Making Car Non-Ownership Seamless

Convincing people to make lifestyle-changing commitments to transit is a multi-faceted challenge.  There are some bright folks who are offering creative solutions.  But there may also be transit agencies which are failing to address the problem.

One can make two types of decision regarding transit use.  Let’s call them “daily use” and “everyday use”.  Both are based on rational assessments of the cost and convenience of transit versus car.  Both are good for traffic congestion, air quality, etc.  But the everyday use decision is far more important to urbanism and to the world.

Daily use is the decision to take transit for a particular trip, without a commitment beyond the current day.

For the first five years of my career, I rode BART from Walnut Creek to San Francisco nearly every workday.  I didn’t make that decision because of any grand philosophical justification or government dictate.  I rode BART because it was cheaper than paying for gasoline, bridge tolls, and parking.  Plus I preferred spending my morning commute reading the San Francisco Chronicle instead of watching brake lights.   My morning memories of those years are mostly Herb Caen and Armistead Maupin.

But despite riding BART to work nearly every day, I still had a car.  I had to live in a home at which parking was available.  And I continued to paying for insurance, maintenance, etc.  On any particular morning, I could have chosen to drive to work instead of riding BART.  And sometimes I did so because of post-work commitments.  I was a car-owner who happened to use transit regularly.

Today, I still make daily use calculations several times a month.  When considering a meeting or athletic event in the Bay Area, I think about transit options versus driving, considering cost and convenience.  And I still have a car in the driveway.

But there is another more profound decision that can be made.  To have one fewer car in the household and to instead rely exclusively on transit.  (I’m using “transit” as shorthand for a comprehensive car non-ownership strategy.  Transit alone is rarely sufficient for living with one fewer car in the garage.  But it can be an essential element of a strategy that might also include a personal bicycle, bike share, taxis, CityShare Cars, etc.)

Historically, the “one fewer car” strategy was usually conceived as a family finding a way to make do with one vehicle instead of two.  But the millennial generation is beginning to show us that a car reduction from one to zero is also a possibility.

The cost savings of making an everyday transit decision and pruning a car can be large.  Not only are the car purchase, maintenance, and insurances costs eliminated, but if one lives in a cutting-edge setting where housing and parking have been decoupled, the cost of a parking space can also be dropped.  If the parking is structured, the savings can be $20,000 or more.

But the decision to do with one fewer car is more complex that deciding to walk to a bus stop Monday through Friday.  It’s about assembling a cost-effective strategy for all the needs of living, from weekly grocery shopping to the delivery of a large screen television to taking a weekend in the wine country.  If the obstacles to any of those tasks become overly burdensome, it’s easy to buy a car, secure parking, rejoin the masses, and resume adding traffic congestion to the streets and greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

So providing ways to facilitate the everyday transit decision is good public policy.  Some folks take the charge seriously.

Hacienda, a mixed-use project in Pleasanton that will someday host almost 20,000 on-site workers and nearly 4,000 residents, has taken a step in the right direction.  In partnership with City CarShare and Schneider Electric, and under the review of UC Berkeley, a fleet of electric vehicles has been made available to the residents and workers.

Need to make a business trip to San Francisco, go to lunch with co-workers, or visit a hardware store during a break?  An electric car is available.

It’s still a trial effort.  The long-term implementation is still uncertain, including details such who covers the cost.  But it’s a creative idea that makes living without a personal vehicle one step easier.

Contrast that to some of the North Bay thinking.  Now that it’s commonly understood that the widening of Highway 101 remains at least seven years away, there is additional regional hope that the coming SMART train can be part of a comprehensive strategy to do with fewer personal vehicles.

Early on, SMART seemed to embrace the challenge.  Management talked of shuttles that would deliver passengers from stations to places of employment.  And SMART was an active participant in land planning efforts to add transit-oriented development near the stations.

More recently, both initiatives seem to have faded.  I recently heard a rumor that no funding would be available for shuttles.  And despite the Petaluma Station Area Plan having been adopted nearly a year ago, the SMART parcel adjoining the downtown Petaluma train station hasn’t been made available to developers.

