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One of the really big missed opportunities in Natomas plan was the interaction of Natomas East Drainage Canal and the rest of the development.
In San Antonio, they developed their waterfront a lot more intensively. It has walking paths with little bridges over the river. They have restaurants and rivers overlooking the river. Hotels and shops take maximum advantage of the river.
The Official Website for The San Antonio River Walk! (http://www.thesanantonioriverwalk.com/photos/index.asp - broken link)
Because of flooding issues and the need to preserve critical habitat for threatened species I am not sure that type of development would be as appropiate along the Sacramento or American Rivers. Also the American and Sacramento rivers are just much bigger rivers when they are in this region. That makes building pedestrian bridges across the river a lot more expensive. But in Natomas, that type of development really could have worked well. A better developed waterfront would have also helped to activate the pedestrian and bike traffic along the canal. That in turn probably would have re-enforced the pedestrian density goals of the entire development.
When Natomas starts growing north of Elk Grove Blvd, I would love to see something to take better advantage of the canal.
Even as presently configured, the execution of the class 1 bike trail in Natomas is a missed opportunity.
One of the reasons the American River bike trail is so successful is that it acts as a bike freeway. You can ride from Discovery Park to Folsom and almost never have to stop your bike for cross vehicle traffic. If you want to bike to work, you rarely have to use your breaks the entire length of the trail while you are on it. As a result its much easier and faster to ride 5, 10 or even 15 miles along that bike trail than along almost any other bike path in the region.
In Natomas they have a class 1 bike trail along the canal which was a really good start. But the car bridges over the drain are too low. When the bike trail confronts streets like N. Bend or Del Paso Rd, their isn't enough space under the bridges for someone on a bike to go under the bridge. As a result the Natomas trail is a lot more start and stop. People on bikes have to wait for traffic to get across the route. That slows down the people on bikes a lot which makes a 5 to 10 mile commute much less enjoyable.
Its expensive to retrofit the bridges over the drain. But going forward with new bridges, I doubt it would be that much more expensive to build the bridges high enough so people on bikes could pass underneath them uninterrupted.
Despite my criticisms, I thought there were some good ideas to be learned from that bike trail as well. On the residential streets like Fenmore, Moonstone and Blackridge they are configured in a manner to provide really good access to the bike trail. That part of the bike trail is extraordinarily permeable. Also the homes watch the trail. Because their are a lot of eyes on the trail, the trail feels very safe. If you needed to ride the trail early in the morning to get to work on time or if are returning from work after dusk, the trail doesn't feel ominous.
It's good that you mention the size differences between the Sacramento and American and the San Antonio River, which is about 50 feet wide, at the wide parts. The Sacramento River is as wide as two football fields--when it isn't flooding. Drainage canals are designed to channel floodwaters, so permanent development like restaurants etc. would be wiped out in heavy flood years, and building buildings along the levees might compromise their integrity.
In terms of the American river, personally I like the fact that Sacramento has a sort of "wild" area running through the middle of the city (admittedly, it used to be the northern edge of the city before we started expanding north and east.) It's kind of appropriate for western cities to have these wild & woolly stretches of nature in them.
The biggest problem with the Natomas plan was that light rail is going to come after the neighborhood gets built out. This is the opposite pattern of the development of the red car system in LA. Down there developers built out the Red Car system and subsidized the cost of operating the street cars for a period in order to lure people to their developments. That was how LA had for a while one of the largest street car systems in the world. There was no sustained funding arrangement, so the system collapsed. But this is why I am advocating public transit and not privately managed light rail.
Right now we mandate that developers provide utilities, roads, sewers and even schools, as conditions of getting a development approved. Why shouldn't they provide light rail too?
If new development had to provide light rail as a condition of development, it would do several good things. First it would encourage developers to maximize the value of this investment by building high density units near light rail stations. Second, the best way for developers to minimize the cost per unit is to build a lot more units. Third if new development had to provide light rail, that means that federal and state transit funds could be used to retrofit existing neighborhoods where it might be a lot tougher to get some sort of parcel tax passed to pay for it.
People assume that suburban areas are intrinsically transit adverse and that is why ridership levels are so poor there. But there is also the issue of transit access. Most transit in the area is designed to funnel people downtown. Most of the light rail and transit lines go in that direction. So the closer you are to downtown, the better access you have to transit. Its that access and availability of a lot of transit lines that makes that area more transit friendly. But I suspect Natomas would look a lot different if developers had to pay for a light rail line to downtown and another one to West Sac as a condition of development.
But I suspect Natomas would look a lot different if developers had to pay for a light rail line to downtown and another one to West Sac as a condition of development.
I suspect it would too. I also suspect the additional costs would be added to the housing and drive prices out of reach for most who would use the light rail to commute downtown. I also suspect that it would do to Natomas what the south line has done to downtown. It would extend the reach of the criminal elements even further north. Natomas is already having enough of a problem with the low income housing. Want more?
All these many plans and wishes for something akin to the River Walk are great. Unfortunately, they would take some planning and thus far, that doesn't seem to have ever been Sacramento's strong suit from slicing off Old Sac from the rest of the town by the I5 freeway instead of fully developing the river front to dissecting, disrupting and nearly destroying the cohesiveness of some of the long-established ethnic neighborhoods by the WX Freeway, not to mention turning K Street into a pedestrian mall for the homeless.
