Public transportation in Folsom area (Los Angeles, San Francisco: cul-de-sac, sales, rent)

[MapleLeaf]

How good is public transportation in Folsom area?
If we live in Roseville/EDH area is it possible to get to University of Sac y public transit?

[wburg]

Not easily or quickly. Roseville has very limited bus service, the trip would require several transfers and probably take at least an hour each way. Roseville and El Dorado Hills are very, very far out, and they have never really had public transit systems.

There is a Light Rail line that ends in old Folsom that goes fairly close to Sacramento State (about a mile away, but there are shuttle buses that go from the station to the school) but it stops running at 7:00 PM.

Oh, and there is no "University of Sac." It's called Sacramento State University, or Sac State for short.

[Damnitjanet]

Is it possible, yes? Is it convientent, not really. Roseville is in Placer County, El Dorado Hills is in El Dorado County, and CSUS is in Sacramento county.

All three counties are served by different transit agencies. Transit in this area is set up for two different purposes, it acts as a lifeline for people who are either disabled or too poor to afford a car and it provides some service for commuters going to major employment centers during rush hour.

Outside of commute periods transit is very infrequent in most of the region, you may need to wait an hour or an hour and half for the next bus. Why that matters is that to get around, you need to catch transfers between different buses. When you are switching from different transit agencies, the coordination is very bad and you are more likely to get stuck waiting even longer for a bus.

The big problem is that there aren't a lot of riders going between Roseville and CSUS and not really many riders going between El Dorado Hills and CSUS.

During rush hour, their is improved transit choices, with express buses from El Dorado Hills to downtown, but those buses don't stop at CSUS.

In Folsom itself, there are light rail trains that run from Folsom to downtown. But the trains to Folsom are more infrequent, (about once every half hour and shut down earlier last train about 7 pm than in other light rail lines). Even then you have the hassle of getting from where you live to light rail and then getting from light rail to CSUS, which involves waiting around for a shuttle from the light rail station to CSUS and possibly waiting finding a connecting bus to light rail from where ever you will live to light rail.

In practice people who can afford to live in Granite Bay or El Dorado Hills, tend to value their time more and have the money to just get a second car and drive.

Alternatively, you could just move to Sierra Oaks or Campus Commons where whoever needed to get to CSUS could just walk or ride a bike to CSUS and you send your children to Sierra Oaks Elementary and Rio Americano for High School.

But if you could you probably would want to avoid setting up a situation where you need to take mass transit from El Dorado Hills or Roseville or really even Folsom to CSUS. Truthfully it just isn't very convientent.

[MapleLeaf]

Thanks you for replies!

I was asking actually not for myself, but for my son who is going to high school...
He will be graduated at 17 y o and I'm not sure if he will be mature enough to drive the car

[wburg]

Most of the folks living in places like Granite Bay or El Dorado Hills wouldn't be caught dead on public transportation, and certainly wouldn't let their kids ride it. Kudos for at least being open to the idea, but it is probably impractical.

[mattinsac]

I think you are mischarterizing the problem. Its very tough to make transit work from those areas to CSUS, moreover the current policies are making the system worse.

Transit works best when it is taking people to and from where they live to their employment center. Those are the areas where you have enough people to justify filling a bus. Most of the people in Granite Bay are going to be working in Roseville, Rocklin and off highway 65. There are poor transit connections from Granite Bay to CSUS because so few of the people living in Granite Bay are going to be working anywhere near CSUS. Most people who live in El Dorado Hills are going to be working in Folsom, or off US 50. There just aren't enough people going from El Dorado Hills to CSUS to sustain high frequency transit service.

Second the design for light rail in this region has been a disaster. The light rail lines were built upon existing heavy rail right of ways in areas filled with warehouses. Because light rail goes through some of least populated areas in region, and it built some distance from employment centers, along most of the highway 50 corridor it does an absolutely awful job of actually getting people from where they live to where they work. So while in theory there is light rail from downtown Sac to folsom, few people actually live within walking distance from where they live and few employers or transit centers are in walking distance of the Folsom light rail line. So that means that you generally are getting stuck waiting around for some connecting bus or shuttle on both ends of your trip. Because no one can guarantee that any part in the system will be on time, the connections generally involve some sort of additional wait. More to the point point even after you get to light rail, its not at all convient to walk from the 65th station to classes at CSUS. So transit in this area is no where near being time competitive.

