Local Motion
When San Francisco’s MUNI spent major money on a “central subway” to Chinatown, I was doubtful. One recent Saturday, though, I revived the gallery-hopping I did before the pandemic, taking the train into the city from Berkeley, walking over to one gallery near Embarcadero Station, then taking a tram past the ballpark to the CalTrain Station, where I switched to another tram to head south to Minnesota Street’s Dogpatch cluster of art galleries and artists’ studios.
While talking with Ward Schumaker, whose ceramics show I came to see, he mentioned the convenience of the T line now that it runs to Chinatown. He was right — the T got me to Union Square (above) quickly, connecting directly to BART and MUNI’s Powell Street Station, where I caught a train to downtown Oakland and another to Berkeley. The tram I took initially past the ballpark was the long way around, slowed by Giants fans on their way to a game. Taking the T back was a straight shot. What had been an ordeal I tended to avoid is now considerably faster and easier.
In Energy and Equity (1974), the social critic Ivan Illich argued that 15 mph was a reasonable upper limit for human movement. He took bicycles as his metric, unaware that bike speeds would accelerate along with everything else vehicular. He was ridiculed for this assertion, but if we think it as an average speed for movement other than simply walking, 15 mph seems reasonable in most local contexts. With it in mind, we could distinguish among trains, trams and buses, cars, trucks, and bikes and their pathways.
Currently, we mix aided-movement modes irrationally. Local non-arterial streets are designed mostly to accommodate emergency vehicles, delivery trucks, and SUVs. Arterial streets are designed to funnel cars and trucks across town at higher speeds, in theory, than local streets permit. In reality, they jam up at certain times of day, slowing movement to a crawl. At other times, their permitted speed makes them hazardous to pedestrians trying to get across them. “Calming” the traffic on them is a current urban fixation, as are efforts to make it safer for bikes to interact with cars and trucks on these same arterials.
Meanwhile, cities like Oakland and Berkeley have designated some non-arterial streets as bike-friendly. A friend who lives in suburban Walnut Creek arrives at BART’s MacArthur Station, he told me, then bikes to his destination — a store in Berkeley’s Fourth Street shopping district — almost entirely on these streets. When he mentioned this, I thought of a mobility study BART made of its El Cerrito Plaza Station, finding that the majority of BART patrons who use the station either walk or bike to it. The study also noted that the topography of the east bay makes north–south movement much easier for bikes than east–west.
Activating the Richmond Line
One focus of BART’s transit-oriented development (TOD) program is the Richmond Line, which extends from MacArthur Station to Richmond Station through Berkeley, Albany, and El Cerrito. The first project, at MacArthur Station, is open, as is the first phase of Richmond Station. Teams are working on projects at El Cerrito Plaza and North Berkeley Stations. MacArthur Station is the tallest and densest of these projects, with an adjoining parking structure for BART patrons. The others are lower and less dense, with minimal structured parking. The completed Richmond Line projects will add some 4,000 units of affordable and market-rate housing in the immediate vicinity of these stations.
El Cerrito Plaza Station’s planned redevelopment (above) is typical of the approach taken. Parcels are allocated to affordable and market-rate developers to facilitate phasing and financing. Local zoning applies, but the city agreed to achieve BART’s targets for height and density. El Cerrito has a specific plan in place for its San Pablo Avenue corridor that establishes the project’s context. North Berkeley Station is surrounded by a lower-density residential neighborhood, so its height and density are more controversial.
BART originally tried to build the station at Solano Avenue in Albany, an existing mixed-use corridor. Albany resisted, so BART shifted it to Berkeley. The first location would have connected the Richmond Line to an important north–south link between San Pablo Avenue and the Alameda and Shattuck Avenues uphill, both major east–west corridors. North Berkeley Station is the north end of a below-grade section of BART that starts at Ashby Station. A linear park above BART’s right of way north of downtown Berkeley extends to Albany and El Cerrito, providing a pedestrian and bike corridor. North Berkeley and El Cerrito Plaza Station’s projects will incorporate it and provide ample bike parking.
