On the Coherency of Transects and Urban Growth Boundaries - Part Four

With this post, I’ll close my far-flung cogitations on the alternative location for the second SMART station in Petaluma and the conclusions to which my thinking led me.

I fear I may have confused a few readers by the way I connected the dots in my head.  It seemed logical to me, but know that I don’t always think like other people.  Today, I’ll try to smooth over any rough patches in my logical progressions.

(When I was a student at Cal, I took a class on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.  I was enroute to becoming the first civil engineering graduate in Cal history to complete the liberal arts requirement, normally met with lower division classes in American history or political science, with upper division classes on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

For my class term paper, I tried to compare and contrast Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Nietzsche’s Superman.  It was a worthy topic, but I didn’t have the chops for it.  In one particular tortured section, the professor, a Nobel Laureate in poetry, wrote in the margin “I have no idea what you’re saying.”  So if I lost you somewhere during my preceding posts, you have my apologies and the knowledge that you’re in good company.)

To recap where I’ve been, I introduced the alternative location for the second station and why it would solve dual problems for SMART, delved into the regulatory constraints on the alternative location, and described the insights about urban growth boundaries and transects to which the contemplations  took me.

To me, the most important conclusion is that urban growth boundaries, the limit beyond which cities may not expand, and transects, the urbanist theory by which cities progress logically from wilderness to urban cores, are fully complementary, the coherency to which the title refers.  The declining leg of transects, as the uses transition through lower density development to agricultural uses is exactly where the urban growth boundary should be.

The only caveat is the urban growth boundaries must remain fixed, or nearly so, over time.  A city that conforms to the theory of transects would have appropriate uses at its boundaries, perhaps low-density residential, development-supported agriculture, large natural parks, or even improvements such as community airports or multi-field sports complexes.

To move an urban growth boundary beyond these uses, allowing apartment buildings or strip malls on the far side, would result in an incoherent, difficult to serve community.  The fact that we’ve built communities in this way for seventy years doesn’t mean we should continue to do so.

This summing up leaves three lingering questions to address before I close.

Why did city building of the past not need urban growth boundaries?:  San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.  These are all fascinating places that we love to visit.  But they grew during an era when no one spoke of urban growth boundaries or transects.  Why do we now need tools of which the city builders of the past knew nothing and yet succeeded well?

The answer is the automobile.  The great cities we enjoy today reached their near final form when people moved about on foot, on horseback, or by common conveyance.  Those means of transport limited how far people could reasonably travel, so cities remains relatively compact, a feature that we continue to find attractive.

If San Francisco hadn’t been settled until after the car was commonplace, it would likely look very different.  More freeways and wide streets to enable people to leave quickly after work.  More chain stores.  Less population.

Indeed, I suggest that if the Bay Area hadn’t been settled until after the advent of the automobile, San Francisco wouldn’t be the dominant city.  Instead, that distinction would have gone to Oakland or San Jose for their easier access to the suburbs of Hayward, Fremont, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy.

With no disrespect to either Oakland or San Jose, both of which have places I enjoy, I’m happier living in a Bay Area where San Francisco is the dominant city.

To a large extent, planning tools such as urban growth boundaries and transects are little more an attempt to recreate the development patterns that existed before the automobile.  And maybe even to improve on what early city builders accomplished.

What happens when a city is complete but development pressure remains?: What if a city is logically bounded by physical barriers such as rivers, bays, and steep hillsides or by appropriate man-made limits such as airports and golf courses such that future development would bust the transect?  And what if the same city has bumped up the transects to create an appropriate number of urban centers and urban cores, but is still experiencing development pressure, perhaps because its form is successfully attracting the creative class?  What then?

To me, this is where the garden city fits.  New villages or towns can be encouraged a few miles from the city.  But the new places must be compact places, with strong transit connections to the larger city.  People who prefer fewer lights at night or perhaps a lower housing cost could live in the new places, but still be convenient to urban life.

This idea may seem far-fetched, but I actually proposed something much like it a few years back.  Sonoma County acquired Today Lake, a dry lake bed and productive farm in the hills a few miles southeast of Petaluma.