Because so few people live along the light rail line, it doesn't pay to run the light rail cars frequently enough. This is why light rail cars only run every half hour to Folsom and stop just after 7pm. Additionally their is no express service. Before light rail came to folsom, there were express buses that would take you from Folsom to downtown. When light rail came, the buses were fed into the light rail network. But the buses didn't have to stop at every light rail station, so they got you faster from folsom to downtown, addtionally you didn't have to wait around at the light rail station waiting for a transfer from the bus to the light rail train. Because the transit system has increased the delays for potential riders two things are happening. Some people are driving to the park and ride lots and others are just driving all of the way into work. Because some of the people are driving to the park and ride lots, that means that there are less people on these connecting buses. In tough budget times because these buses now have less riders, these connecting lines are the first to go. As a result you have less transit access because now they are dropping the bus lines that formerly connected you to the rail system.

If you were actively trying to keep people off transit it would be difficult to come up with a better way of doing it than extending light rail into neighborhoods with few employers and few residents, but that is what this region is doing.

The net result is that the addition of light rail resulted in longer commuting times, and a much more expensive transit system.

If this region had the density of San Francisco, then some sort of rail system probably would be a good idea. But this region doesn't have the density to support light rail especially in the areas where we are now building out the system. As a result we are building out a much more expensive transit system that is failing to capture an appreiably bigger share of the commute.

Notice how the addition of the folsom light rail line in 2004 only boosts transit usage by less than .5%. The region could have raising mass transit usage for much less money if it lowered the cost of a bus pass or increased the frequency of the buses than 255 million it spent on the light rail line to nowhere.

Folsom city, California - Selected Economic Characteristics: 2005-2007

Folsom city, California - DP-3. Profile of Selected Economic Characteristics:**2000

[wburg]

Part of the transit problem is the "half a canoe" problem: half a canoe may be cheaper than buying an entire canoe, but it is far less useful than buying the whole canoe. When we built the Folsom light rail line, we built half a canoe. It would make a lot more sense to have double-tracked the entire main line, in order to allow express service and 15 minute headways, but there wasn't enough money to do so, and RT is so strapped for cash they can't afford to maintain the bare-bones service they do have.

I wouldn't characterize the Gold Line as strictly warehouses: it travels parallel to Folsom Boulevard along much of its length, including several retail and residential areas. None are densely built out, becase car-centric neighborhoods do not ever become densely built-out transit-oriented corridors. Part of the purpose of building fixed-rail public transit is to encourage that kind of growth, and we are starting to see that happen in certain spots, but only recently has there been the political will and concurrence from the development community to do so. When light rail was first built, it was still assumed that park-and-ride was a practical metaphor, the purpose of the central city was strictly as employment center rather than for residence, and it was still assumed that we could keep building single-family greenfield suburbs forever. Our failure to turn away from that mode of thinking is why our transit system isn't nearly as useful as it could have been. Other cities built dense housing along their light rail lines, and supplemented regional light rail with local streetcars to make transfer between modes easier and more reliable. Other cities decided to dedicate one-half to one cent of their sales tax to public transit operation, to ensure they didn't end up building big transit systems and then not provide them with enough trains (and connecting buses) to make transit convenient. We didn't, and we're still cursing our purchase of half a canoe, but aren't willing to pony up for the whole canoe. The "cheaper" option is just to buy another half-canoe but the problem with that is then we'll have two equally useless half-canoes.

San Francisco has the density of San Francisco because it built a streetcar system, back when many parts of San Francisco were still vacant greenfield areas. Los Angeles had that kind of density too, until they abandoned the streetcar and interurban network that allowed the city to be built out in the first place.

[kim racer]

The problem is that gas prices in the US are incredibly cheap. Mass transit doesn't work in this country because generally speaking its much cheaper, and faster to drive. Thus the only people who take transit are people who have no other options. In Europe and Japan they tax the hell out of gasoline and automobiles, when driving is expensive people want to live near transit and proximity to transit is a selling feature for both employers and people looking for housing. So people are willing to put up with the hassles of density and transit.

