transit use in
New York by building more housing in Manhattan.

We have to realize that jobs density is as important as housing
density.  We need to intensify both.  And we should realize that
bedroom communities like Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley,
Woodside and Atherton, which have few jobs of their own, house many
of the people who work in Palo Alto.

According to MTC data, jobs near transit corridors is twice as
effective at promoting transit use as housing near transit corridors.

So what makes sense to promote from a radical change point of view is
high density jobs regions.  San Francisco downtown is already the
most dense jobs region in the Bay Area.  The Palo Alto business
district is number two.  San Francisco terminus and Palo Alto
downtown are the two business stations on Caltrain.

In contrast, the business districts of Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and
San Jose largely consist of low density jobs sprawl that discourages
transit use (although San Jose downtown has been becoming more dense,
San Jose consists of many square miles of low density commercial
space).

Although some would want to relocate those who currently live in the
Central Valley to the Bay Area, there is significant embodied energy
in those buildings and structures.  Although very few of those people
work in Palo Alto (less than 2% of people employed in Palo Alto live
outside the 9 Bay Area counties plus Santa Cruz county), High Speed
Rail from the Central Valley to the Bay Area and Southern California
would replace many driving commutes with train commutes.  There would
be much less need to build roads like a freeway replacng route 152 in
south county.  With the price of gasoline approaching $5/gallon, we
couldn't build High Speed Rail fast enough.

We may well need to relocate the residents of Foster City and East
Palo Alto, and the San Francisco and Oakland airports as they will be
inundated by rising ocean waters from global warming.  See the maps
by BCDC about the extent of inundation from 1 meter rise in sea level.

The real question is why should California grow to 50 million
residents.  Let us first start with our assumptions and question
them.  US Air Force Major Chester I. Brown said during the Vietnam
War, "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

It would be helpful if ABAG recognized the benefit of increasing the
density of jobs, particularly with access to transit corridors, as
much as it recognized the benefit of housing density near transit
corridors.

Best regards,
Arthur

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur M. Keller, Ph.D., 3881 Corina Way, Palo Alto, CA  94303-4507
tel +1(650)424-0202, fax +1(650)424-0424

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