Shortly after the acquisition, my wife and I attended a fall festival at Tolay Lake.  At the time, County planners were still trying to develop a vision for the place, so were asking people to join an email list.

I eagerly signed up and even more eagerly filled in the comment section with my thought that Tolay Lake could be a small village, perhaps something like Seaside, Florida, populated by park employees, workers at a small model farm, shopkeepers to meet the needs of the residents, writers and artists who would enjoy the quietude, and perhaps a few weekenders also.  Cars could be discouraged, with a frequent bus connection to Petaluma.

I impatiently waited to see if my thoughts would make the email newsletter.  I never found out.  I wasn’t even put on the email list.  It can be tough to be out in front of the curve.

Where does the second SMART station belong?: If the alternative location for the second SMART station is a poor solution, what then?  What other sites remain?

I’ve looked at the rail alignment through Petaluma.  There aren’t many other reasonable places for a second train station.

I understand there was once consideration of placing the second station by the proposed River Front project, near the 101 overcrossing of Lakeville Street.  However, that site is too close to the downtown station.  I could see a location along the proposed Rainier Connector, but that option is likely more than a decade away.  The Corona Road location made sense, but SMART may have poisoned that well with their acquisition strategy.

And that leaves one location I can see, a location that a reader first pointed out to me.  There is a currently vacant parcel along North McDowell Boulevard a short distance north of Corona Road.  It has good rail frontage.  It’s a little smaller than the Corona Road site, but could still accommodate a fair number of cars.

The only problem is that the site is currently proposed as the parking lot for the successful pub at the Lagunitas Brewery.  A parking lot that is needed to address the current problem of patrons crossing McDowell Boulevard to reach the pub.

To my mind, the only way that the parcel can be freed up for use as the SMART station is if aggressive traffic calming is implemented on McDowell.  If traffic be slowed to 25 mph, then pedestrian safety would improve and the street parking on the opposite side could continue to serve the Lagunitas pub.

It would be a very urbanist solution.  But it would solve a lot of problems.  And, as another reader has pointed out, urbanist pioneer Peter Calthorpe long ago sketched up an urbanist community on the opposing side of the tracks.  Although that project would require moving the urban growth boundary, violating a principle that I elucidated above, the proximity of housing, train station, successful pub, and McDowell bus corridor is a compelling urbanist vision.

And the reason I’m here is to point out the urbanist solutions.

Okay, having thrown a lot of words at train stations, transects, etc, I’m ready to take a breath.  Perhaps the readers feel the same.  The next post will pick apart a recent ad that was intended to make us feel good, but falls short on urbanist grounds.  It’s such an easy target that the post will be short.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

On the Coherency of Transects and Urban Growth Boundaries - Part Three

In my last two posts, I’ve written about a property swap being considered by SMART, the regional rail authority for the North Bay.  Initial planning for the coming SMART train had assumed a second Petaluma train station at corner of McDowell Boulevard and Corona Road.  But SMART didn’t own the site and hasn’t secured it, leaving a question about where the station would go.

As a result, SMART is now considering a trade with a North Bay development company.  SMART would acquire an alternative site for the second station along Old Redwood Highway northeast of McDowell.  In exchange, SMART would grant development rights for the SMART land adjoining the downtown Petaluma station.

In the first post, I provided a more detailed introduction to the possible swap.  In the second, I wrote about the land-use restrictions that would limit the possibilities, including transit oriented development, around the alternative station site.  Today, I’ll weigh the pros and cons of the possible trade and then philosophize globally about the issues highlighted by the situation.

From an urbanist perspective, the primary arguments for the swap are the earlier development of a second Petaluma station and the momentum that the swap would give to possible transit oriented development at the downtown Petaluma station.

Also looking from the urbanist perspective, the primary argument against the swap is the restrictions that would limit or prohibit transit oriented development around the second station without changes to the urban growth boundary, the community separator (depicted in the photo), or both.

(Although not an urbanist perspective, many Petalumans also have a concern about the traffic issues of putting the second station at the far north end of town.)