The primary reason you have people taking transit in NYC and SF is that there land prices are high enough where it becomes too expensive to build large parking lots, so parking is expensive and if you have to pay for parking the marginal cost of driving can exceed the hassles involved in taking transit. But those communities are next to ocean and were largely built out 50 to 100 years ago in an era when transportation costs were about 10 times higher. Additionally proximity to the ocean acts as inducement to put up with hassles of higher density living.( hassles of parking etc)

Sacramento is surrounded by farm land. There are incredibly strong economic inducements to sprawl. In this region when land prices and parking get too expensive that just serves as an inducement to build elsewhere, generally along one of the freeway corridors, thus the expansion of office space along 50 or off highway 65 or in Roseville. In the future there are plans to build lots of additional office space in Natomas and talk about doing the same in Elk Grove. Notice how the additional office space isn't going in next to light rail corridors. There is space next to light rail to build denser if there was a market for it. The Lumberjack on Arden Way next to the Royal Oaks Post Office has enough space to build an office building there if there was a market for it. But with no market, RT ends up using that as place to store buses.

Transit works best when it connects one dense employment corridor with other dense regions. This region has a very dispersed employment pattern that is continually get more dispersed. The only major employer that will build downtown is government. For everyone else the combination of cheap parking, cheaper rent and closer proximity to the better educated work force means that growth gets driven out along the freeways. For a light station to have 1500 hundred users in a day is considered excellent. The average freeway lane in this region delivers that many people in an hour. If you are an employer and want access to the labor market, you build where you can get it and that is along a freeway preferably close to Roseville or Folsom because the region gets better educated as you get closer to those regions.

The only development that is being done near transit is heavily subsidized by the redevelopment agencies, often with an assist from one of the state agencies as a backdoor subsidy to advance the policy goal of redevelopment. This region is doing everything short of actually raising the gas tax to try to push development downtown into denser corridors. It set up an urban services growth boundary, it mandated higher levels of density in new developments.

But bad pricing triumphs over elaborate policies. If they try to raise parking prices to get people out of their cars, that pushes growth to the office space along the freeways. If they stop building additional freeway capacity, that makes commuting more difficult to downtown and makes it more difficult for downtown employers to attract the better educated workforce available in the suburbs and that drives away the private sector employers.

If you look this region has been building out light rail since 1987 and transit funding got increased as part of sales tax increasing local funding for transit, but transit usage as percentage of the commute has been falling during that period in part because employers and commuters have responded to the higher costs of congestion downtown by moving to suburban office parks which are much more difficult to serve by transit.

About the only thing that has reliably pushed up transit share of the commute is those periods when gas prices spike. When gas prices were above $4.50 locally, there was some movement of people to take transit instead of driving to work. If we taxed gasoline like they do in Europe where gas is priced closer to $8 a gallon, then we probably would see a move to transit. In that case proximity to transit might actually be an advantage.

But right now at current gasoline prices transit is boondoggle in this region. The economics of this market are such as to completely undercut the planners in their attempts to get people out of cars. Because gas is cheap, its quite affordible to make fairly long commutes. That in turn means that land values are uniformily fairly cheap making large parking lots quite cheap and allows people to afford to live in large homes spread out on large lots often with as many as three car parking garages plus plenty of street parking.

If you look at the proposed climate change legisilation, the cap and trade system is so weak that it won't meaningfully raise gas prices any time in the foreseeable future. Instead we are getting more of the same. More funding of elaborate transit projects that have little chance of actually increasing the share of transit being used in this region.

I think increased funding for transit makes a lot of sense in Europe and arguably in Manhattan, and in the high density regions of the country like heading to loop in Chicago or the financial district in San Francisco. But in this region its throwing good money after bad.

The build out of light rail was an expensive mistake. It made taking transit less convientent for potential riders. The route it took on Folsom Blvd goes through multiple warehouse districts, it goes through an automall, it spends a lot of time adjacent to a freeway. What it fails to do is go through many neighborhoods with actual people living with in walking distance to light rail station and it fails to go through many areas within walking distance to the offices along the highway 50 corridor. Thus the huge number of park and ride lots along that light rail corridor. This is an area where buses provided much better service to potential riders because a bus could at least drop people off in walking distance to major office complexes.