The biggest problem with the Natomas plan was that light rail is going to come after the neighborhood gets built out. This is the opposite pattern of the development of the red car system in LA. Down there developers built out the Red Car system and subsidized the cost of operating the street cars for a period in order to lure people to their developments. That was how LA had for a while one of the largest street car systems in the world. There was no sustained funding arrangement, so the system collapsed. But this is why I am advocating public transit and not privately managed light rail.
You're exactly right: the whole point of transit-oriented development is to build the transit first. The problem is that federal funding for transit requires the population density first. The secret is to build streetcar lines instead of LRV lines: they are less expensive to build and better suited to cities.
It's how Sacramento was built too: the suburbs of Oak Park, Curtis Park, West Sacramento, North Sacramento and Colonial Heights/Colonial Acres were built in conjunction with a streetcar line, built by the same people who developed the land. East Sacramento and the Land Park area developed in about the same way. There were other working combinations: PG&E owned the local streetcar line, who made a wonderful regular electricity customer and helped promote the use of electricity along its routes.
Pacific Electric was kind of different: it was an interurban, not strictly a local streetcar company. Owner Henry Huntington also owned the Los Angeles Railway, a narrow-gauge local streetcar line in LA (the "Yellow Cars.") PE worked more like RT Metro or BART, running in between cities. LARY worked like the Market Street Railway in SF: small streetcars to get around within a city. Interurbans had things like restrooms, diner service, even parlor/observation cars, and most (especially in the western US) carried freight trains as well as passenger trains, and many also operated local streetcar lines.
Northern California had its own interurbans, the best-known of which was the Sacramento Northern. It ran from Chico to Sacramento to Oakland, with branch lines to Colusa, Woodland, Danville, Davis and a few other places. Including the ferry across Suisun Bay (whose restaurant was owned by Oak Park resident George Dunlap) the SN was the longest interurban main line in the country. Once the Bay Bridge was built, they even went all the way to San Francisco on the lower deck of the bridge, alongside Key System trains. SN also operated local streetcar lines in Sacramento, Chico and Marysville/Yuba City, and commuter service from Sacramento to Woodland, North Sacramento, Rio Linda and Elverta. In addition, another electric interurban, the Central California Traction, ran from Sacramento to Stockton. They also ran a local streetcar service in Sacramento, from 8th & K to 21st Avenue east of Stockton Boulevard.
Wburg-
The Natomas drainage canal is engineered differently and functions differently than the local rivers. If you look at the amount of freeboard on the levees in along the canal versus the freeboard along the rivers, you will notice its much smaller than the amount of freeboard along the canal.
The primary tool for moving volumes of water through canal quickly are huge pumps, not rising waters. Along the canal, there is are several large pumping stations. There are also several temporary holding ponds to handle peak flows including a very large holding pond in the regional park. But those are temporary measures to handle things until the pumps can be sped up.
Lastly if the system still has too much water, the area that will flood is Rio Linda. In that area, the creeks don't have levees. If there is too much water the areas around those creeks will flood.
Granted if the pumps fail in major rain event, Natomas is screwed. But if the pumps fail in downtown in a major flood, I-5 and potentially parts of downtown are screwed as well. There are risks in building cities near the juncture of two rivers.
Levees pose additional expenses on development but not insurmountable burdens. If you look at what they did at the Chevy's along the Garden Highway, they built the restaurant on top of a parking lot. If anything was to flood, it would be a parking lot. Overlooking a water body is amenity. People will pay a premium for the opportunity to do so and that can fund building higher densities.
Crumudgeon-
I know both the city and county of Sacramento have mixed income ordinances. Its a response to a state law that mandates that cities provide adequate housing to people of various income levels. But they have the effect of weakening the link between cost and price. When you buy an expensive home in this region one of the fees you are paying for is the cost of subsidizing the construction of housing for people with more modest incomes. Whether you agree with this law or not, it is the law of the land.
Second the other issue is future transportation costs. For a period gas prices were above $4 a gallon. What was driving gas prices up is that in China and India, large parts of the population were getting wealthy enough where they could afford to start buying cars. While its possible to create more gas from oil shale if necessary, the marginal cost of additional gas supplies is looking to be more expensive in the future probably closer to 4 or 5 dollars a gallon.
But there is reason to think gas prices will be even higher than that in the future. The feds are talking about imposing a cap and trade system for greenhouse gases. Effectively that should act a large tax on gasoline. Also the State of California has committed itself to regulating greenhouse gases as well. Going forward I suspect that those regulations will get more stringent.
While imposing a mandate to increase light rail in the area will increase the cost of development. It should also have the effect of increasing the value of the property itself which has the effect of offsetting this expense. In Davis, there are parcel taxes to support the local schools increasing the cost of living in Davis. But a big reason people are willing to pay a premium to live in Davis is the opportunity to send their children to the very high quality Davis public schools. The cost of amenity is one consideration, but so too is the value of the benefit of the amenity. If the value of the amenity is capitalized into property values, its effective cost isn't as high.