The Richmond Line is effectively a spur of BART’s east bay network. While MacArthur Station is a transfer point, transferring to the Antioch Line to get to Rockridge Station, and vice versa, is awkward. Rockridge Station is easily accessed from the suburbs east of the Berkeley and Oakland hills, including Walnut Creek, an urban center that competes with San Francisco’s Union Square as a regional retail destination. College Avenue around Rockridge Station initially benefited, but the post-pandemic shift in commuting and live/work patterns makes the Richmond Line ripe for activation. Redeveloping its stations is an important step which BART could support in the future by adding more frequent local service.
When we think of regional transit, we often focus more fully integrated systems with faster intercity service. This was the thinking behind California’s high speed rail (HSR) initiative, for example, but reality lags this vision considerably — HSR’s opening move will connect Greater Los Angeles to Bakersfield. BART will soon reach downtown San José, giving it a second connection to CalTrain and Amtrak, but these component parts form an “ecosystem” of sorts that suffers from crimped funding and limited new investment. Integration is more likely to be achieved by coordinating service and managing existing routes more effectively, and by reimagining what we hope transit will do for us, locally as well as regionally.
What is transit for?
When I visited the Jack Fischer Gallery on Minnesota Street, the building was crowded, but not as crowded as it was hosting the San Francisco Art Book Fair (above). The Minnesota Street Project is an affordable venue for the arts in a city whose downtown is geared to national and global events. While the pandemic upended assumptions about the latter, these local venues are thriving. Indeed, I was struck by how vibrant the Third Street corridor is, compared to Market Street downtown. It benefits from UCSF’s presence at the south end of Mission Bay, but redevelopment north and south, especially around Mission Creek and Dogpatch, has brought a mix of housing, parks, shops, restaurants, and workspace, changing character from district to district — well-served now by the T line.
Walkable urbanism needs local mobility. We need to turn our idea of regional transit inside out, making local access as important a goal for it as geographic reach and point-to-point speed. This is not to say that the latter goals are unimportant. Regions need backbone systems with reach and speed, but they also need locally serving networks that do this efficiently — like the T: frequent; direct and accessible from the neighborhoods served; and connected to major transit corridors like San Francisco’s Market Street.
The example of San Francisco’s central subway also suggests that local jurisdictions will be crucial to making walkable centers more widely accessible. Along BART’s Richmond Line, bus routes that connect each station to likely destinations, not just take riders back and forth from their places of residence, will set the stage for better future service — with trams instead of buses, perhaps, on well-traveled routes. (When trams have protected rights of way, they’re faster than cars on congested arterials. Reducing the number of lanes on those arterials is easier if there’s a convenient transit option for getting from point A to B.)
Deciding on density
El Cerrito’s San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan provides a development framework for its part of this major north–south corridor. The new housing planned for El Cerrito Plaza BART Station conforms to the plan, which means that its developers can limit any additional concessions to the lower-density residential blocks to its east. At North Berkeley Station, the developers have to arrive at a plan with the local community (above), although Berkeley has committed to meeting BART’s density target. How this will impact future growth is unclear, but Sacramento and Acton Streets toward University Avenue, and Delaware Street toward San Pablo Avenue, are the most likely to be redeveloped at higher densities in the future.
Both University and San Pablo Avenues are in walking/biking distance of North Berkeley Station, and the streets that connect them are more likely to see infill redevelopment scaled to what exists now — lower, with a smaller footprint, adding units by increasing site coverage and eliminating on-site parking. Closer to University and San Pablo Avenues, their higher densities may spur larger sites and taller buildings. None of the BART TOD projects in Berkeley and El Cerrito follow the model of BART’s MacArthur and Lake Merritt Stations, both containing their programs in two adjoining buildings, one taller than the other. El Cerrito Plaza and North Berkeley Stations’ redevelopment creates a parcel “grid” of smaller buildings. The main questions they raise about density are how to relate to the station and ensure access; how to use open space to benefit the new community and tie it into the surrounding one; how to relate to the linear park and pedestrian/bike pathway that runs through both sites; and how to provide porosity to and from the surrounding area.
