The Larkspur ferry crunch, part 4: The ferry’s capacity

Larkspur Landing by cucchiaio, on Flickr

Larkspur Ferry Terminal (LFT) has an access problem: not enough people can get to the ferry. This shouldn’t be solved with parking garages, but rather with a shuttle and parking district in the short-term and transit-oriented development in the medium to long-term. But the terminal itself can only take so much ridership. In our fourth and final installment, we’ll examine the existing need, potential need, and the real and legal constraints on ferry service from LFT.

Need

At the moment, LFT is about 45 passengers over capacity on the morning rush hour departures. These benighted folks need to take an overflow shuttle bus into the city rather than the much more luxurious ferryboat. If GGT adds access for 500 more people to take the ferry, as seems to be desired, that would aggravate the overcrowding.

Adding capacity isn’t trivial. Though there are enough vessels to take people, there aren’t enough crew. Each vessel needs a captain and a crew, but these folks need to be paid for a full day, and there isn’t any need for a third full-time crew because of very low mid-day demand. While GGT is considering using one of their licensed office staff members as a captain for one morning departure as a cost-saving measure, there will be too much demand if ridership continues to increase and access is boosted as planned.

Rush hour, under the intense TOD scenario I outlined or from the SMART Station Area Plan, would probably bring about 350 extra riders, along with 120 or so from SMART and another 450 from parking expansion. If 70 percent of them use the ferry at the peak of the peak, that means another 600-650 ferry riders in the morning, or enough for one more peak hour ferry departure, which means yet another crew.

To make this make financial sense for GGT, the agency needs to figure out how to boost reverse-commute ridership and mid-day travel, which will mean more intense, or at least more interesting, development at Larkspur Landing. That, in turn, will probably require more trips. How far can GGT go?

Constraints

Corte Madera Channel. Image from NOAA.

Like all transit, ferry capacity is measured in how many vehicles of what size can be accommodated per hour. Physically, LFT is constrained by the size of the 2-mile long Corte Madera Channel, which provides an outlet for the ferries. It’s wide enough (about 265 feet) that two ferries can pass, but with a depth of only 9 feet it’s relatively shallow, so boats with even a moderate draft (how deep the boat’s hull goes under water) won’t be able to use it.

Logistically, LFT is constrained by its need for high-speed catamarans, which have a lower passenger capacity than slower monohull vessels. The largest catamarans in GGT’s fleet can fit 450 people, while its slower Spaulding monohull vessels can fit 715. Passenger demand for fast service to the Embarcadero wins out over capacity here.

Environmentally, LFT is further constrained by the need to protect the marshland around the Corte Madera Channel. Too many departures and the wakes will erode what is very rich habitat. To help combat this problem, GGT has limited the number of crossings between LFT and San Francisco to 42 per day. Each crossing, whether from or to San Francisco, uses one of those slots.

GGT is further constrained by the number of high-speed vessels in its fleet. With only 4 vessels, it can only run 3 departures per hour.

A theoretical maximum

But if we leave aside the environmental and fleet concerns and focus solely on the physical and logistical ones, we find that GGT could probably get 6 departures per hour from LFT. The highest-capacity catamarans that can sail the channel can hold about 500 passengers, so we can get 3,000 peak passengers per hour from LFT to San Francisco and vice versa. This is approximately 1.5 highway lanes worth of capacity in each direction. The Ferry Building should be able to handle that kind of intensity from LFT, but GGT may need to find or build a new berth in San Francisco.

To achieve this level of service, GGT would need eight vessels total – seven running and one in reserve.* The MV Del Norte, runt of the fleet, would need to be retired and the other catamarans would need to be retrofitted to fit 500 passengers. Five new vessels and three refurbishments should add out to about $56 million. Operating cost per hour of this maximum service is $12,420, so if GGT ran this for four hours per weekday, it would be about $13.2 million annually, less passenger fares, of course. Anything above this level of service would require a deeper channel, which would be more expensive to build and maintain.

The real maximum

As mentioned above, not only does GGT not have the fleet to run its maximum service but it’s limited to only 42 crossings per day. Using up 24 of those on rush-hour service isn’t going to cut it. Instead, we can reasonably assume a capacity of three departures per hour, or about 1,350 passengers per hour. It’s not fantastic, but that’s how much capacity the system is considering.