There are several papers arguing that proximity to light rail already increases property values. In an era of much higher transporation costs because of rising gas prices as well as rising gas taxes, this effect probably should strengthen. If gasoline costs $7 dollars a gallon like it does in the UK right now, even if you wouldn't might others pay a premium to be near a light rail station?
In 2005, the gold line was extended out to Folsom.
According to the census, in 2000, 325 people or 1.4% of the then population of Folsom commuted to work using mass transit. After the build out of the light rail line to Folsom, according to the latest census report done after the completion of light rail to folsom, 540 people or 1.7% of the population used mass transit to get to work.
Now compare that with El Dorado Hills which never got light rail. In 2000, 120 people or 1.4% of the population used mass transit to get to work. According to the latest census report for that region, 257 took mass transit to work or 1.6% of the population.
On longer distances light rail does a bad job competing with buses. The big reason Elk Grove dropped out of RT was that two biggest places people were commuting to and from Elk Grover were to downtown and to the Franchise Tax Building off Folsom Blvd. Because buses could go directly from Elk Grove to those places, the buses could get there faster than light rail which had to make multiple stops to just get downtown. Because you can't get from Elk Grove to Franchise Tax without going through midtown, light rail is even less time competitive with buses going out to Franchise Tax.
When light rail made it to Folsom, the buses lines were fed into the light rail station to boost traffic on the light rail. But the need to have people make a transfer to light rail plus all of the stops between Folsom and downtown has meant that the time to commute on mass transit from Folsom to downtown has actually gone up.
That is the reason why despite the 250 million plus spent extending light rail to Folsom rider ship in Folsom went up about the same as El Dorado Hills which didn't get a light rail extension. In terms of mass transit utilization the region really doesn't have anything to show for its 250 million dollar investment.
If this region wants to get more people to ride mass transit, it should just increase the number and frequency of the buses to build up the ridership base. For a given amount of money you could get a lot more people to ride transit. At some point in the future, it might be cheaper to replace some of these bus lines with light rail or brt, but right now this region doesn't have the mass transit usage to justify these investments.
If this region wants to get more people to ride mass transit, it should just increase the number and frequency of the buses to build up the ridership base. For a given amount of money you could get a lot more people to ride transit. At some point in the future, it might be cheaper to replace some of these bus lines with light rail or brt, but right now this region doesn't have the mass transit usage to justify these investments.
Disagree.
Folsom LRT has 3 problems right now.
1. Frequency (30 min WTF?)
2. Stops are too far from job centers. Mainly a Folsom problem since job centers are scattered.
3. Cannot transfer from LRT to Folsom stage line for free.
The way to make LRT work properly in this region is to make it convenient. Right now using LRT to suburban areas is too much of a cluster****.
Before I worked out in Folsom and went to school at Sac State I literally only drove my car on the weekends. I when I first started working in Folsom I tried to use LRT but its too much of a hassle.
There are job centers in Folsom like the Intel campus, but light rail doesn't actually go near them. There are job centers in Rancho Cordova, but again, light rail mostly misses them as well.
For a lot less money buses could serve these locations a lot better. If the 250 million was spent on buses you could offer high frequency bus service that actually took you to where you worked. Instead the region spent a lot of money on a light rail line that goes to a lot of places with warehouses and car dealerships that largely don't employ a lot of people and aren't near residences where people actually live.
The secret to public transit is BUILD THE TRANSIT FIRST. Building "transit-oriented" neighborhoods without transit is a contradiction in terms. Car-centric neighborhoods NEVER reach sufficient density because they have to be built around a sprawl/greenfield model, and the more a car-centric neighborhood gets built out, the harder it is to graft a mass transit system onto it later.
Buses don't do the job because their infrastructure is basically car infrastructure--their stops aren't predictable or fixed, which means that this year's bus route can go somewhere else based on administrative whim. Fixed-rail transit creates predictable growth patterns. Properly connected and suitably frequent local buses can supplement this, along with suitable frequencies, but cities have to be willing to pay for that.
Unfortunately, trying to connect centralized public transit with decentralized auto-centric suburbs is never going to be feasible. The farther one gets from the central transit hub, the farther the distance between "spokes" of transit--thus there is a theoretical maximum size for practical transit usage, and it will always be easier if you live near a station than far away from one. The whole point of TOD is to build the transit line, then build dense residential and mixed-use ADJACENT TO TRANSIT STATIONS instead of far away from them.
Light rail from Folsom is slow because they built a single-track line without provision for express trains. The NAST/ECOS lawsuit agaisnt CALTRANS resulted in a compromise that will fund double-tracking of the Folsom main line, increase frequencies to 15 minutes, and create express trains (along with enhanced bike paths) so that problem should get better as soon as CALTRANS bucks up the funds for the settlement.
I am curious as to how many people use Light Rail to folsom other than commuters: personally I go to Old Folsom a lot more now on light rail than I ever drove there--driving there is a huge pain in the neck, but light rail makes it easy. It takes some time, but it's relatively mellow time sitting on the train, not angry time trying to not get flattened by traffic on the freeway.
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