The TOD projects on the Richmond Line reflect the consensus views of BART’s planners and their cities’ leaders of the levels of density that are appropriate to the different stations, and the forms they should take. One could quibble about their formal qualities, but the more interesting story, to me, is how walkable urbanism itself is changing.
Precedents and portents
In 1989, I visited the late U.C. Berkeley Professor Richard Bender and his wife in Tokyo, where Bender was a visiting chair at RCAST, the research campus of Tokyo University. They were living in Mejiro, an area of the city served by the Yamanote Line, an elevated “circle line” run by JR. Bender told me that Mejiro reminded him of the Brooklyn of his youth, the way the station opened out to a shopping street, with residential neighborhoods behind it. It takes in Gakushuin University, the “Peers’ School” founded after the Meiji Restoration to educate Japan’s aristocracy. The presence of its campus (above) gives Mejiro a “university city” feeling not unlike Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Mejiro has steadily densified over the decades.
The Benders lived in a three-story condominium building developed by the parents of our friend, Toshio Oyama, completed in 1989 on the site of his grandparents’ house. Recently, Oyama teamed with a developer to replace his late parents’ house next door with two-story building with a café below and housing above, then replace the old condo building with a newer, taller one. The deal gave him the smaller building, a condo in the bigger one, and cash. This is typical in Tokyo, where most redevelopment is incremental, initiated by property owners and their smaller-scale developer partners.
When I visited Oyama’s Nest Café (ha ha) in 2018, I noted that the lane I walked up and down in 1989, one car and one person wide, is still there. Fire and garbage trucks in Tokyo (above) are scaled to the lanes. Car registration in Japan, based on engine displacement, led to “micro-cars,” like Europe’s Smart Car. In France, the EV revolution spawned the Ami, a two-seat Citroen “city car” with a top speed of 25 mph and a range of 75 miles. Drivers as young as 14 can own or rent them there. Sweden’s Luvly, makes a four-seat EV (above, right) with a top speed of 56 mph and a range of 62 miles, shippable in a flat pack, with two removable batteries weighing 33 pounds each.
Established automakers have tended to convert their existing gas-powered models to EV. Indeed, GM recently announced that it will stop producing its compact Bolt EV sedan to focus on its large EV pickup. In cities, car use is mostly local, so speed and range are less important than cost, convenience, and ease of parking. EV Pickups and SUVs may be an endangered species.
Our city streets were planned and designed around large vehicles. Efforts to reduce their impact and make streets safer for walking and biking take this as given, but a shift in vehicular scale, reflecting today’s urban realities, would allow us to rethink the streetscape entirely, reallocating the flow of cars, bikes, and pedestrians, the way we allot space to them, and how cars and bikes are parked, recharged, and potentially shared.
Transit at different scales needs to be at the heart of this. What we’re really rethinking is how our cities work, how “walkable urbanism” is activated by locally-serving transit that supports walkable destinations by making them accessible at “Illich speed” as I’ve defined it: an average travel time of 15 mph in town, some of which involves walking or biking. By re-establishing stations and stops as ordering devices for city districts and neighborhoods, walking/biking can again become the main way people use them.
Where topography is an issue, a tertiary order of transit can be introduced. The hillside escalators in Hong Kong are one example. As I saw in Rome in 1998, small “buses” take people from one district to another along its main walking routes, so they can forego cars or minimize their daily use. (Use taxes on private cars can reinforce and help pay for communal and less impactful alternatives. Like water and power, private cars can be charged a base rate for reasonable local travel, with the cost rising as size and use increase. This can be tuned to individual and family needs and situations, including disability. “Reasonable” is the key word.”)
