The backup on the Alameda side of the tubes is caused by congestion on the other side. If there were no congestion on I-880 and Oakland city streets, the outbound tube would act as two lanes of high-speed freeway. At least as far as the outbound direction is concerned, tube traffic could be brought to a standstill even if nothing were ever built at Alameda Point or anywhere else within the city limits.

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A few issues with this quote also:

People love to say, “I’m all for creating alternatives to driving alone,” but when you propose building things in ways that have been proven to do just that, their support suddenly evaporates. “Walkable communities,” “de-emphasizing the automobile,” all of that goes out the window, and suddenly an automobile-oriented business park is the cat’s meow

Speaking personally, I live in the East End of Alameda BECAUSE it is a walkable community. I moved my business to Alameda so I could walk/bike to work. I prefer & have always sought out walkable communities ever since I left my parents’ home. If money, cancer & trafiic were no object, I’d be happy to see one of your Smart Growth Master’s Thesis communities built there.

Trouble is, money, cancer & traffic ARE hurdles, esp the money. While the infrastructure build out is generally fiscally neutral via Mello-Roos financing, the cleanup to residential standards is not. Plans are to finance it through the existing TID to the tune of somewhere btw 200-700MM depending on whom you believe. If one naively chooses the low end, that’s still 40M per house + Mello Roos + other encumbrances on the homes before ground is even broken. (And I’ll bet you dinner at Pappo every night for a year that the final tally will be much greater) That starts to make the rather uneconomic, and effectively dooms many of the fancy amenities SunCal is “promising.” And regardless how much of a tab the TID runs up, the incremental property tax dollars that the base would generate will never flow to the general fund, thus crimping the city’s finances in perpetuity and placing a greater burden on the rest of the city to pony up for essential services.

Financially it’s a bad deal. The auto oriented business park you mention so derisively has a far better chance of economic success. Aleady there is a fair amout of industry operating at the base; allowing these tenants to sign long term leases or purchase the land outright would greatly facilitate expansion of this. It could be accomplished with far less and perhaps even no subsidy and would result in a revenue plus for the city. Of course such an idea has the fatal flaw of not matching meddlesome idealists’ dreams, but the dreams don’t pay.

And after the money, what of health & traffic? The health question has no definitive answer yet; we won’t know until after the fact just how many people are sickened by the toxins, but the risk is there. If you are so willing to let others risk cancer, are willing yourself? Will YOU move there & raise children?

We’ve beaten that poor dead traffic horse enough already, but suffice to say there are some very sound reasons why people who otherwise like walkable communities oppose your pet project.

I also don’t understand the accusations of a “lack of reality-based thinking.” As far as I can tell, this just means “the facts you present don’t represent ‘reality’ because they don’t agree with my hunches and gut feelings.” How else is one to understand things like the unsubstantiated claim that transit ridership could not possibly increase because “anybody who wants transit can use it right now”? Right, right, our current transit system is so wonderful that it couldn’t possibly be improved in ways that would attract new riders…now that’s what I call a “lack of reality-based thinking”!

Furthermore, I don’t think there’s a double standard when it comes to analyzing traffic constraints. Consultants Fehr & Peers first studied these in 2005, in conjunction with the original Preliminary Development Concept for Alameda Point:

http://www.alameda-point.com/pdf/TSwebDec05.pdf

A subsequent study by WRT/Solomon expanded the Fehr & Peers analysis to cover two additional transit-oriented scenarios and compared them to the original PDC:

http://www.alameda-point.com/pdf/5-5-08wrt.pdf

It’s worth remembering that the WRT/Solomon study, funded by a grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), was commissioned by the City in October 2006, before SunCal had even entered the picture. This study found that a transit-oriented scenario would generate millions of dollars per year for public transit, enough to fund improvements that will benefit the whole island.

People love to say, “I’m all for creating alternatives to driving alone,” but when you propose building things in ways that have been proven to do just that, their support suddenly evaporates. “Walkable communities,” “de-emphasizing the automobile,” all of that goes out the window, and suddenly an automobile-oriented business park is the cat’s meow. If we continue to focus all of our planning on accommodating single-occupant vehicles, then—surprise, surprise—all we will ever build are automobile-oriented developments.

If there were land between here and Oakland, if the site were some reasonable distance above sea level and not on fill, then I would not be so opposed to this project. I’m not against housing obviously, but it has to be workable and this just isn’t. “Denial of fact” has become so commonplace that I’ve often given up on stating the obvious, because it seems to be futile.

What I’m really opposed to are the lies, circumlocution, disingenuity, material omissions, denials of facts, unalloyed cynicsm & steaming bullshit that are being used to sell this deeply flawed plan. The transit line discussed here is but one aspect, there are others such as the financing scheme and environmental risks. DLM alludes to these & other problems with far clarity than I can muster whn she speaks here & elsewhere about the lack of reality-based thinking that drives otherwise intelligent people to say that 5000 homes wil not affect tube traffic, etc.

This talk, talk, talk from Mr. Transportation. When they take public transit away, what do you get?

Traffic, traffic, traffic…

When you keep pointing to the ideal, and the papers keep pointing out the obvious reality–cuts across the board–then how in the world can anyone believe in your ideal?

Your ideal just ain’t real.

Reality: 4,000 new dwellings means 4,000-6,500 more cars.

