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Comment by m-j-fox | Hacker News Reader

I often go to work at a lab that is as close to the Warm Springs BART station as any business could be, but I will still drive because walkability is so bad it will still be a 15 minute walk. Maybe someday they will build something near these East Bay BART stations.

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"but I will still drive because walkability is so bad it will still be a 15 minute walk."

Isn't a 15 minute walk the definition of walkable ? That's almost the perfect mix of time convenience and health benefits.

Perhaps all of the bad weather in Fremont tips the scales for you ?

Fair. But the drive is about 15 minutes directly there. With Bart, drive + train + walk, it would be 45 minutes. It's really about total time.

People don't want to walk circuitous routes along really busy streets. And 15 minutes when its 90 out isn't fun either.

There are houses that are less than a half mile from the platform, yet no one in their right mind would walk that. http://imgur.com/a/TUi8r

EDIT: I mean walk around under the Grimmer underpass, not dart across the freeway obviously.

That complete lack of walkability is some serious riff-raff proofing they're doing there. Can't have anyone without a car just wandering into a nearby pleasant little suburban cul-de-sac now can we? You see, lack of walkability is basically a strategy for keeping poor people out of nice areas. San Francisco is the exception to this rule because of the hills. Poor people don't like to walk up hills to go to the liquor store ergo nice houses can be near poor neighborhoods as long as they are sufficiently up hill.

That certainly make sense. I had a similar idea about the reason behind it: The local residents don't want people parking in their neighborhood. Every BART station I've been to gets filled to max capacity during commute hours. On top of that, the hours are limited so overnight is impossible, but that could be done in a residential area. Businesses around the stations have to put up signs saying no BART parking allowed (how is this enforced?). The people that live nearby wouldn't want people parking for weeks for free on the streets outside their homes. I know this is illegal and they could be towed, but I wouldn't doubt this is involved in the planning.

Here is how residential parking works in such cases: posted limits like 2 or 3 hours parking, local residents get stickers to their cars exempting them from limit. That's all.

In London, they simply restrict parking to residents from, say, 10-11am in one area, and 11-12 in the next area.

One parking warden can cover a large area, residents get a permit, visitors only need to pay for one hour of parking.

All that undeveloped land around the BART station will be high density housing btw. The work has already started.

In Santa Clara County they have a pretty strong vision for more transit-oriented development, for the Milpitas and Berryessa Stations [0]. We'll see if that actually happens though, it seems like a lot of those East Bay stations are just meant to be driven to.

[0] http://www.vta.org/News-and-Media/Connect-with-VTA/Milpitas-...

The Berryessa station, at least, should be bikable from a decently-sized residential area, not to mention reachable by light rail or bus. We'll see what people actually do.

It'll also be nice if we see neighborhoods that pop up similar to what's on the Caltrain corridor, like in Burlingame or Mountain View. Really nice, walkable areas with lots of retail and housing.

Oh, you wanted new homes in the bay? You sweet summer child.

I don't understand?

Allowing houses to be built is a giveaway to the plutocratic developer conspiracy to destroy the earth, poison our lungs, and gentrify our neighborhoods.

There's this frustrating principle of public transit where I've never lived in a place that I could take it and get there faster than I could by some other means. There's a bus stop right in front of my house, and light rail station a few minutes walk away. The train stops in front of my office, but I can still bike or drive to work faster.

When I lived far out in the suburbs there was a commuter train once an hour and I could always count on being able to drive the freeway faster, even in traffic even though it was miserable.

Don't worry, we will soon enough "improve" public transportation by slowing down, banning, and pricing you out of the alternatives.

EDIT: Yeah, this is flippant, but far as I can tell it's the truth. Policymakers are well aware that public transit is often not the most attractive option, and are working to bring it to the top of your list of options by degrading driving until it's worse. Congestion pricing, parking scarcity, reducing road throughput, etc. I guess in principle some of this might make buses more attractive, but not trains.

If anything, it's the opposite. Public transport in the U.S. sucks, and driving always gets the upper hand in policymaking. These two go hand in hand, as the more people drive, the less money and effort goes into making the public transport systems better.

Stuff like congestion pricing isn't intended to increase use of public transport (that's a side effect), it's intended to reduce traffic and make driving "better" (by pricing lower-income folks out of it, but that's generally how "better" works in the U.S. anyway).

I have -- when we lived out in the Bronx and I commuted to NYU. On a weekday, nothing is strictly faster than some form of public transit, though on weekends driving can be a little faster. Then there's parking, which is a whole other story. But New York is unusual for a US city; I absolutely agree with you as far as every other US city I've lived in is concerned.

>it seems like a lot of those East Bay stations are just meant to be driven to

BART is in a really incoherent place with respect to this. It definitely wants the number of station-accessible parking spaces to shrink, but its plans for the surrounding areas include basically everything except housing for BART commuters.

Offices, retail, housing for disabled homeless veterans, housing for seniors, housing for unemployed people, community centers, maker spaces for underrepresented groups, etc. Anything and everything but market rate housing.

A "transit village" plan was partly executed at Macarthur, except predictably, the market rate housing part fell through. Another "transit village" is going up on the parking lot at West Oakland (best station to drive to - sits on an underutilized freeway, parking still available at 9:30am in adjacent private lot, departures every couple minutes, and only 7 minutes to Embarcadero). The transit oriented development will include, again, everything but market rate housing.

Far as I can tell, BART is not trying to bring station users any closer, it just wants them to switch to bicycles. (Fuck that shit. Right before boarding a crowded train is the worst possible time to pedal a few miles uphill. I'll pay whatever it costs for the remaining privately owned parking, and when I can't, get out of this hellhole. I run 4 times a week, but it's sort of the whole point of civilization to me that exercise is decoupled from transportation).

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