11/2 6:00-7:00 pm – Housing at Tamien

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Housing at Tamien raises questions for Caltrain parking and station access

Monday, November 2, 6-7pm
Elks Lodge 522, Willow Room, 444 West Alma Avenue, San Jose,

Tonight, City of San Jose is hosting a community meeting to review a housing and mixed use development with up to 440 units of housing, near Tamien Caltrain and light rail, on land currently used as a parking lot.  Given the area’s housing shortage, the transit location is a fine place for housing.

Tamian_Meeting_LocationOne question is how VTA will replace the 205 parking spaces.  VTA’s proposes to build a parking structure on the other side of the freeway.  However that land is currently used for Caltrain parking.  How will parking and station access be maintained during construction?

Less parking would be needed if Caltrain service was more frequent to the Capitol and Blossom Hill stations further south.  So, the good news is that there is a proposal for more frequent Caltrain service south of Tamien included in the VTA “Call for projects” for funding from the 2016 sales tax.

For more info, see this blog post.

A copy of the original announcement can be found here.

Tamien Parking structure project

Roland Lebrun Tamien ISMND comments

Click on the image below to see what the parking crisis at Tamien looked like back in February 2014 (one year before the City of San Jose fenced off the northern half of the dirt parking lot).

Tamien parking February 2014

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The Bay Area Peninsula Corridor

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SPUR has posted the first part of a discussion on transportation on the peninsula.
Will Rail Rule the Bay Area Peninsula Corridor Again?

The San Francisco Peninsula travel corridor — the roads and transit routes connecting the string of cities between San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley — faces serious transportation challenges. But the Peninsula wasn’t always jammed with cars. In fact, it grew up around rail, in the form of compact and walkable communities.

Is the Peninsula’s legacy of trains and transit-oriented neighborhoods enough to make rail a thriving transportation option for the corridor in the future? Can it be the backbone of a more sustainable system that improves our quality of life? We think the answer is yes. To help shape this vision, we are partnering with Stanford University, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the San Mateo County Economic Development Association to figure out the big policy, infrastructure and funding moves needed to keep this corridor working for decades to come. Part 1 of this post looks at how we got into this fix. In Part 2, we’ll follow up with a look at what’s planned for the future and SPUR’s upcoming work.

 

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Transit Does Not Have to Reduce Traffic Congestion

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CitiLab Lead Image

The Atlantic CitiLab has an interesting article:

Public Transit Does Not Have to Reduce Traffic Congestion to Succeed

The discussion is focused around a statement that is repeated over and over about new transit projects, which has been proven wrong time and time again.

“The region’s newest [xxxx] will add [more capacity] while relieving traffic and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.”

They have said that about every freeway that has ever been built and every new lane that they’ve added to those freeways.  They have said the same thing about every additional bus line, light rail line or expansion of any existing mass transit option.

However, as noted in the article, “There’s just the little problem of the evidence. With few exceptions, studies tend to find limited signs that transit has much of an impact on nearby road congestion.”  The same goes for adding new lanes to a freeway. Simply stated, the highways quickly fill up and again become congested.

We need to begin looking at things differently:

  • Population is going to continue to grow.
  • The percentage of people over 55 will continue to grow.
  • New people will continue to move into the area in search of jobs.

Instead of looking at transit solutions to “cure” our current transportation problems, I would recommend that we look at transit solutions to prevent future transportation requirements from making the problems worse than they are.

One example would be working on the Sprinter and expanding it to become a key component, connecting the people living in the upcoming Urban Villages to job centers.

The current Sprinter proposal does just that.  It connects the growing residential neighborhoods, in the southern part of the county, to the booming job opportunities, in the northern part of the county, without adding to the problems on 101 and 87.  It may not necessarily reduce traffic on those roads, but it will help keep them from getting worse, especially on game nights at Levi Stadium.