At first view, the pros and cons may seem roughly balanced.  They certainly seemed so to me when I first learned of the possible deal.

But on further consideration, my focus improved.  I think transit oriented development around all SMART stations, including the second Petaluma station, should be an essential element of regional growth.  As a region, state, and nation, we’ve done too much to encourage sprawl not to encourage walkable development, such as well-designed transit oriented development, wherever we can.

But doing transit oriented development at the second station would require adjusting the urban growth and/or community separator.  Indeed, I would advocate for adjusting one or both if needed to facilitate transit oriented development at that station.  But I don’t want to advocate for those adjustments.  I would find them antithetical to good urbanism.  Therefore, my only possible position is to oppose the swap.

I still thank those who have pushed to bring the possibility to our attention.  But ultimately, the costs are too high.

Instead, I encourage SMART to expeditiously proceed with a process to identify the best developer for transit oriented development next to the downtown station and to simultaneously continue a search for a second station site that better meets the long-term needs of the community.

I know that time and resources are tight around the SMART office, but this stuff is important.  If we can’t facilitate the type of places where people would live who be likely to ride the SMART train, then the train may be an engineering success, but a financial and social failure, which isn’t what any of us want.

Having reached that conclusion, let me pull back and take a larger view.  In the preceding posts, I’ve written about concepts such as urban growth boundaries, community separators, and transects as they pertained to the possible second train station.  They were helpful lenses through which to view the immediate issue.

But thinking about those concepts also led to bigger conclusions that crystallized around a couple of recent interactions.

An architect acquaintance, after chatting with the regional coordinator for a rural space preservation organization, emailed me with a question.  He was intrigued by the idea of development supported agriculture, one manifestation of which could be clusters of homes surrounded by working farms, perhaps with the residents helping to work the farm and definitively with the value of the homes integrating with the farm to make the land immune from further development.

The architect liked the concept, but asked me how, when the urban growth boundary leapfrogs past the farm and homes, the developments don’t just become low-density pockets inimical to good urbanism.

 Also, someone at CNU 23, the most recent annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, made the point that it’s ridiculous to have urban growth boundaries that we define as the ultimate limits of our communities and then to consider changes in the boundaries every twenty years.

The only conclusion to my mind is that urban growth boundaries need to be far less movable that we’ve considered them in the past.  Perhaps they need to have a target life of fifty years or more, except in extreme circumstances.

The urbanist concept of transects, as a logical progression from natural and rural settings up through low-density residential developments and all the way to urban cores, supports the argument for stable urban growth boundaries.  It becomes nonsensical to have a low-density residential development at the urban fringe only to move the urban growth boundary and allow a shopping center on the far side.

Some, engrained in the American pattern of continual growth constantly reclaiming the wilderness, will rebel at the concept.  But growth needn’t always be horizontal.  Vertical growth, such as changing the transect of an area from T5 Urban Center to T6 Urban Core, can allow significant population bumps without expanding the urban growth area.

And having urban growth boundaries that rarely move, if paired with strictures on the entity with planning authority outside of the urban growth boundaries, could reduce the need for community separators.  Instead, all of the land outside of an urban growth boundary would effectively become the urban separator.

Some with a sense of history may point out an apparent logical flaw in the suggestion of fixed urban growth boundaries.  What if the founders of San Francisco had set a permanent urban growth boundary for their city in 1850?  Seeing that the future of the community as a supply center for the miners extracting gold from the Sierra, the founders might have set their boundary a dozen blocks above the bay, leaving the remainder of the peninsula tip as a permanent rocky and sandy native area and denying us the eventual delights of Golden Gate Park, the Sunset District, and Ocean Beach.

How can we logically constrain ourselves on urban growth boundaries today while also enjoying the urban places that resulted from not having those constraints in the 18th and 19th centuries?

I think I can answer that question, but will defer the answer to the next and final part of this series.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

On the Coherency of Transects and Urban Growth Boundaries - Part Two

In my last post, I gave the background for a land-use conundrum that has arisen in Petaluma.  The regional rail authority, SMART, is reportedly pursuing a land swap that would accelerate development of a second train station in Petaluma and of transit oriented development adjoining the first Petaluma train station.  Both are fine goals.  But the swap would put the second station at the urban fringe, a location bothersome to local urbanists.

