Successful transit includes nice lobbies
By Mark Brodsky
The great sage Harry Golding once quipped, "Where you stand on an issue has a lot to do with where you sit." This is also true about efficient mass transit, for he could have said, "Where transit works has a lot to do with where you wait."
People wait for transit in only two places--on street and in lobbies, and you wont find me on the street. As with most Silicon Valley suburbanites I will do most anything to avoid waiting on a street for transit. Usually, I only see the young and the dispossessed standing there waiting for a bus. I won't do it, my wife would never do it, and I cringed when my teenage kids waited for the bus to Great America. Pedestrians on the road look so isolated, vulnerable and abandoned.
There are not even sidewalks to many bus stops. So one reason transit use sucks in Silicon Valley is because most people like me won't make their connections waiting on the streets.
Now, lobbies are something different. Shuttle buses have picked me up from hotel lobbies all over the world. Taxies have honked for me at home (my lobby). Limousines have whisked me away from corporate lobbies, and many foreign rail, air and bus stations have safe and comfortable areas to wait for the next connection. (If you fly to Hong Kong, take the high-speed train to the Kowloon transfer station, then pick up one of the free shuttles to the major hotels. Nice, clean, protected, organized, climate-controlled and safe.)
Transit lobbies also take care of my needs. Last week I munched a cinnibun while waiting to be picked up from the lobby of the San Diego Airport. Had coffee, too, and there was a clean restroom nearby, if needed.
So, if lots of people, like me, do not mind taking transit, if we can wait in a lobby, why haven't public agencies used lobbies to attract us?
There are lots of existing corporate, shopping center and hotel lobbies. Perhaps we might build some more lobbies where jobs and housing are concentrated. Such sites could even have affordable living centers constructed over these lobbies. This way there would be plenty of users, additional housing and lots of commuter services.
Then, we could connect all these lobbies (with a few dozen luxury shuttles using our HOV network) to our rail stations, airports and even our bigger bus stops. Logical, but that's not the way it is in Silicon Valley.
Instead of supporting the idea of comfortable pedestrian centers, our transit planners have made these connections downright difficult.
Consider Light Rail on First Street in San Jose. Just try to give a fellow employee a lift to a station, and you might get a ticket for stopping on the street to drop him off. And look at the park-and-ride lots. No bathrooms and no commuter services. In place of comfort we're offered a barren lot where even "roach coach" operators face arrest trying to sell a cup of coffee.
That's why the current Valley Transportation Authority BART to San Jose proposal is doomed to fail us. While BART could carry lots of passengers, the cost of tunneling the last nine miles into downtown San Jose soaks up all the available funds for making Silicon Valley connections comfortable.
Basically, it eats up 80 percent of the money for less than 1 out of 5 commuters, and screws us for 25 years.
There is a possible compromise. Building BART just to North Milpitas will free up billions for the intermodal connections (a.k.a. lobbies) needed to get commuters between transit and their jobs. A comfortable transit hub at Mission and 880 (where Bart and the ACE train cross), could have stops for HOV express shuttles to lobbies at AMD, National, Cisco and other large employment concentrations. Safe, comfortable and convenient. And easy, too--just get off the train and look for a corporate logo.
Once we see how a world-class Milpitas transit center works with East Bay maybe then we can see about a West Valley transit lobby. We have almost as many commuters coming up 85 and 17 as there are coming down 880 and 680 (Does the URL www.northlosgatos.com ring a bell?)
So, if we want traffic relief, we must tell our transit planners to make it comfortable. Tell them not to dump money down a nine-mile rathole and build nice connections instead. And tell them the people of Silicon Valley do not make connections standing on the street.
Mark Brodsky is a Monte Sereno resident who is active in transit issues.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
