“What it will mean for San Francisco to have its tallest building be the Transbay Terminal tower is a statement that our highest value is ecology,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a local public policy think tank. “It will be this exclamation mark saying the most important location in our city is the transit center.”
∙ Six years post-9/11, super skyscrapers rise from U.S. cities [SFGate]
∙ Hines And Pelli Clarke Pelli Bid The Most (And Get The Transbay Nod) [SocketSite]
With a currently sub-optimal public transit system…
…and talk about putting lipstick on a pig (see above).
SPUR seems compelled to insist upon transit oriented development without the requisite transit.
MUNI is not reliable, much of it is already at capacity, and nothing on the horizon is going to make it so. The Mayor has had the power to do something about it but he’s not really cared.
BART is at capacity and CalTrain is a toy joke.
High Speed Rail is vaporware.
But the construction and real estate interests that would own this town are relentless. Fortunately, the tower appears to be more of an exercise in building office space rather than as an effort to build even more luxury condos that nobody living here can afford.
SPUR: Taking the “T” out of TOD.
-marc
marc,
Your posts continue to kill me. “Caltrain is a toy joke”.
Keep up the editorializing, clearly you know what you are talking about.
I suppose we should halt all new development in the city until you feel that public transit has been fixed. Keep us posted.
marc, I don’t have enough information to say whether I think the PCP tower project is good or not. I hope I’m not jacking this thread, but I’m intrigued by some other parts of your comments.
You’re spot on that Muni isn’t operating the way it needs to for TOD to make sense in San Francisco. I fear that you’re right about no complete solution being on the horizon (and that you may be right about HSR). But some parts of Muni that seem to be at capacity either just aren’t being managed well or their real capacity is suppressed by external factors such as traffic congestion. What is it that you think the mayor has the power to do but isn’t doing?
BART has a problem at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Muni-SF-SPUR problem you describe: It has a long history of building transit infrastructure when and where there is insufficient ridership to support it.
Full disclosure: I used to be a SPUR employee and I still do some work for them on contract.
Caltrain could be excellent as could this TBT but our biggest issue impeding progress is really the lack of any sort of regional planning
We all know the region is going to be adding millions of people and jobs over the next decades and it makes sense for them to go in SF and near by as much as possible along with future transit infrastructure investment but everything is so piecemeal it seems impossible. So what happens? You build transit centers without trains, a small area like Brisbane which is perfect for a transit oriented mid to high rise office/residential development instead half asses it and is putting in auto dealerships (tax competititon), you get South City getting a Bart station in the middle of tract houses and next to a Costco while 10-15K thousand workers are across town and on and on
The Bay Area and the state will never get it right without real coordination and enforcement and a real regional growth plan. Then we have the whole issue of SF transit vs Bart which stinks but lets not even go there
rant over
also just a thought on Caltrain here; they can now get people from San Jose to SF in what like 35 minutes?
It takes me damn near 30 minutes on Bart to get from SF to the airport which is not far
Just because Bart has slick 70’s look doesn’t make it better
With a relatively small investment Caltrain electrified and with direct service to SF would be pretty effective yet we keep going to the Bart option that costs 10x more… it makes you wonder why
The rest of the world has this totally figured out. Metros in the city and commuter rail in the suburds. I like the Bay Area but if we are doing something different from the world in the area of public transit I am going to guess that we have it wrong
Some of the proposals for the eastern neighborhoods make a mockery of any concept of transit-oriented growth. Why build the 3rd street light rail, then limit housing development along the 3rd St. corridor? Why prevent housing development in the Mission – one of the best-served areas by transit in SF? This quixotic, romanticized notion of “protecting” crumbling industrial areas from housing development defies logic and common sense.
zig,
you know from your local history that bart was doomed the day they let the county of san mateo voters decide not to approve the half cent sales tax in the 70’s to extend it south of the city. some decisions are just too important to be left to the moronic masses and that was obviously a bright shiny example
we will never recover from that i fear
james after seeing the dismal SFO extension I am not so sure it would have mattered. Just because we build Bart doesn’t mean we do anything about landuse.
This was my point. Look at the billons wasted on the South City, San Bruno, Milbrae stations where 15K workers are on the other side of town. South City’s station is next to a super Costco of all things
And for every massive Bart Extension (warm springs, livermore, san Jose) the whole region and everybody else who rides transit loses out
So I would argue the day Bart decided to shift the focus to the distant suburds rahter than being a metro for Oakland, Berkeley, San Francsico, Daly City and the rest of the core is what we are still reeling from
CalTrain from SF to almost San Jose on a limited is about an hour long trip.
Long, but if CalTran can ever get WiFi up and running, two hours (round trip) of getting something done or surfing the web or streaming music and movies…
caltrain gets it. i like the recent use of the information billboard on 101 south around candlestick. it goats you into realizing you could be in san jose faster than the drive at that particular moment, ie. drive to san jose, 44 min, caltrain 40 minutes.
bart and muni are hopelessly lost.