Today, I’ll fill in more of the site and regulatory background, along with reintroducing an urbanist concept that speaks directly to the concern.  In my next post, I’ll conclude with my personal conclusions and philosophical insights.

The new site for the second station is within, but immediately adjoining the Urban Growth Boundary, the current legal barrier to further urban development.  A UGB can be realigned, but the process is slow and onerous.

Even importantly, the site adjoins a Community Separator, a set-aside area that is intended to be permanently excluded from UGBs in order to maintain rural lands between cities.  Over time, it’s expected that the UGB will move as the City of Petaluma needs more land.  But however much expansion might be desired, the Community Separator is intended to remain forever off-limits.

(The photo is of the Community Separator from an office window a short walk from the proposed train station.  Note the train tracks in the foreground.)

The result is that that station location, a former lumber yard that has been vacant and awaiting a new use for a decade, may provide a readily available site for transit use, but is trapped in a corner with little adjoining room for related development.  To the west and north are expansive office parks.  To the east is the Community Separator that is a permanent barrier to future development.

It’s only to the north that a small strip of developable land remains, between Old Redwood Highway and the railroad tracks.  And even that land is outside of the UGB, so is likely to remain barred from development for many years.  (The site can also be viewed here.  The station site is where the three parallel sheds are located, near the middle of the map.  The land east of the curved rail alignment is in the Community Separator.  And the light industrial and sales land uses north of the site are outside the UGB.)

Those who view the world through drivable suburban spectacles may argue that developable land isn’t needed around the station, that the downtown station will provide a walkable urban setting for those with that preference, and that the only function of the second station should e to provide parking for those who would drive, which the newly proposed site accommodates well.  (Although even the drivable suburban devotees may pause at having the station at the far north end of town, resulting in more traffic on busy McDowell Boulevard and undersized Ely Road.)

But the bigger concern should be the continual reports from surveys of potential homebuyers, especially among the younger segments of the population, that they want more walkable residential options.  It’s a topic about which I most recently wrote here.  With a transit station being a logical focus of a walkable setting, siting a transit station where only limited residential land is available, and even that land requiring a UGB realignment, would be a land-use decision that doesn’t address the long-term needs of the community.

One of the underlying theories of urbanism, the concept of transects, also shines a light on the shortcomings of the possible station location.  The transect theory, which is borrowed from biology, argues that cities, like biological communities, are more stable and functionally effective when they transition gradually and logically between areas of different function and intensity.

In biology, a transition might be from a surf line to a sandy beach to a grass-covered coastal dune to a coastal forest.

In land-use, the transition is usually depicted as from natural land (Transect 1 or T1) to rural agricultural land (T2) all the way to the most intense urban uses (T6).

Train stations, with their parking and/or transit oriented development adjacencies, should probably never occupy any Transect below T4.  The downtown Petaluma station is adjoined by T5 and T6.

But the Community Separator on the far side of the rail tracks from the proposed station site is realistically a T2, if not a T1.  So we would have a T4 use immediately adjoining an area of T1/T2.  Mother Nature wouldn’t do that and perhaps neither should we.

Balanced against all of these concerns is the reality that the newly proposed site is available for immediate development, unlike the site that was formerly proposed for the second station.  Also, the site adjoins office parks to which workers could perhaps travel by train.  As a legitimate goal for urbanists is a functioning and productive transit system, the second site therefore has attractions to the urbanist mind.

The question becomes whether to accept a flawed land-use pattern in exchange for a train station that will be available more quickly, following the dicta of not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, or to insist on waiting until a train station site becomes available that would result in a better land pattern.

In the next post, I’ll offer the result of my mental balancing on the question, along with some related musings about the relationship between transects, UGBs, and Community Separators, the “coherence” promised by the title of these posts.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

On the Coherency of Transects and Urban Growth Boundaries - Part One

Something I find irresistible about urbanism is how well the pieces fit together.  It’s a logical, coherent theory of how the world of land use that works, or at least should work.