If GGT adds more service than this, and they very likely will need to, it will need to carefully manage its fleet, perhaps by running an asynchronous schedule. Two vessels would run between San Francisco and LFT all day, while three would only run during peak hours and remain in reserve in San Francisco during the day. This should allow it to stay within its needed 42 crossings without allowing headways to get too high or sacrificing late-night and early-morning service.

Alternatively, GGT could request more crossings from neighbors and the state. This would require a new environmental impact report that would identify mitigating measures to lessen the damage on the nearby wetlands. Under this route there’s a chance their request would be denied.

GGT must smooth its ridership profile through TOD. There is no other way for it to achieve continued ridership growth in a sustainable way. Ever-higher peak demand will be burden the system with high crew costs and wasted capacity. GGT can do this by shaping the development at Larkspur Landing and inviting SMART to build closer to the terminal (and therefore draw San Francisco commuters heading north). But GGT must also be careful not to overload its southbound capacity. Even at its theoretical maximum, GGT’s Larkspur ferry cannot move as many people as a rail line, and it cannot just pack the ferries ever-tighter as BART does.

A better Larkspur Landing will have new development, new parking capacity, a reinstated shuttle, and enough ferry capacity going in both directions. It will be a net positive to the transit agency’s bottom line and to its mission to take people off the bridge. It will boost the profile and financial situation of Larkspur and Marin County. New parking garages are the easiest but least effective way to boost access to LFT and improve the financial situation of GGT. It’s vital the agency look beyond those garages and to a better, stronger future.

*The total minimum round-trip is 70 minutes: 5 minutes loading/unloading at LFT, 30 minutes transit to SF, 5 minutes loading/unloading at SF, and 30 minutes transit back to LFT. Longer headways that don’t evenly divide into 70 would need to add time to the layovers.

The Larkspur Ferry crunch, part 3: Development

by flyron on Panoramio

Larkspur has a parking problem. More accurately, it has an access problem, one that can be solved by harnessing extant parking and by running a shuttle service. These are ultimately stop-gap measures. If Golden Gate Transit is serious about turning its ferry service into the workhorse it could be, it needs to start thinking beyond the park and ride model to ferry-oriented development.

The financial case

Transit-oriented development could make GGT a mountain of money. Though as a public agency GGT isn’t necessarily supposed to make money, profits mean more stable finances and stronger service.

From a strictly real estate perspective, GGT could earn $2-4 million per year by leasing its parking lot to development, assuming fairly low-rise (four story) development to match the height of existing buildings around the neighborhood. If GGT wants to build on the land itself rather than lease to a developer, it could reap the full value of its land. If developed like the draft Larkspur Station Area Plan, that means roughly $7.8 million in gross revenue from residences and retail. If GGT adds 50,000 square feet of office space, it could quadruple its income to $33.8 million.*

Because GGT land isn’t taxable thanks to its status as a government agency, Larkspur should encourage any residential development on the terminal parking lot to have small units like efficiencies, studios, and one-bedrooms. Childless households attracted to small units are less of a burden on city services, so the lack of parcel and property taxes won’t be as great a problem. Sales taxes would still come in from these households, though, so Larkspur would get some boost from GGT land use changes.

If private property owners follow through on the SMART Station Area Plan, of course, the City of Larkspur would be able to reap the full benefits of more intense use.

The access case

What prompts this analysis, of course, is the current lack of access to the ferry, not simple financial concerns. GGT thinks Larkspur ferry ridership is limited by the ability of people to get to and from the terminal and wants to break through that barrier.

Transit-oriented development of the whole neighborhood of the sort called for in the draft Station Area Plan will provide a way to break through this barrier. More people will be able to walk to the ferry terminal, and that’s a good thing. The existing residents of Larkspur Landing seem to be heavy users of the ferry, with 0.6 weekday trips per person.** We don’t know how many people may eventually live where the parking lot now stands, but there’s every reason to believe they will be just as apt to use the ferry.

Residential TOD is a good way to build in riders who won’t be deterred by the lack of parking. With SMART or a bus shuttle, there’s a good chance GGT could attract car-free or car-light residents, which would boost other transit ridership.

Office TOD could be even more valuable and attract the reverse-commuter. There’s a glut of counter-commute capacity from San Francisco. Attracting San Franciscans to the ferry would allow it to make the most of its existing resources and are an easy way to boost farebox recovery.

