This April, Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District officials will debate whether to hike the cost of ferry rides for Clipper Card holders, which would raise $2 million to help close an $87 million deficit caused in part by costs associated with the Doyle Drive reconstruction. As long as the parking lot is free, this is the wrong move for the District. Charging for parking would discourage driving to the ferry terminal and encourage people to bus or carpool, freeing some of the parking lot for mid-day ferry drivers, putting more people on buses and bikes, and perhaps even boosting, rather than suppressing, ferry ridership.
Marin Transit or GGT should ensure there is a convenient bus transfer in Larkspur, however. The 15 minute, freeway-bound walk from the nearest bus pad is sometimes called the Walk of Shame, and the 29 bus from either Ross Valley or the Transit Center is about as fast as molasses on a cold day. Sausalito, also in the plan, doesn’t fare much better with the bus route but at least its connections aren’t equated with shame and embarrassment.
Transit-oriented redevelopment
Long-term, the GGBHTD should partner with the City of Larkspur to redevelop its Larkspur Landing parking lot as a transit-oriented village. As it stands, it’s about as far from Market Street, time-wise, as San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, and with the coming reconstruction of the Greenbrae Interchange and SMART station it stands to become the most transit-rich point in the county outside downtown San Rafael.
My very rough calculation, based on the findings of county-wide land values in the Tiburon Housing Element, places the parking lot’s market value at between $48 million and $55 million, assuming 45-unit-per-acre housing (roughly three or four story buildings). If the land were leased from GGBHTD, it would add around $1 million to $2 million per year of direct income, and around $1.3 million in new fare revenue, assuming transit is the primary mode of transportation for the residents. In all, it would equate to around 8 percent of the ferry’s cost.
For Larkspur, it would provide a boon in sales tax revenue from tourists and residents alike, not to mention a property tax windfall. Indeed, if density limits are replaced with height limits the units would likely be studios or one bedrooms - too small for families to put a strain on the school system, and so would boost revenues for the district without adding many extra students.
But for the moment…
For the moment, parking lot development is long-term conceptual thinking to put the ferry system on stronger financial footing. This debate is just about whether to raise the fares of ferry riders, and the answer should be a firm no. Raising the price of parking would have a number of positive knock-on effects to commuting and parking patterns at both Sausalito and Larkspur by improving parking availability for mid-day riders, encouraging carpooling, biking and busing and making more efficient use of the infrastructure we have.
Contrary to modern beliefs, the earth really does not belong to us, and we are terrible caretakers and stewards. We need to do better if we expect to leave anything worthwhile for our or anything's children, eh? Conservation is a much better everything, than consumption. Get out of your cars folks. Live a little, and leave something besides landfills and parking lots for the future. Too much trouble? Oops. Drive on Buy.
That said, we also need to live in reality, and putting a few thousand more cars on the highway every day would have a vastly higher environmental impact than a parking lot. Unless you are subsistence living (obviously not in Marin), all human activity has an impact. Both of us are commenting to the Patch in the comfort of our homes, using electricity, burning coal, natural gas, petroleum, and nuclear fuel. The houses we live in testaments to deforestation. It's hard to take the moral high ground when you are drawing power off a grid powered by fossil fuels inside a building constructed of destroyed forests, typing away on a computer made in China under inhumane working conditions. (My apologies if you live in a tent running a hand cranked generator, and are a whiz at soldering your own circuit boards). My point? Lighten up (please). The article was about brainstorming ways to close a funding gap, not "rape and plunder."
We do need to be better caretakers, and that means remembering how to build our settlements as humans have done for millenia. A park and ride lot is anathema to such an effort, as is sprawl out into the Delta.
How do we change folks beliefs, and attitudes, or educate our ignorances and blind spots? We have serious changes to make, which no amount of feel good/greenwashing is going to mitigate. It is near impossible to have anything to do with modern society, without being a consumer, and most of us seem to consume away, with little awareness or thought to the real impacts of our consuming lifestyle upon the environments which sustain us all, and all the other life which we reduce to $ values, for our own ends. Nature is "worth" more, intact, than most anything we can turn it into, and we need to work with, and within nature. The modern whirled is all about money.
We need to work within the wholeness of nature, and stop trying to mold it into lifeless forms. Lighten up? On the one hand, everything is perfect as it is, and on the other, I want to change this whirled, while we have the chance. Lighten up? Endless Wars, Fracking, G.M.O's, More Nukes, etc, are all the results of folks "living" in "reality" I say, lets change our reality, and leave something for the future worth leaving. Yes, WE can, but only if we choose to change, beginning with consuming less, driving less, flying less, etc, and hopefully, LOVING more, and not just our own little groups.
Publishing a good ride sharing software program that allows people to more easily find car pool partners is the best solution for now.
