This is well-intentioned, but I predict will very often result in development of superificially attractive high-density housing with inadequate parking near transit lines with inadequate capacity and existing connected services.
Development limits and parking requirements are often abused, to be sure, but they do have real purposes, and the mere presence of a transit station doesn't eliminate the development externalities they legitimately exist to address.
Inadequate parking is a much better problem to have than inadequate housing. I mean, not even close to the same level of problem!
But that's assuming that there will even be inadequate parking. With car sharing services, and enough transit, it's not a problem. I just got back from Vancouver, a city with high density, not a huge number of cars, but extremely easy mobility for both those in cars and those on transit. Parking is less of an issue because not everybody has to drive.
Cars don't scale well. They are massive, take huge amounts of space when moving or when when not moving. That's not to say that we shouldn't have cars, we absolutely need them. But we also absolutely need transit.
One of the first steps towards that possibility is allowing housing that allows a car-less life. Parking spots add expense to every unit built. Those who don't have cars have been subsidizing those with cars for a long time. That's OK, but maybe, JUST MAYBE, we should try some housing where we let people live without a car.
I agree, and would go a step further: inadequate parking is a feature, not a bug, because it creates incentives that benefit all of the people living in the area regardless of socioeconomic status.
This bill is saying that cities can’t take state money to build transit and then sabotage it with sparse housing and cars. Cars in the vicinity of transit unquestionably reduce the utility of transit projects.
This is also a big middle finger to Berkeley which for decades has refused to put residential zoning around its incredibly expensive subway stations. Berkeley’s BART parking lots are zoned “unclassified” and can’t be developed without a giant NIMBY hissy fit. This bill short-circuits the hissy fit and allows BART to build 85-foot apartment buildings without parking at Ashby and N. Berkeley stations. This will provide way, way more riders for BART than a handful of parking spaces provide.
> This bill is saying that cities can’t take state money to build transit and then sabotage it with sparse housing and cars.
And, that's a fine general idea; the specific implementation is a bit different than that.
> Cars in the vicinity of transit unquestionably reduce the utility of transit projects.
So does an overbalance of residential property without adequate alternative transportation compared to the employment, retail, etc., services accessible by transit.
> This is also a big middle finger to Berkeley
Yeah, look, I think on balance this is likely to be a net benefit, if something of a blunt instrument, in the Bay Area and L.A. Basin, but it's not limited to those places, and it's triggering transit conditions have no consideration of the connected services and only limited consideration of capacity.
> > This bill is saying that cities can’t take state money to build transit and then sabotage it with sparse housing and cars.
> And, that's a fine general idea; the specific implementation is a bit different than that.
How is this bill different from that?
> So does an overbalance of residential property without adequate alternative transportation compared to the employment, retail, etc., services accessible by transit.
What you are afraid of seem to describe exactly our current situation, where large office parks or shopping centers are build with little integration with housing.
To the contrary of what you are saying this regulation would make it harder for cities to approve offices that can not be connected to new transit near housing due to zoning. I doubt that most people given the choice would choose to drive in traffic instead of taking transit to work if the housing situation allowed them to do so.
> Yeah, look, I think on balance this is likely to be a net benefit, if something of a blunt instrument, in the Bay Area and L.A. Basin, but it's not limited to those places, and it's triggering transit conditions have no consideration of the connected services and only limited consideration of capacity.
If there is no demand developers will not build, so I do not see how this can become a large problem.
822 parking spaces at N. Berkeley. Are they really going to build “way more” housing units?
Not that many people live in reasonable walking distance of the suburban commuter stations; building on the parking won’t really change that. I would love it, though, if we could radically upzone the whole area for a mile around.
Walking for half an hour to work is great. Walking for half an hour just to get to your train is no way to live.
Look at the map. Six city blocks at North Berkeley and 2-3 at Ashby. You could easily put 2000+ new units there if you get past the NIMBYs. Most other stations in the East Bay already have all adjacent lots spoken for with (relatively) high density development (Lafayette and Orinda being the notable, also NIMBY driven exceptions).
It's an 8-acre site. At that height I'm sure they could figure out how to get 100 dwellings per acre, and that works out to something near 2000 occupants. A parking space at a BART station produces fewer than two rides per day, while a housing unit within half a mile of BART produces more than four rides per day.
Development limits and parking requirements are often abused, to be sure, but they do have real purposes, and the mere presence of a transit station doesn't eliminate the development externalities they legitimately exist to address.