Getting these reverse-commuters will require some skill on the part of developers. Only 2 percent of Marin’s jobs are held by transit-commuting San Franciscans. There aren’t many San Francisco commuters to begin with, and most of them are driving, not taking transit. A combination of marketing office space to San Francisco businesses, free transfers to Muni and BART, and discounted fares for employees of Larkspur Landing businesses could help boost the number of reverse commuters.

Any redevelopment plans need to be carefully evaluated. The Larkspur parking lot is on old marshland that will be very expensive to redevelop. GGT land isn’t taxable, so developments’ strain on city and county services needs to be weighed carefully. Neighbors and businesses need buy-in to improve the area. And traffic, surface transit, and parking are all thorny problems that need to be addressed (and are bigger issues than can be addressed here).

Then again, Larkspur Ferry Terminal may not have the capacity for more ridership. There’s already an overflow bus for morning commuters, and GGT is considering adding another morning ferry to cope with demand. In our fourth and final installment, we’ll examine the ferry terminal’s capacity constraints and what to do about them.

*Larkspur offices lease for about $43 per square foot, and apartments in Marin rent for about $2,000 per month. Retail rents for about $20 per square foot.

**At the moment, 25 percent of ferry riders walk to the ferry. It’s very likely that most of these riders live in the nearby homes north of Larkspur Landing Circle, as those are the only homes within walking distance.

Markets are the third way to affordable housing

Boston, with 53 units per acre of pure character and almost nothing over 4 stories. Image from Google Maps via Placemakers.

It’s no secret that the cost to buy or rent a home in the Bay Area is extremely high and rising. Thanks to a regional economic rebound and renewed interest in the kind of walkable living that defines San Francisco, demand for Bay Area housing is at a high.

Unfortunately, this means that only the most privileged can afford to purchase a home in our inner-ring suburbs. Blue collar workers, service workers, and young professionals making less than astronomical sums are having an increasingly difficult time finding homes they can buy or even apartments they can rent. And so a debate over how to accommodate affordable housing swirls around every planning meeting and town council election.

Advocates rally behind nonprofit housing and the state’s regional housing needs assessment (RHNA) process, which assigns each municipality and county a certain number of units they must accommodate. Others, especially in Marin, say cities and counties are managing their affairs just fine and resent anything that could be construed as meddling from Sacramento or ABAG.

Yet both perspectives neglect the economic underpinnings of our housing cost. Fundamentally, we have a shortage of housing for any income. Until either side begins to address this fact, we’ll continue to face deadlock and continuing cost escalation.

Market urbanism

Our housing shortage isn’t everywhere. Stockton and Vallejo can attest to that. Rather, the cost hikes have been in the walkable areas that have come into vogue over the past 10 years. Downtowns both large (San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland) and small (San Rafael, Napa) have seen their prices rise since the end of the recession.

While some of the demand in the big cities may come from name recognition, the principal reason for the price spike is that the supply of housing in walkable neighborhoods has not grown with demand for it. We have a classic housing shortage, and the only way out is to boost supply of walkable housing for all incomes, from luxury to low-income, by making it profitable to build such housing.

To some, this will sound like nonsense. We need affordable housing, not luxury housing. But the theory that increasing supply will stabilize prices has been borne out in at least one market.

Washington, DC, has seen a massive population boom. Since 2000, it has grown by nearly 10 percent, and now is adding 1,300 new residents every month. Though housing costs have increased (partly due to a lack of financing in 2007-2008 and partly due to a lag between demand for apartments and their completion), this year they are expected to be stable despite the continuing influx of people. Regionally, nearly 40,000 apartments are coming online in the next year, with another 30,000 the following year.

No government program could have forced such broad rent stabilization without direct price controls. Next year’s stable rents will only have come about because the region’s governments have worked with demand rather than against it. In the central city, DC is working on a revised zoning code that will promote high- and moderate-density walkable living. In the suburbs, counties are converting drivable retail centers into walkable mixed-use areas, sometimes far from the Metro rail system, relieving some of the demand in the central city.

The Bay Area could join DC and stabilize its housing market only by stepping back from the dysfunctional No Development vs. Affordable Housing debate. We must boost the supply of housing for all incomes or we’ll never get a handle on the problem.