I don’t sit at the SMART management table.  But I think a train can be a good regional addition.  And I sympathize with SMART’s problem.  The long-range planning assumed a continued robust economy that would generate solid sales tax revenues.  The economy hasn’t been robust and may still be years from being as strong as hoped during the planning.

Nonetheless, the SMART goal should be to facilitate non-car lifestyles.  At present, SMART seems to believe that delivering a working train that may encourage daily use will be adequate.  It’s not.  We need a system that will encourage everyday use.  Shuttles, transit-oriented development, and a big picture strategy are required.  And they’re required now.

The Hacienda electric car program isn’t a complete solution, but it can be part of a complete solution.  Which seems to be more than SMART is currently offering.

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

Trying Too Hard and Trying Too Little Are Both Flawed Approaches

I recently made a day trip to the East Bay.  My business required only a couple of hours, so I stretched my outing to look at the downtowns of Pleasant Hill and Pleasanton.  The choice of destinations, which was based a bit on logistical convenience and a bit on alphabetical proximity, was fortuitous because it illuminated two approaches to urbanist design.

In a conventional sense, Pleasant Hill doesn’t have a real downtown.  The town came into full existence during the era when strip malls and housing tracts were the development norm.   But a few years back, a developer tried to fill the void with Crescent Drive, a faux downtown near the center of the community.

The impulse was reasonable, but the execution missed the mark.  In an era when we’re rediscovering knowledge about how downtowns work, the lessons were ignored in Pleasant Hill.

There isn’t a residential component to add life to the streets.  Instead, the land uses closest to Crescent Drive are mostly parking lots for Crescent Drive shoppers.

Walkability is limited to the pedestrian routes between the parking lots and the shops.  Outside of Crescent Drive, much of the existing development is pedestrian unfriendly big boxes and strip malls.

What remains is attractive but generic architecture, banners describing the area as “downtown”,

and an arch above the entrance announcing “Pleasant Hill”.  I can be a fan of entrance arches.  When they look authentic, they create a warm feeling about the community.  But authenticity is hard to achieve in faux downtowns.  And, like the rest of Crescent Drive, it wasn’t successful here.

I sympathize with the problem faced by the developer.  It’s hard to create a downtown decades after the town came into existence.  But an incremental approach would have been better.  (Although I’ll acknowledge that financing would have been difficult.)  Crescent Drive feels like an attempt to be too much too soon.  Which resulted in a development that is little more than inadequate and quickly aging eye candy.

Pleasanton is on the other end of the scale.  It’s a marvelous downtown that clearly dates to the early days of the community.  The arch sign, even with the retrofitted neon tubing, feels authentic.  The storefronts are varied and interesting.  And the perfectly preserved filling station is guaranteed to evoke smiles.

But it seems that little beyond preservation has been done to make downtown vibrant.  It has an oddly linear configuration, only one street wide and about a half-mile long.  It may be the best location in the Bay Area for a small town parade, but it’s not convenient for pedestrians to explore, with the only route being up and down the same street.

The linear downtown reminded me how much I enjoy the North Bay cities like Sonoma, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Napa, and Petaluma that offer multiple routes for a downtown amble.

There are charming residential neighborhoods in Pleasanton, but they’re too far from downtown to be readily convenient on foot.  Nor does there seem to have been any effort to widen or to strengthen the downtown.  Underutilized parcels exist only a block away, but there was no evidence of an attempt to add residential to enliven the downtown or commercial to enhance the pedestrian experience.

I didn’t research the municipal planning documents to see if there was a vision that hadn’t yet reached the ground.  But my observation of downtown showed a place that was resting on the laurels that came from preservation and hadn’t yet grasped the problem of making the downtown truly vibrant.

Creating a functional downtown is a challenge that must be met with both enthusiasm and restraint.  Neither Pleasant Hill nor Pleasanton seems to have found the right balance.

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