There is a proposed bicycle / pedestrian bridge across Sir Francis Drake, a quarter mile east of the existing pedestrian bridge. Four designs were shown, but the cost of each design was not disclosed. Which design looks best? Cost would be a major factor in my decision making. Safety being next, since tall trucks occasionally hit low bridges. Then there is the question if the bridge is really needed. SMART riders are going to use the existing bridge. Crossing SFD in the crosswalk isn't that hard. The bike route from SFD to CM does need improvement.
Charging for parking only works as an incentive to use other methods. If using a bus to get to/from the ferry is easy and effective, folks will use that instead of driving, especially if they would get saddled with an extra parking fee for NOT using busses. But when no other busses exist, all that parking fees will accomplish is to persuade ferry users to go back to driving to the City.
The Greenbrae Interchange Project will add a whackload of bus stops at SFD under the freeway for use by the freeway-bound buses, giving a good connection between those, the ferry, and SMART. As well, there's rumor that the 29 is in line for some service improvements or rerouting through the Canal, so that will improve the situation for the interim.
Something the ferry building could do would be to create a Warm Planet-type bike storage space so the hardcore cyclists could have a bike at both ends of the ferry, eliminating the need to carry one on board, except for that first time.
Marin has been hostile to bus commuters for years. Except for highway lots (long walk either morning or evening - bad in rain), parking near bus stops has been extensively restricted to a few hours to serve the interests of merchants or local residents. If it is not convenient, the people don't use it.
For Marinites who have been rather averse to the whole Clipper Card thing, you would take a ticket at the start of the day when you enter the lot. You have to pay for your ticket at the terminal using cash, card, or Clipper.
I can't speak to John's sartorial habits, but I typically wear a suit when I bike to work, as long as the weather can support it. That means jacket, tie, and sometimes a sweater. It's not as high-impact as one might imagine, especially once you get used to it.
Amusingly, the directions 511 provided were as follows: 1) Take the GGT 23 bus from Fairfax at 10:20am to the San Anselmo hub. 2) Transfer to the GGT 22 bus to the San Rafael Transit Center. 3) Transfer to the GGT 70 bus and exit at the SW corner of Mission & Second in San Francisco 4) Take Muni 14 to Market & Steuart St 5) Walk to the Golden Gate Ferry Terminal 6) Take the Golden Gate Ferry to Larkspur, arriving at 1:30pm. And people wonder why no one takes transit.
If you REALLY want to take the ferry into the city, take the 3:19 23 out of Fairfax (depends on your exact location, but that's when it leaves the Parkade), transfer to the 29 at the Hub. Arrives at 4:02 at Larkspur Landing Circle.
However, this is the year 2012, a time when mobile solutions for transit abound in every part of the world EXCEPT Marin County. Heck, we can't even rely on non-mobile computing solutions! The fact that 511.org and its truly abysmal "solution" are the best way to navigate an extremely complicated transit system is *absolutely* something to judge the usability of our transit by. There is simply no excuse.
So why should they have heeded my repeated suggestions from 2008 to 2010 that they also submit their data to Google Transit or put together mobile apps for smartphones? When I attended a public workshop regarding transportation in Marin a year or so ago I was told repeatedly by other attendees that my insistence that we needed better transit data reporting was a low priority, as not everyone has a smartphone. (As if better online route suggestions, bus shelter status updates, "next stop" displays aboard busses, and other information that makes using transit easier are unimportant!) Do you really believe that it's completely acceptable for people who want to use transit to study the tome that is the service route schedules and maps and piece together the complexity that constitutes a simple trip from Fairfax, down Sir Francis Drake to Larkspur Landing on a Sunday? Is it remotely acceptable that riders have no idea what the next stops are without having to listen intently for the muffled announcements of drivers? Again, is it any wonder people in Marin County don't use transit?
Though I do know from people inside GGT and Marin Transit that Google Maps functionality is on its way by the end of this year (the irregular school bus schedules are why it didn't show up last year), and that there is consideration for a NextBus system (no excuse why it's not already rolled out), you're absolutely right: GGT is terrible to use. I don't know why the shuttles don't have Clipper readers. I've written a whole series on the subject here, though some of the posts seem to have gone missing from Patch. Luckily I have my own blog: On unsucking the system in general: http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/unsuck-golden-gate-transit/ On wayfinding: http://sanrafael.patch.com/blog_posts/maximizing-golden-gate-transit-wayfinding-from-a-to-b On doing better with headways: http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/maximizing-golden-gate-transit-headways-schmeadways/ On open data: http://thegreatermarin.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/open-data/ GGT/MT could do so, so much more but it feels like they just don't care. It's frustrating in the extreme.
Oh, and GGT - it's now on Google Maps, so you can do that, too.