Reform the laws, boost supply

Bay Area developers face a potent mix of restrictive zoning and anti-developer sentiment. We fear that any changes to our much-beloved downtowns will destroy their character, and that rapacious developers just won’t care.

Arguably, they didn’t care in the 1950s or 1960s. Ugly concrete replaced beautiful Victorian. Grassy hills became rolling tract homes. Governments helped by marking poor neighborhoods “obsolete” and tagging for them for demolition.

The laws put in place to stop this kind of idiocy worked, and developers now try to work within a city’s character rather than against it. Developers now face strict design review to ensure developments work with local character and architecture, or are built on characterless strip malls and dead zones.

Still, some of those laws hold back development to an undue degree. Take density limits, put in place to maintain neighborhood character. These ensure that only, say, 30 units per acre can be built in a given acre. While that seems like plenty of density, they encourage the largest units instead of the most rentable mix of units. A developer can’t charge as much for a studio apartment as he can for a two-bedroom, but since both count as a “unit” he’ll build a bunch of two-bedrooms. In Marin, this has meant continuing undersupply of studios and a rent hike of 14 percent since 2011.

Other constraints, such as parking minimums and inclusionary zoning, squeeze even more money from a project, rendering small infill developments unprofitable and impossible.

Cities should reform their zoning codes to make attractive and character-rich development profitable again. Density could be substituted with height limits, which would allow cities to keep a low-rise or mid-rise character while also adding housing units. Parking minimums, too, should be abolished in favor of alternative means of transportation and neighborhood parking plans.

Even in large cities, this will encourage dense development beyond BART stations. Though BART-oriented development is useful, there aren’t enough BART stations to make much of a dent in the housing supply. More importantly, these developments are often islands of walkability in a pedestrian-hostile sea if infill development is restricted to the BART station. Real cities are integrated fabrics, with buses, walking, and biking dominating short trips. Most of the walkable centers in the region follow this pattern and aren’t anywhere near rail transit. There’s no reason not to expand those town centers into the retail strips that dot the region or the vast office parks that dominate swathes of the East and South Bay.

Matthew Yglesias has written extensively about the need for infill development and upzoning. It is simply not tenable to prevent first-wave development from being redeveloped. Our land is simply too valuable to remain parking lots for offices and strip malls.

If the Bay Area is serious about affordable housing, its governments must tackle laws that keep supply from catching up with demand. We cannot rely upon nonprofits or government largesse to solve this economic problem effectively, nor can we freeze our cities and rents and call it a day. Only the market can fix the market.

The blog Sightline Daily has an 11-part series on legalizing real affordable housing, from zoning to density to rooming houses. It should be required reading for anyone involved in affordable housing policy.

 

Microblogging, expanded

by 1yen, on Flickr

Yesterday, I realized I have more ideas for blog posts than I have time to do them. I’m in the middle of a series of posts on Larkspur Landing – I have two more to go – and the issue of affordable housing has reared its ugly and nonsensical head once again in Marin. I’ve also started blogging about the broader region at our sister site, Vibrant Bay Area. Unless one of you wants to pay me, you’re probably not going to get as much analysis as you or I would like to see.

Thankfully, I’m on a microblogging site you may have heard of called Twitter, so I condensed them down into a series of hypotheses. Though I’m confident there is enough data to back up these statements, I haven’t investigated them to confirm that my hunches are correct.

Microblog post: Bike infrastructure that doesn’t accommodate utility biking, cargo bikes, and children is only half-ass bike infrastructure

— The Greater Marin (@theGreaterMarin) March 21, 2013

Pardon the swear here. Bicycling, if it’s going to take off in the US, needs to be more than some paint on the side of the road. Known in California as the Class II bike lane, the bike lane is far better than nothing but far worse than ideal. To me, if you’re uncomfortable riding a cargo bike on it, or if you wouldn’t send your 8-year-old to school on it, then it’s not good enough to put cars and bikes at parity.

Microblog post: The Bay Area needs to quit with the transit villages & look at buses as real transit that can support upzoned retail strips

— The Greater Marin (@theGreaterMarin) March 21, 2013

Cities are not isolated pockets around subway stations. They are integrated fabrics. San Francisco is walkable even far from BART stations, when the only transit is a bus. Since most of the Bay Area is designed around retail strips like El Camino Real, upzoning plans need to take that into consideration. Bubbles of walkability, like Santana Row in San Jose or the BART transit villages, don’t encourage people to live car-free lifestyles, only a car-free commute. By connecting high-density rail-oriented areas with moderate density bus-oriented areas, the Bay Area could improve its mode share mix immensely.

