The new and improved San Jose Berryessa transit village

Senator Wiener’s legislation for transit housing (SB-627) is dead now, and the car-centric planning around BART stations continues on. Here are the latest neighborhood plans for the San Jose Berryessa station. The Mercury News describes this plan as having “more intense densities and new visions of how the ambitious Berryessa district development might appear.”

As you can see, the retail center looks like just another suburban strip mall (click image to enlarge).

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Livermore BART station will be surrounded by sea of parking

Billions of dollars are going to be spent extending BART to Livermore. And once again, the plan is to surround this new BART station with acres of parking:

In general, according to BART, the neighborhood is still over-parked and is not entirely consistent with BART’s TOD policy and guidelines that recommend against parking minimums and recommend lower parking maximums. Eliminating parking minimums and reducing parking maximums can help reduce the cost of housing, consume less valuable land near transit and reduce associated environmental costs, such as water pollution from increased impervious surfaces.

In addition, BART expressed concern that the location of the additional parking capacity in such close proximity to the BART station entrance at a key point of pedestrian and bicycle access to the station will diminish the placemaking features of the development and discourage active and shared-ride modes of transit access, as well as diminish the overall quality of the transit­ oriented development.

This is yet another example of local government blocking infill development around transit stations — and why it is so important to pass SB-827 (Wiener) which enacts mandates for transit-oriented development.

You can read all of BART staff comments on the Isabel station plan here.

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