Here are some thoughts to meditate upon;

  • Light rail is for dense urban core (+/- 10 miles)
  • Sprinter/BART (light trains) are for longer distances (up to 20 miles end to end) meaning that BART between SJ and SF makes as little sense as the light rail between Santa Teresa and Mountain View.
  • Urban rail (Caltrain) (up to 50 miles)
  • Intercity rail (Amtrack/Leo Express) (up to 150 miles)

VTA’s 42.2-mile light rail line is one of the longest to be built in the U.S. in 50 years, putting it into the category that should be supported by a Sprinter/BART style service.

Bottom line is that commuters need transportation that will take them to their destination in one hour or less meaning that one size cannot possibly fit all (hence the need for “context-sensitive solutions”).

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Leo Express

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Leo Express EngineLeo Express is a creative new train company from the Czech Republic.  They rent space on the existing railroad tracks to run state of the art trains at a third of the cost of the existing government managed systems.  Their goal is to present the consumer with a fast, clean and efficient transportation system.

Leo Express mapBack in May, there was a great write up in the Huffington Post.  According to them, Uber changed the world for taxi using consumers and Leo Express is doing the same thing for its railway passengers.

Also in May, CNN described how “This Czech company wants to bring Euro-style trains to the U.S.”  According to that article, they are “considering several routes to connect cities in the New York, Chicago and San Francisco regions”.  leo express train inside viewCan I ask them to put Silicon Valley on their list?

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Caltrain Grade Separations

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palo-alto-crossing-guardOn Tuesday evening, 13 October 2015, at a meeting starting at 6pm, the Palo Alto City Council will be reviewing the city’s planning for grade separation of the Caltrain tracks, which would improve safety and traffic flow, and facilitate more frequent rail service.   Palo Alto’s preferred option is a trench depressing the tracks below three streets: Charleston, Meadow, and Churchill. The topic is time-sensitive because of the renewed planning for High Speed Rail on the Peninsula corridor, and the upcoming 2016 Santa Clara County transportation sales tax.
See: Friends of Caltrain Blog | author: alevin | October 12, 2015 at 8:58 am
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Beacons for visually impaired bus passengers in Bucharest

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Now, this is creative thinking with high value.

Mounted on the outside of each bus, a beacon emits via Bluetooth Low Energy its unique location identifier when it is within about 180 feet of a bus stop.

The project’s app, installed on the iOS or Android smartphone of a visually impaired person waiting at the bus stop, responds by pushing a notification to the passenger’s home screen that “bus number 24 has arrived,” even if the app is not open. There is also a unique audio signal emitted by the phone.

My wife has a lot of visually impaired friends who have to use Outreach to get around, because of their vision limitations.  This just might be what they need to get out on their own.

See:  Beacons lend a helping hand to visually impaired bus passengers in Bucharest

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San Jose’s Light Rail system

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I just discovered the Light Rail Now Project’s web site and its collection of articles about San Jose’s Light Rail system.  There are some interesting facts buried in these articles that I’ve never heard before.

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Modern Transit Society, Inc. [MTS]

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The Modern Transit Society ended operations in 2014, but in its 43 years of operations, it actively supported the use of alternative modes of transportation than the automobile.   Of interest to our reader would be their history of the conflicts in transportation modes and documentation on how, time and again, traffic engineers would do almost anything to remove any obstacles standing in the way of adding lanes for automobiles.

There are a lot of articles buried in the site that discussed the demise of the light rail systems and the role GM and traffic engineers had in it.  Roger Rabbit’s Bay Area counterpart simply didn’t have a chance with GM acting in the role of weasels.

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Wednesday evening 9/2 in San Jose, sustainable transportation investments for Santa Clara County.

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Wednesday evening 9/2 in San Jose, sustainable transportation investments for Santa Clara County.

Come learn more about the upcoming Santa Clara County ballot measure and build a strong community voice for sustainable transportation. The next meeting is this Wednesday night, September 2 at 6pm in downtown San Jose at Martin Luther King Library, Room 255, 150 E. San Fernando Street, San Jose.

For more information, check out Adina Levin’s post on the Green Caltrain blog.

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