Microblog post: Cities alone won’t solve income inequality, so stop looking to poor (no rich) (no unproductive) hipsters to do it for you.

— The Greater Marin (@theGreaterMarin) March 21, 2013

The term “hipster” has become so over-used it’s lost what little meaning it once had. Hipsters are supposed to save the city (a simplification of Richard Florida’s theory of the creative class) and destroy the city (a simplification of Joel Kotkin’s opposite theory). They’re poor and unproductive one moment, rich and entitled the next. The latest in this devolving debate has Richard Florida positing that a lot of creative class types in a single city lowers income inequality. Joel Kotkin responded with a glorified, Told you so, which led to a Florida response of, No, idiot.

Through it all, I just wish people would leave the poor/rich/entitled/gentrifying/unproductive saviors of our society alone. Income inequality is more complicated than theories of cities, and no single class of people is the salvation or damnation of our society.

And stop calling them hipsters.

This might actually become a post: The whole urbanist thing can be summed up as the pursuit of max. efficiency of access within constraints.

— The Greater Marin (@theGreaterMarin) March 21, 2013

Actually, it probably won’t. In occurred to me that urbanism was the pursuit of maximum efficiency of access within the constraints of the age. In our age, those constraints are principally about preservation of land, character, history, and preexisting residential neighborhoods. In other ages these were sunlight and fresh air; defensibility; or access to water.

I define access as the number of destinations within a given travel time by a given mode, and I define efficiency as minimizing negative externalities and maximizing positive externalities in the course of one’s daily routine. That’s too technical. In other words, how much does our urban design pollute? How much does it make us healthier or sicker? How much land does it use up? How much does it cost? And so on.

My definition could be rephrased. Urbanism is the pursuit of the most access at the least cost to ourselves and to our environment within a community’s chosen or necessary constraints. Decisions from transportation to zoning hang from this.

Last microblog post: With the CC, ACE, and BART, the East Bay has more potential transit capacity than the Peninsula. It should act like it.

— The Greater Marin (@theGreaterMarin) March 21, 2013

The East Bay has a wealth of rail infrastructure. It has two parallel passenger rail lines running from Richmond to Fremont and branches going in all directions, while the Peninsula has only one rail line going north-south. The Peninsula’s rail capacity will be constrained by the blended Caltrain-High Speed Rail plan, while the East Bay’s capacity will not be.

Rather than pursue BART expansions and inefficient ferry service to San Francisco, it should bolster its Amtrak and ACE service to be true rapid transit in parallel to BART and Caltrain. It should restructure its zoning to encourage new neighborhoods to develop for San Franciscans fleeing ludicrous rents. And it should invite tech companies to build new neighborhoods around their train stations instead of new office parks in the middle of nowhere.

Each of these ideas should be pursued, but I fear I must decline the call. That shouldn’t stop you from heeding the call, of course. If you agree, or even if you disagree, pitch me a story on one of these themes. I might end up running it.

The Larkspur ferry crunch, part 2: Bring back the shuttle

Larkspur Ferry Terminal by Matt The Ogre, on Flickr

It’s impossible to discuss the access crunch at Larkspur Ferry Terminal without the subject of shuttle buses. It seems like an easy solution to the seemingly intractable problem of how to get people to the ferry, but history shows it’s not so straightforward.

As mentioned Monday, the shuttle was a monumental failure with riders, principally thanks to free parking. Though ridership would spike to 10 percent of ferry patrons during promotional periods, it would drop back down after the promotion was over. It’s tough to compete with free and convenient.

Pay parking eliminates this concern. Thanks to a quirk in Clipper, riders will get a free transfer while drivers will not, replicating the situation during promotions. It is not unreasonable to assume that 10 percent of riders, the same number who used it during promotions, would use the shuttle. At that rate, the shuttle would actually make a profit, but not like a normal bus may.