[wburg]

Although many don't agree, I don't think gas is going to stay cheap in the long run. Once gas stops being cheap and stays that way, the cities that will be in the best shape (or at least the least bad shape) are cities that have transportation infrastructure.

It is tremendously easier for cities like Sacramento to grow out than up, but there are other problems to face. Cities can only grow so dispersed and so far before delivery of urban services like water and sewers costs more than they can generate in fee revenue. The traditional answer is to encourage more suburban expansion and annex the new suburbs, converting cheap low-tax farmland into expensive high-tax residential and commercial neighborhoods. But eventually expansion gets too hard for municipalities, even though it is still feasible for businesses and developers to just leapfrog into the next town. The result is a city that gets financially strangled by its own infrastructure--as we are seeing in Sacramento today!

There seems to be an assumption that Sacramento will eventually reach the level of population density that will support transit. The problem is, because gas is cheap and we have available greenfields, there is no reason whatsoever to densify. So those levels will never be reached, not in a century--they'll just keep expanding outward until we hit the Sierras and the coastal mountains.

The other problem is that a completely built-out neighborhood will never have room for a light rail line. Even if things do get somewhat busy and dense, there will be far too much traffic to allow light rail to come in, because the neighborhood was car-dependent from its very creation. Such is the issue in North Natomas: Truxel Avenue was supposed to have a light rail lne running on it, but the transit wasn't built first and the result was a car-centric neighborhood that will have huge trouble ever being anything but a car-centric neighborhood. Now people in the neighborhood will fight the effort because Truxel is already a very busy and crowded street and there is no place for light rail to run, and a feeder/cul-de-sac building model means that nearly no place in the neighborhood is convenient to walk to any point on Truxel. Even walking from Truxel to STORES is longer than suggested TOD walking distances, on baking asphalt parking lots.

So our choices are to fund transit properly, not half-a-canoe half-hearted attempts, or be stuck with neighborhoods that won't EVER be dense enough to be transit-oriented unless they are entirely bulldozered and built back from the ground up...which is probably a lot more expensive than providing some funds for transit.

Yes, TOD often calls for financial assistance--but not always. Some central-city TOD is being built without subsidy, and many older city neighborhoods that are TOD by original design (they were built before cars, but after Sacramento's old streetcar network) are seeing a revitalization and denser infill because a lot of people want to live in a neighborhood unlike the quarter-acre beige McMansions we are all told we must desire unless there's something mentally wrong with us.

[kim racer]

It tremendously difficult to densify, even when the local economics might seem to justify it. Its much easier to sprawl. The people who don't like an existing neighborhood will move away from it. The people who remains in a neighborhood are mostly people who like it the way it is already. Since these are the people who vote, the local politicians end up getting captured by people opposing new growth that would densify the area. The pretexts change, perhaps to save historic homes or rent controlled units or preserve our schools but in practice its extraordinarily difficult to substantively increase the density in any community. Growth flows to greenfield areas because that is the area where it gets the least opposition. You won't get new growth in an area unless the locals will go along with. This is why even though the bay area has some of the highest housing prices in the country, developers aren't Manhattanizing Marin, San Mateo, the southbay and why SF has about the same population today that it did in the 1950's. Increasing density is something that people always want to happen in other areas.

Instead the population growth of the bay area has flowed to Roseville, Elk Grove etc where the locals were willing to convert farmland into housing. That is a much easier sell because cows and chickens don't worry about additional traffic flowing through their neighborhood nor what new growth will do to the local schools.

Absent high gasoline costs, higher land prices in Sacramento create huge incentives to develop new greenfield areas. Its just a question of finding the government the most in need of the money and the property tax boost from new growth. Right now unemployment in Sutter County is around 20%. Southern Sutter County is closer to Natomas and downtown Sacramento than Woodland. Rice land in southern Sutter county is going for $10,000 an acre. If you put 10 homes per acre, the cost of aquiring this land is about $1,000 dollars a homesite. Given that new homes are selling for 220k each, you can afford to build the home, put in the infrastructure and create jobs for some of the 20% of the local population in Sutter County that is unemployed. The margin is big enough where you can easily afford to provide infrastructure to your development. Housing uses less water than Rice fields, so you can even sell of some of the excess water riights. You could even fund a redevelopment fund to bring new jobs to Yuba City and Marysville. Because their is already a freeway going through southern Sutter County, one of the big infrastructure costs has already been partially covered.

