“From an efficiency point of view, transportation takes 18% of the household budget, causes 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the Bay Area, consumes at least 10% of the land use with roads, highways, and parking spaces at work places, home, and shopping. At some tipping point, transportation begins to divide more than it brings people together. At some tipping point, our automobile culture takes away more freedoms than it brings.
The unintended social consequences are huge: children who don’t have the freedom to walk down the street for a pick-up game but have to have play dates, seniors who are trapped in their homes unable to drive, childhood obesity…”
Former Palo Alto Mayor Yoriko Kishimoto offered these observations at a recent discussion at Palo Alto-based design firm IDEO. Unable to attend the event, I asked to speak with Kishimoto about transportation issues, and she generously provided an account of smart growth advocacy, by others as well as herself, in the Peninsula cities. While the promotion of walking, cycling, and public transportation—the scale of which can be readily grasped—are all essential components of her long-term vision, the elephant in the room is the proposed High Speed Rail route from San Jose to San Francisco. Its scale is far less easy for the average person to grasp, and it has the potential to be dramatically divisive, hardening the already frequently impenetrable barrier of the Caltrain corridor as it passes through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Burlingame, and Belmont, which have come together as the Peninsula Cities Consortium to address the issue.
While highlights of the debate over the Peninsula corridor are well covered in area newspapers, Kishimoto introduced me to a promising public participation process being employed to sort through the problems. The process, in which many architects are playing key roles, is well documented online, so I will merely offer an overview here.
The Peninsula Rail Program, a partnership between Caltrain and the California High Speed Rail Authority charged with implementing high-speed rail service from San Jose to San Francisco as well as a Caltrain modernization program, is proposing to utilize a process known as “Context Sensitive Solutions” (CSS) to incorporate public input into decision-making. According to Bruce Fukuji, CSS Program Manager for the Peninsula Rail Program, the CSS process “supports communities to achieve feasible, context-sensitive solutions for the project” and “utilizes urban design to shape transit system design to enhance community life and support walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly environments.” The process began with a High Speed Rail Design workshop supported by the Consortium and hosted by the City of Palo Alto on 4 November 2009, followed in January by a San Jose Diridon Station Area Community Meeting and, in March and April, meetings of the Technical Working Group (city, county, and other agency managers, planners, and engineers) and the Policy Maker Working Group (mayors, council members, and other representatives of the affected cities), with an additional sixteen community workshops held between 15 April and 16 June 2010. The entirety of this process precedes the drafting of an Environmental Impact Report.
Of particular note for architects—because it involved the leadership and participation of many architects—was the kick-off HSR Design Workshop held last November. Following introductory remarks from Palo Alto Mayor Peter Drekmeier, Menlo Park Mayor Rich Cline, and Palo Alto City Manager Jim Keene, workshop organizer Brian Steen introduced a series of presentations by technical experts on transportation, tunneling, geotechnical engineering, historic resources, trains, finance, and public art. The morning session concluded with remarks by architect Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA, on elements of the fabric of place that “gather meanings and serve as anchors of identity—anchors sufficient to allow continuing transformation around them.” Urban designer John Kriken of SOM and landscape architect Walter Hood also addressed the gathering.
Nine afternoon work groups, each focused on an eight-mile segment of the HSR route between Atherton and Palo Alto, were coordinated by architect Clare Malone Prichard; architect Henry Riggs; landscape architect Chuck Kinney and architect Bob Peterson; landscape architect Andrea Lucas; architect Ken Kornberg and landscape architect Willett Moss; architect and developer Kathy Schmidt; architect Grace Lee and landscape architect Gary Laymon; architect Randy Popp and project manager Maryanne Welton; and urban planner Virginia Warheit.
In addition to the work group leaders, a number of other architects participated in the generation of design alternatives for the rail corridor, including Henry Riggs of Menlo Park and Judith Wasserman, David Solnick, and Martin Bernstein of Palo Alto. Architect Tony Carrasco, also of Palo Alto and a participant in the charette, has generously directed me to a wealth of documentation of the event, much of which can be found at the links below.
The HSR Design Workshop is an exemplary instance of architects mediating what, to the average citizen, can be an incomprehensible gap between the scale of infrastructural development and the scale of everyday experience.
Further resources:
San Jose Mercury News
Peninsula Rail Program
Peninsula Cities Consortium
California High Speed Rail Authority
Documentation of the November CSS Workshop
Author Tim Culvahouse, FAIA, is editor of arcCA.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2010 in arcCA 10.2, “The Future of CA.”