Normally, fares paid directly for the bus service goes towards the route’s bottom line. Greyhound makes a profit on its buses, while GGT wants to recover no less than 20 percent of its operating costs with fares. A ferry shuttle, however, would be a loss leader. The real money isn’t in the fare paid for the shuttle ride; it’s in the much higher fare paid for the ferry ride.

Since demand for the ferry already outstrips the ability of people to get to it, every ferry rider who switches from car to shuttle frees a parking spot available for someone new. If 10 percent of ferry riders switch to the shuttle, another 275 people can drive to the ferry. Our drivers would take round-trips, so GGT would earn $12 per day in fares from them. And, since they’re driving, they’d pay out another $2 per day as a parking charge. Add it up and GGT gets nearly $3,000 per new passenger per year, a total of $785,000 in new revenue.

A simpler shuttle program

The shuttle program used in the past was a complicated and vast thing, with shuttle routes overlapping existing routes inefficiently while running long distances.

There’s no need for that. While most ferry riders come from Central Marin, nearly all bus traffic runs through the San Rafael Transit Center. It’s impractical for a shuttle to replicate all these routes, and why should it? If it wants to pick up more passengers up 101 or down Miracle Mile or out in the Canal, it has ceased to be a ferry shuttle and has become part of the wider bus system.

As well, running the shuttle outside of a very restricted 6-minute Transit Center-Ferry Terminal circuit opens the route up to delays from traffic or crash. Given the often long waits between ferry departures, a delay could force a long wait on riders. If ferries are held to wait for the bus, it would add delays for the rest of the commute hour.

Unfortunately, a dedicated shuttle would be rather expensive. At $660,000 per year, it would make a $125,000 annual profit, but there’s a lot of waste. When ferry headways are long – up to 95 minutes – the shuttle wouldn’t have anything to do. GGT could realize significant cost savings by extending an existing route to the ferry terminal instead.

By extending a short, frequent route, like Route 35, GGT would be able to operate a shuttle for only $340,000 per year. When ferry headways are long, the bus would be able to continue on its normal route and head to the ferry terminal for shuttle runs. When ferry headways are short, every run would hit the ferry terminal.

It’s important to point out that, since GGT will charge for parking no matter the outcome of its parking expansion, it must implement a shuttle to take up the slack of those who don’t want to pay the charge. If GGT rejects the shuttle but institutes the parking charge it will face a decline in ferry ridership rather than an expansion.

This kind of shuttle is not on the radar of GGT officials. They cite the old system’s high cost, poor response, and ferry riders who said they want a shuttle for other people but not themselves. Though they want to time Route 29 to the ferries – a fantastic idea – they may miss an opportunity to add revenue to the system. Staff should draw up some shuttle options with projected ridership and combined ferry/bus revenue. The Board needs to see its options.

If reorganizing neighborhood parking is the “organization” side of ferry access, the parking charge is the “electronics” side of ferry access. The modest investment would add efficiency by segmenting the access market into those who really want or need to drive and those who would prefer to leave their car at home.

As we discussed Monday, there is no reason to invest in parking garages for Larkspur Ferry. Not only can GGT provide 520 more parking spaces for free but it can free up 275 parking spaces with a profitable shuttle service.

So we can accommodate plenty of Marin commuters, but GGT’s ferry faces other problems, namely severely underused afternoon and reverse-commute capacity. And if the aim is to boost ridership, there’s no more efficient way than increasing the number of people who walk. The next installment will tackle these issues with transit-oriented development.

 

The Larkspur ferry crunch, part 1: There’s already enough parking

All the parking lots in Larkspur Landing. Image from Google Maps.

There’s no question that Larkspur Ferry has an access problem. If you drive, there’s a vanishingly small chance you’ll get a parking space after 8:30am. If you don’t drive, your options are to live in the neighborhood, walk for almost a mile along the freeway, bike for 15 minutes from the Transit Center, or take the miserably slow GGT Route 29 bus.

In response to this perceived lack of access, GGT is again investigating some exceedingly expensive parking garages paid for by a new parking fee. (They had last discussed a parking solution in 2007, when ridership was about what it is today.) While this would expand access, this solution fails to take into account the breadth of options available, including 520 unused parking spaces in Larkspur Landing that already exist.