Unless there are really going to be decent jobs here, there will be more cars and more traffic and more pollution. SunCal promised Tesla to Albuquerque and Tesla moved to L.A. instead. Meanwhile, we got us a %$@t-load of empty commercial space. If that were all full up, we would be having bad traffic and more cars and pollution to, but ain’t nobody talking bout THAT!

I see a double standard here, that for me at least is the root of the problem: we are asked to consider research on the cost of driving and to do so in a reasonable, open-minded fashion, but when it comes time to recognize the very real traffic constraints that we face in Alameda, all of sudden reason disappears. To make matters worse, we have the spectre of very serious damage to the city’s bridges and tunnels and infrastructure and whatever else, which also should be recognized and has not been.

And getting back to increased delays at the tube: as a matter of common sense, I think that drivers delayed at the tube will find another route off the island, and I think further, that this “detoured” traffic will probably spill over onto side streets if the main routes become too congested. I’d still like to hear from MK or JKW on this topic.

First of all, there is a big difference between “cutting their services in half” and “Half of Muni routes face cuts.” Although half of the routes are affected in some way, the maximum total amount of service that would be cut is only 6.4 percent, even under the “worst-case scenario.”

The focus on routes is especially important in the case of Muni. Unlike AC Transit, which undertook a major restructuring of its lines to provide as much service as possible with extremely limited resources, Muni’s route structure hasn’t changed much since they heyday of streetcars. Muni was cobbled together from several private companies that operated competing service in the same areas, often on parallel tracks. Ever wonder why the 26-Valencia covers nearly the same territory as the 14-Mission, only one block away? It’s because one company ran streetcars on Mission St. and and another ran an interurban train service on separate tracks on Valencia St. On Market St., there were even two competing sets of tracks laid in the same street!

Muni’s redundant, inefficient streetcar-era routes have been maintained to this day because of intense political pressure. People make such a stink about any changes to the bus lines that the S.F. Board of Supervisors actually winds up ruling on the fate of individual bus stops! So, to make a long story short, many of the cuts described in your article are actually part of a long overdue restructuring of Muni service.

Routing issues aside, the deeper issue here is funding. Transit agencies make cuts when they don’t have enough funding to cover expenses. Page 8-7 of the Alameda Point Specific Plan calls for a transportation assessment to fund “transportation improvements and ongoing transit operations.” The second part is the Holy Grail of transportation funding: All too often, there is a one-time source of money to build capital improvements, but no stable source of funding for ongoing operations, which must be funded in perpetuity.

A fair question about the plan is how much money the transportation assessment is expected to raise, and whether that can be realistically expected to cover the operating costs of the system that is envisioned. Nevertheless, the importance of any kind of commitment to an ongoing assessment should not be underestimated. This is something that sets the current plan apart from run-of-the-mill suburban-style development plans that don’t even mention transit service, to say nothing of a written commitment to a dedicated source of revenue for operations.

That said, I don’t disagree with the real environmental & social costs of automobiles being well above their cash contributions, though a firm number on such things is very difficult to ascertain. For example, what is a case of asthma worth? How many dollars to assign to autos’ role in 1 cm of sea level change? It’s impossible to come up with a number but it doesn’t strain credulity to say that number would be high.

However, if one is factoring in such unquantifiable debits, one must also account for unquantifiable credits. Automobiles add tremendous quality to their owners’ lives. The ability to go where & when one wants adds a lot out human happiness. Cars also facilitate employment & economic growth. Want a new job that’s off the bus route? Car gets you there. Shopping & vacationing, to name just 2, are greatly faciliatated by autos. Such contributions to economic growth, and tax revenue, are very difficut to measure vs. a bus-only world, but they certainly do exist. Point being that autos have significant real benefits to go along with the real costs mentioned above.

But let’s just say for moment that MK is right — hypothetically, I am not conceding the point — that autos don’t pay their own way. Two questions from that assumption:

1) To make autos pay from a public policy standpoint, they must be taxed more heavily. To do puts them out of reach of many consumers without returning to them any benefit of utility. Take away cars from these likely lower income consumers & you remove many employmnet & education opportunities from them. Whatever trade off they receive in incremental public transit services (a less unreliable 51 bus, a BART extension to SJ are two that once can envision, and even these are years off and extremely expensive) generally does not compensate for the lost oppourtunites of a car. Well they should move to a denser area if they must rely on transit, you might say, with smug self-gratification that this would achieve HOMES’ overarching goal, but is forcing people to forgo opportunity & move out of desperation any kind of freedom? To say nothing of how this would countermand HOMES position on Measure A….

2) If you believe that cars don’t hit their bogey, even you must admit that BART & AC Transit require even greater subsidy than do automobiles. Is it responsible government to redirect energy from a less subsidized method a to one that eats more cash?

We’re starting to get very macro here, so I’ll bring it back to the original point: Suncal’s plan doesn’t hold financial water, nor trafiic water either. It increases congestion on the Island. Any mitigation of that would require significant additional subsidy, if it’s achievable at all. Add to that the extremely high costs of a cleanup to residential standards and the risk that fails also & we wind up with a plan that just doesn’t make any cents.

Back to our little island…. (am I on ignore here? what happened to the host??) …. MUNI could be cutting their services in half.

MK… don’t you see the risk of developing Alameda Point under assumption of mass transit and then it gets cut or underfunded and what that will do to Alameda? I see it as a very high risk.

I don’t think you will ever acknowledge the human nature factor (Californians will show up with their cars and use them) so I will just focus on my above question.