California Forever, the tech-billionaire funded city, plans for transit after all

The mega-project’s lead urban designer describes how transit could, potentially, be part of the city plan.

A transit station in California Forever, before track has been laid (Credit: SiteLab Urban Studios)

When the developers behind California Forever unveiled their plans for a new city in the outer reaches of the Bay Area, they went out of their way to demonstrate that it would not be a stereotypical sprawling subdivision. This city, which is being funded by a who’s-who of tech billionaires, would be a “model for how to create new communities that provide the benefits of dense, walkable life to more people,” the development team wrote in a blog post. 

Yet in their initial plans, the developers behind California Forever neglected to provide for a significant transit connection to the outside world. Their planned community in Solano County would be a walker’s paradise within city limits, but trips beyond would likely require getting in a car and driving on already-congested highways. 

Urbanist critics—including this one—pounced. Without a real regional transit connection, this self-styled urbanist utopia would never live up to its stated ambitions. 

Now, the lead urban designer for California Forever says he got the message, loud and clear. 

“We are building a rail-ready community,” said Gabe Metcalf, head of planning for California Forever. “It would make all the sense in the world to connect the new city by rail to Sacramento and the Bay Area.”

In the wake of criticism regarding a lack of regional transit, on Valentine’s Day Metcalf and his team submitted revised ballot measure language to Solano County obligating the developers to set aside land for rail right-of-way and stations. 

Yet the path to laying tracks—or building anything, for that matter—is far from straightforward. 

California Forever will need to qualify for the November ballot, convince Solano County voters to change the area’s zoning, complete an environmental impact report, and ink a development agreement with the county, among other steps, before it can break ground. A 24-hour hackathon it is not.

Building regional transit connections is especially tricky. Creating such a network “by definition involves a bigger area than just Solano County,” said Metcalf, who formerly served as head of the Bay Area urban planning think tank, SPUR. “So we have to work with a lot of different entities”—including Caltrans, the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and various transit agencies and city governments—“to get external transportation done.” It also means Metcalf has to speak in lawyerly hypotheticals about how rail could, potentially, be integrated into the new community. 

The most logical regional transit connection would be to the Capitol Corridor regional rail service that links San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento on an alignment roughly paralleling I-80, Metcalf said. One or more rail spurs could be constructed connecting the new city to the existing tracks, either to the west, in the direction of the inner Bay Area, or to the north, in the direction of Sacramento. 

A connection to the new community could dovetail with Capitol Corridor’s ongoing plans to build a new bridge or tunnel across the Carquinez Strait to improve service. It could also feed into even longer-term plans to build a new rail crossing between Oakland and San Francisco, linking the Capitol Corridor and Caltrain services. 

A major challenge for all of these projects—besides cost—is the fact that Union Pacific owns the Capitol Corridor tracks and currently limits the number of passenger trains per day. “Thus far they have only been willing to sell a certain number of time slots,” Metcalf said. “I don’t know enough to say what those conversations have been like.”  

Asked whether the well-heeled backers of California Forever—including Laurene Powell-Jobs, Marc Andreesen, and Reid Hoffman— would be willing to invest serious money in regional transit, Metcalf hedged. “Should it ever become possible,” he said, “we have every incentive in the world to invest in high-quality transit to our site. It would make our project more successful.”

Metcalf likened this potential arrangement to the streetcar suburbs of the 19th century. In many cases, the transit and the real estate would be developed by the same company, creating a mutually supporting urban ecosystem. In more recent years, Hong Kong’s metro system has posted consistent profits thanks to massive real estate developments adjacent to its stations that produce a captive audience of riders.

Metcalf pushed back against the notion that the new city will have poor transit connections to the outside world—even without, or before, a rail connection. As soon as residents begin moving in, Metcalf said, the city will provide “high-quality rapid shuttle” services—akin to the region’s armada of tech buses—bound for destinations like San Francisco, UC Davis, and the closest BART and Capitol Corridor stations. The shuttles would make use of the Bay Area’s growing network of managed freeway lanes, which are reserved for transit, carpools, or solo drivers willing to pay an extra toll for a faster ride. 

These regional shuttles, or a future train connection, would be complemented by a compact urban form that will make it easy to get to transit from anywhere in the city, Metcalf said. He predicts a “much higher transit mode share than the vast majority of the Bay Area.”

But when only 5% of commuters in the nine county Bay Area took transit to work in 2022, that’s not a very high bar to clear. Improving on the abysmal status quo of American suburban development is the easy part. Creating a new model for American urbanism is going to require turning some hypotheticals into realities. 

This article originally appeared in Fast Company. It is republished here with permission.