My charitable suspicion is that the California Forever folks considered the extremely difficult political coordination problems they'd have to solve to get a rail connection to their new city built, taking into account the absolutely horrible state of Bay Area transit governance and paucity of real progress in the last 50 years, and decided that they already had enough expected difficulty to overcome to build the city at all and had none left to spare for regional transit. They might be wrong about that, but it seems hard to blame them for betting that way.
I think that's probably right. Wading into the regional transit planning morass would be a lot of extra work. But necessary, I think, if this city is actually going to be a model for the cities of the future.
I've been living in the Bay Area a long time, and I-80 isn't great. Man, it would be great to have a nice rail system to Sacramento. But, how realistic is it? As far as I can tell there hasn't been any progress or any workable paradigm for improving rail along the I-80 corridor. Unfortunately, I think that I-80 is all we're going to get. We need to accept the reality here and not delay every other good project just because regional rail is dysfunctional. We can't hold our breath until a good regional rail system arrives because it might never arrive. It's like NIMBYs criticizing new housing development because it hasn't filed the right forms to analyze the impact on the western hedge turtle.
The Capitol Corridor has a lot of potential to be a very high-quality, European-style regional rail system. And there's a lot of interest in making it so from regional planners.
I'm sympathetic to not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. But if the project is going to promote itself as an urbanist and environmentalist wonder, it has to be held to a very high standard. The people involved have so much money and power that they could really make a difference in advancing high-quality regional transportation.
I don’t know if it’s fair to call this sprawl. It’s certainly - at least at the outset - going to be a bedroom community, but I think of sprawl as a characteristic of the development itself, not its relation to preexisting development.
Medium term, though, I could see this looking like the Woodlands, Texas. TW became its own self contained economy with all the downtown Houston based oil companies opening offices where their employees were actually living.
I also suspect the demands on regional transit will be less given the degree to which office work is still remote or at least hybrid (though whether that keeps the two highways less than fully congested is an empirical question I suppose).
Good post. This is the only reasonable critique of CF I’ve seen thus far (most opposition to it just comes from the fact that’s it’s funded by billionaires, as if other real estate developments were funded by charities or something). Theoretically they could get around many of these car-dependency issues by just building taller and denser but I feel like voters will be afraid of that.
I'd say they need a bridge or tunnel connecting the new city over or under the San Joaquin River to the BART station in Antioch or Pittsburgh. That sounds like 10+ years to get all the environmental paperwork done. And then, who is going to pay for it? The wetlands look to be 2 or 3 miles wide.
The Capitol Corridor is much closer, so that would probably make the most sense to link up to. But it would be nice if they at least mentioned regular bus service to BART in the interim.
My charitable suspicion is that the California Forever folks considered the extremely difficult political coordination problems they'd have to solve to get a rail connection to their new city built, taking into account the absolutely horrible state of Bay Area transit governance and paucity of real progress in the last 50 years, and decided that they already had enough expected difficulty to overcome to build the city at all and had none left to spare for regional transit. They might be wrong about that, but it seems hard to blame them for betting that way.
I think that's probably right. Wading into the regional transit planning morass would be a lot of extra work. But necessary, I think, if this city is actually going to be a model for the cities of the future.
Leaving out public transit is a big miss. I hope they're able to connect with their region via a decent transit system.
Amen!
I've been living in the Bay Area a long time, and I-80 isn't great. Man, it would be great to have a nice rail system to Sacramento. But, how realistic is it? As far as I can tell there hasn't been any progress or any workable paradigm for improving rail along the I-80 corridor. Unfortunately, I think that I-80 is all we're going to get. We need to accept the reality here and not delay every other good project just because regional rail is dysfunctional. We can't hold our breath until a good regional rail system arrives because it might never arrive. It's like NIMBYs criticizing new housing development because it hasn't filed the right forms to analyze the impact on the western hedge turtle.
The Capitol Corridor has a lot of potential to be a very high-quality, European-style regional rail system. And there's a lot of interest in making it so from regional planners.
I'm sympathetic to not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. But if the project is going to promote itself as an urbanist and environmentalist wonder, it has to be held to a very high standard. The people involved have so much money and power that they could really make a difference in advancing high-quality regional transportation.
I don’t know if it’s fair to call this sprawl. It’s certainly - at least at the outset - going to be a bedroom community, but I think of sprawl as a characteristic of the development itself, not its relation to preexisting development.
Medium term, though, I could see this looking like the Woodlands, Texas. TW became its own self contained economy with all the downtown Houston based oil companies opening offices where their employees were actually living.
I also suspect the demands on regional transit will be less given the degree to which office work is still remote or at least hybrid (though whether that keeps the two highways less than fully congested is an empirical question I suppose).
Good post. This is the only reasonable critique of CF I’ve seen thus far (most opposition to it just comes from the fact that’s it’s funded by billionaires, as if other real estate developments were funded by charities or something). Theoretically they could get around many of these car-dependency issues by just building taller and denser but I feel like voters will be afraid of that.
I'd say they need a bridge or tunnel connecting the new city over or under the San Joaquin River to the BART station in Antioch or Pittsburgh. That sounds like 10+ years to get all the environmental paperwork done. And then, who is going to pay for it? The wetlands look to be 2 or 3 miles wide.
The Capitol Corridor is much closer, so that would probably make the most sense to link up to. But it would be nice if they at least mentioned regular bus service to BART in the interim.