Rethinking’s “how come”
A welter of arguments is made for changing our region’s urban condition. Each argument has committed and passionate advocates, but they often overstate their case and push their point of view past what others consider reasonable. City councils like Berkeley’s struggle to make sense of what they hear, often put forward in terms of urgency, citing climate change, traffic fatalities, and other reasons for taking action. (Plans to reduce street parking and add bike lanes in the Hopkins Street’s Westbrae shopping area [above] in north-central Berkeley exemplify this contention.)
The solutions these advocates put forward, while well-intentioned, are too narrow. They miss the possibilities for urbanity inherent in a broader rethinking of our region as a natural and manmade ecosystem. Urbane is to cities as humane is to humans — urbanity isn’t elegance or savoir-faire, but a deeper understanding of what makes a region a greater sum than its parts: livable, accessible, walkable, with nature not against it. As Jane Jacobs argued in The Economy of Cities (1969), a city’s countryside is also part of its urbanity. As there’s no real separation between humanity and nature, we have to take both consistently into account.
Our region has reasonably good “bones,” but we’ve removed a good deal that could help us now, like locally serving streetcars and the suburban growth patterns they spurred. We overlaid the region with freeways and converted a lot of close-in agricultural land into low-density housing. We pushed new growth to the periphery. Droughts, floods, and spiking energy prices have undermined this model, leading us to reverse ourselves: taking down elevated urban freeways; adding local transit infrastructure; and coming to grips with what the market provides well — how to facilitate that — and will never provide at meaningful scale without public investment.
What do we really want for the Bay region, with its remarkable terrain, and for our towns and cities, and their connective tissue? These questions have real urgency, as the single-issue advocates correctly recognize, but we need to consider them holistically — as an ecosystem greater than its parts.
The deflating Tech bubble, giving us back a less drastically tiered regional economy, invites us to take a local-up, less-is-more approach to our future. We have a limited ability to make big moves, so they need to be strategic. The central subway, much criticized when it opened, may turn out to be exactly what was needed to connect and activate a transit line stretching from Chinatown to Bayview — a string of distinct communities that, newly more accessible, can thrive together as a greater sum. The Richmond Line, long an orphan in BART’s world, has the same opportunity to be the spine from which secondary and tertiary movement fans out, just as the transit corridor along Market Street helps organize MUNI’s bus and tram service.
Denser projects can be added at different scales along these corridors. Not every project needs to have a big footprint and not every developer needs to be a big player. As in Tokyo’s Mejiro, redevelopment can be more inclusive, particularly if by-right zoning makes a comeback. Recent state legislation overrode local control, but the impetus behind it was to break an unworkable local development process. That point made, reforms need to follow that give a local spirit to the letter of what the new laws require.
The forms local redevelopment take is best decided by local communities themselves. Their decisions can be facilitated by cities, as San Francisco did in Dogpatch with its Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, to mediate between local preferences and regional imperatives (and vice versa). Transit is part of this, integral to the potential of districts and their neighborhoods to come into their own in an evolving way — a local motion that’s tuned to the people and enterprises that activate them, to the spirit of each place.
Sources
BART: In November and December 2022, I reviewed documentation of its TOD program that BART has put online, and interviewed BART planners Shannon Dodge and Kamala Parks about its TOD program.
Cities of Berkeley and El Cerrito: I reviewed Berkeley’s online information on the Ashby and North Berkeley Station projects; and El Cerrito’s updated San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan. I heard a presentation of early concepts for the North Berkeley Station project by its selected developer team.
San Francisco Housing Action Coalition: As an SFHAC member and a participant in its project review calls, I heard a presentation of El Cerrito Plaza Station’s redevelopment by its project team in September 2022.
Acknowledgements
This paper is my third as a Visiting Scholar/Architecture at U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED). I’m grateful to CED Dean Renée Chow for her continuing support of my research. I first wrote on this topic in 2007 with the late CED Dean Richard Bender, my writing partner for half a century. Our work and conversations still inspire me.