This isn’t to imply that the laws of urbanism are as immutable as the laws of physics or mathematics.  E=mc², F=ma, and (x+y)(x-y)= x²-y² have a crystalline perfection that nothing in the living, oxygen uptake world can match.  But with that exception, urbanism can be startlingly beautiful in its consistency.

Urbanists can and will argue about the small details of urban theory.  Indeed, they often seem to revel in those arguments.  But they’re mostly fussing over the little stuff while remaining in full agreement on the big stuff, which is why they can go out for beers after the most heated arguments.

I was reminded of this coherence when a couple of thought exercises I’d recently been mulling suddenly and unexpectedly came together to display a logical truth.  Although the insight is universal, the cogitation catalyst was a proposed change in the SMART train facilities here in Petaluma.

It’s a story that’ll take me several posts to present.  Today, for those not in the North Bay, I’ll summarize the back story.

As originally approved by the voters, the SMART (Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit) train was to extend from Larkspur in Marin County to Cloverdale at the far northern end of Sonoma County.  Petaluma was to have two stations, one near downtown that was to be the focus of walkable urban development and another in the northeast quadrant of town that was to serve the drivable suburban neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, that voter approval came in 2008 and was in the form of a quarter cent sales tax.  With the great recession, sales tax revenues shrank abruptly and SMART was left with an unfunded mandate.

To adjust, SMART made significant adjustments to the system configuration, trimming the north and south ends of the line and dropping several stations, while promising to restore the deferred elements as soon as tax revenues allowed.

One of the deferred stations was the drivable suburban station in Petaluma, then slated for the intersection of McDowell Boulevard North and Corona Road.  If not in the heart of suburban Petaluma, the proposed station location was reasonably convenient to much of Petaluma and was on a well-used Petaluma Transit route for those who would access the train by bus.

The community was disappointed by the temporary loss of the Corona Road station and has continually agitated for its restoration.  But at the same time, the City prepared to make good use of the downtown station.

Using funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the City completed a master plan for development of the area immediately adjoining the downtown station.  (Dual acknowledgments: I served on the Citizens’ Advisory Committee for the Petaluma Station Area Plan.  Also, the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds is within walkable distance of the downtown station and I’ve helped organize the Fairgrounds re-envisioning currently being done by Petaluma Urban Chat.  So I have a dual interest in the success of the downtown station.)

The key parcel for development at the downtown station was owned by SMART.  During rail construction, the parcel was put to temporary use for staging, but the community expected SMART to establish a parallel track of identifying a developer who could move ahead with transit oriented development the site as soon as the construction use was complete.  Except SMART never implemented the parallel track.

So now the community had two beefs with SMART, the absence of the Corona station, which would serve those who would drive to a station, and the flagging efforts at the downtown station, which would serve those who prefer a walkable experience.  Meanwhile, the date of SMART’s revenue service was coming ever closer.

A month ago, SMART announced a possible deal that would address both concerns with a single action.  They would secure an alternative parcel for the drivable station.  In exchange, they would grant development rights for the downtown parcel to the current owner of the alternative station location.

At first blush, it seemed a reasonable, even inspired, solution.  In the first days after the announcement, the community seemed pleased with the trade-off.  The downtown transit oriented development was again underway and the second station would be available sooner than anticipated.

But the honeymoon ended quickly.  The new site was at the urban fringe.  It couldn’t be served as easily by Petaluma Transit.  It would encourage more car trips down streets that were poorly configured, near capacity, or both.  The only sites for transit oriented development around the new station were outside of the Urban Growth Boundary.

The community began scratching its collective head, wondering if the deal struck by SMART had been Faustian.

That will be the jumping off point for my next couple of posts.  What are the implications of putting a transit station at the urban fringe?  Does the location create difficult future decisions?  Is the urban fringe location a reasonable trade-off for moving the downtown development ahead?  What does urbanism have to offer on the point?  Do the transects that form the heart of urbanism impart insights?  The answers should have application not only to Petaluma, but to all communities.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)