In 1984, you probably would have told me that there is no way that there would be plans for 60k home sites in Natomas because the area is a flood plain. But because the economics were so compelling, the long term master plan was amended. Plans change particularly when its incredibly lucrative to change them. Smart developers come up with pretexts (save the Kings, build a University, etc) to change plans when its incredibly lucrative to subvert the plan.

Absent a significant rise in transporation costs, there are a lot of areas in this community where its quite lucrative to subvert long term plans and its reasonable to assume that developers will do exactly that.

We have democratic majorities in the house and senate and a democratic president. The new climate change bill is tepid. It is so full of give backs to the energy companies that its not going to meaingfully raise energy prices for the next 20 years.

The State of California has a budget deficit of at least 26 billion dollars. The state senate and assembly are controlled by the democrats and Gov. Schwartzeneggar has been hailed as some sort of enviromental governor. Nevertheless there are no current plans by either party to either raise the car tax nor to raise the gas tax to fix the budget problem.

If you can't use the largest state budget crisis in its history as a pretext for raising the gas tax or the car tax, you just aren't going to raise these taxes. If you can't do it now, you never will. No one in either party at either the federal or state levels is willing to raising the gas tax. There is talk about extending the sales tax to other goods and services, there is tax about increasing the income tax, but the gas tax is the tax that no will dares to speak its name.

This is why I don't think gas prices or transporation costs will go up. There is no political will to push them up in this country. If it can't happen now it never will.

But even if transportation costs went up for reasons not related to an increase in gas taxes, I am not sure that this area would in fact densify.

A lot of the growth in the economic activity in this area is a function of cheap transporation costs. In 1930, all of the top 25 cities in this country were next to a major water body, the ocean, the great lakes, the Mississippi. Because the cheapest least energy intensive way to ship something is by water.

If transporation costs go up for reasons other than in increase in the gas tax, I think economic activity is probably going to occur in a lot of these older areas where you have much better access to cheap water transportation, places like Cleveland, Savannah, Baltimoore, etc. These are areas that used to be dense and it would be much easier to make them dense once again in the future. Those areas are also economically destitute enough where the idea of new growth in older neighborhoods might find political traction with the locals. They are also on a major water body.

Lastly as long as transportation costs are as cheap as they are, why should the reason bother to try to densify? In terms of farmland, we are abandoning surplus farmland than we are losing it to suburbanization. We have more areas covered by forest today than we did 100 years ago, in part because we have effectively banned logging in large parts of the country.

There are also some real benefits from sprawl. People who live in low density regions have shorter commutes and can afford to live in bigger homes. Because land prices are cheaper in these areas, housing costs and housing prices as a percentage of income are much cheaper in the regions that are most tolerant of sprawl. The places that historically have the biggest housing affordibilty issues are the places that are the densest Houston and Atlanta are much cheaper than Manhattan and San Francisco and people in Houston and Atlanta are spending a much smaller fraction of their income on housing than people in NYC or SF. Nationally people who commute using mass transit spend twice as much time as people who live in low density regions.

In short there are real benefits conferred by these sprawling communities and the economic demand for these neighborhood is what gives the developers the economic leverage to subvert the city planners long range growth plans.

At the moment I see the city planners long term growth plans being completely undermined by cheap transportation costs. We have been building out light rail in this region now for more than 20 years and the share of people taking transit is lower today than it was in 1980.

This idea that if you build a transportation network somehow the riders will appear has been undercut by thirty years of experience. The only thing that gets people out of their cars is high gas prices. When gas prices go up, transit's share increases, when gas prices fall again, transit's share goes down. Nothing else works, not building light rail, not increasing transit funding with an increase in the gas tax. Only high gas prices.

The long term trend in this country for the past 200 years is declining transportation costs. The only reason mass transit has been more competitive in Europe and Japan then in this country is that they have been willing to tax the hell out of gasoline and car ownership. But housing prices are greater there as share of income and people are stuck living in much smaller homes.

Absent huge increases in gas taxes and vehicle license fees, I doubt transit is going to gang much share in most of this country either and in this region. I see no will of the people or there representives to vote for higher gas taxes.