Organization before electronics before concrete

An old adage marks best practice for facilities design: organization before electronics before concrete. The first, organization, rearranges existing resources to maximize their utilization. The second, electronics, upgrades the systems you already have so you can make even better use of your resources. The third, concrete, adds resources to your now-optimized pool. By prioritizing cheaper solutions before expensive ones, organizations can save a lot of money.

In the case of Larkspur Terminal, GGT’s supply of access to the ferry (the parking spaces, bus seats, bicycle racks, housing units, and office space in the vicinity) is the resource. As currently designed, there is a shortage of access, but GGT doesn’t need to add more garages just yet.

The Larkspur Station Area Plan revealed that, during the day, 520 parking spaces in the neighborhood went unoccupied. Though GGT does have a parking problem on its own property, the area’s parking supply is more than ample to meet the demand.

Graphic and data from City of Larkspur. There’s a lot of demand for parking, but a lot of unused space, too. PDF here.

These spaces aren’t being used because the parking supply isn’t well-organized. People driving to the ferry have the option of parking for free on the street, for free in the ferry parking lot, or for $4 per day at the Marin Airporter. The other lots aren’t an option to them, as they’re reserved for more office workers than exist and patrons of Marin Country Mart who mostly come on the weekend.

Through a reorganization of the neighborhood’s parking supply, GGT could expand ferry parking by 520 spaces essentially for free.

GGT, Larkspur, and the businesses in Larkspur Landing would need to work together to figure out the precise rules, but the core of any plan would be pricing: a $2 charge per day for anyone parking in the area who doesn’t get parking validated by a retail store or who doesn’t have an employee parking pass. The owner of each lot would get income from their charge. Larkspur would earmark on-street parking charges to neighborhood improvements.

Coincidentally, 520 spaces is nearly the same number of spaces GGT wants to add in a large, 969-space garage. Since it would be built on 400 existing parking spaces, the garage would net 569 parking spaces. Unlike the essentially free 520, however, the 569 spaces would cost an astounding $44,000 apiece.

No need for concrete

Organization before electronics before concrete means other options should be explored before investing in costly new infrastructure. An examination of the neighborhood finds that parking already exists to meet demand, if GGT can harness it.

Of course, if the politics prove impossible and those open spaces can’t be used for ferry riders, GGT will need to turn to the parking equivalent of electronics: a shuttle from the Transit Center. We’ll tackle that question next.

The vibrant Bay Area

Image from NASA.

The Bay Area is quite a tapestry. We have people from around the world trying to make a living here and even more pounding at our doors. We are a global economic force in industries both ancient (wine) and contemporary (tech). From a hilltop above rural Bolinas you can spy the western symbol of urbanism, San Francisco. And over it all, we have over a hundred governments and even more elected boards and semi-independent agencies shaping policy.

The Bay Area is a vibrant, fascinating, diverse, and interconnected place in ways we hardly ever stop to think about. And so, I’m starting a new blog today, in addition to this one, called Vibrant Bay Area.

For the past two years, I’ve written The Greater Marin, an exploration of these themes for a single county. Yet the deeper I dug into local concerns, like the SMART train and affordable housing, the more I understood that policies in Marin shape the region, and vice versa.

And so, a group of like-minded activists and writers gathered to create a new platform to explore the region’s urban affairs from the bottom up.

Vibrant Bay Area is a collaborative attempt to peel back the region’s layers to find the lines that connect our communities and the lessons we can learn from one another. Though each writer has his or her own perspective, we all approach the region from a decidedly urbanist perspective. We believe the future of the Bay Area lies in vibrant town centers accessible by biking, walking, and well-designed transit.

The challenges faced by the Bay are substantial and as diverse as our cityscape. While Vallejo struggles with the financial consequences of unsustainable sprawl, Windsor wonders whether its character can survive an apartment building boom. While VTA runs nearly empty, BART’s commuters crush through the Transbay Tunnel. From crime in Oakland to education in San Francisco, transit in Napa and development in Contra Costa, we want to explore this whole great, fascinating region of ours.

And we can’t do it alone. Have a tip? Want to write a post? Get in touch with us: info [at] vibrantbayarea.org. We’re also on Twitter at @vbayarea. And by all means, if you see that your community or issue isn’t receiving the attention it deserves, step up! Our all-volunteer corps can’t be everywhere at once, so lend your voice.

The Bay Area is vast, but it is not inscrutable. Join us in shedding a light on the dark corners of our fascinating, vibrant region.