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My husband and I are considering relocating to one of the Sacramento suburbs to be closer to family - leaning toward Folsom. We plan to buy a house; hoping for a smaller house in an area walkable to a few things (a restaurant, bar, grocery, etc.). We are retired/working remotely. We visited and really enjoyed the bike trail, and can envision kayaking in Lake Natroma. Are there good opportunities for cultural things (live music, theatre, etc) in Folsom, or would that require a trip to Sacramento? Any thoughts on the local live music scene - particularly jazz or bluegrass? Is public transit decent? Grateful for any thoughts you would care to pass along.
I live in Folsom. Folsom is nice, but you might also like or prefer El Dorado Hills, Roseville, Rocklin, Davis Gold River or possibly East SacLand Park . So if you haven't at least looked at those areas, I would look at those before committing to Folsom. There is a historic core in Folsom that goes back to the Gold Rush, then the area grew more slowly as a prison town until the 1990's when Intel came to town and the area has grown appreciably in the past 30 years.
In terms of Cultural amenities, Folsom has the Harris Center and that will program some events, but their is probably more of that in the larger Metro area, Davis has the Mondavi Center and there are other events in Sacramento. For Cultural Events I would probably favor both Davis and Sacramento as better choices those areas. I would say the network of bike trails is pretty good, but the network of trails is better in Davis. But Folsom is better than Roseville, Rocklin or El Dorado Hills. Gold River is smaller than Fosom, but it too has an extensive network of bike paths and depending on where you live there you might prefer that.It is also really close to Lake Notomas.
If you search for the Harris Center, you want harriscenter.net. The website lists the shows for this season. It won't have everything that downtown Sacramento or SF has but has a decent selection. You will be amazed at how easy it is to drive into the campus and park for a show (like 5 minutes or less). It's also maybe 10 minutes to get through the parking lot to the main road after the show.
Fwiw mass transit is pretty damn inconvient/useless in the greater Sacramento region, the area simply isn't dense enough to offer service with any type of useful frequency. There are/were commuter lines generally to ferry state employees downtown, but often the bus lines fed into light rail and between transfer times, it became really damn slow to even try to use those to get to work, so most people skipped the busline and either drove directly to work or just drove to light rail which means that in practice you still need a car to use light rail if you bother to use it at all. As more people worked from home during covid, well the demand for that service slowed so there have been service cutbacks. There is light rail, but outside of commute times, it regularly has drug dealers plying their trade, so it isn't especially safe especially at night. So mass transit is mostly for people who don't have any other options because the service is so infrequent , slow and not especially safe. If you couldn't afford a car, I think your money is probably better spent buying a used electric bike or moped because that will get you point to point faster without having to deal with all of the nair do wells at the light rail stations.
The problem isn't density, plenty of low density places that have very viable rail transit.
The problem is light rail is being misused. There are far too many light rail stops on the grid (like 50% of the stops). Yet the bulk of the ridership comes from folks in the suburbs. Meanwhile, even with half the light rail stops, it is more convenient to own a bicycle versus using light rail to get around on the grid!
The grid should only have 3 stops. The downtown station, state capitol, and one in midtown. Shift emphasis on getting suburban commuters downtown as fast as possible. With express trains every once and a while for far out stops like Folsom, Watt Ave, and CRC.
The grid should have a streetcar/trolley like Portland. With lines going on I + Q streets, and lines going on 10th and 21st. Basically a kind of tic tac toe shaped street car line. By doing that you would always be less than a mile from a street car stop. You could traverse the whole grid on foot.
No argument that Sacramento should get its streetcars back--hopefully the latest attempt to get a streetcar starter line over the Tower Bridge will finally happen, and we can start expanding it in both directions into West Sacramento and Downtown/Midtown. I think we've had this discussion about light rail stops before and disagree--having half a dozen or so stops instead of three makes light rail far more useful for getting around the central city, and lacking a streetcar, that's how central city residents use it. The extra 1-2 minutes it takes getting through the grid stops are a minor factor. In general, though, we can use a lot more rail transit in the central city, whether it's streetcar or light rail or a combination thereof. All we have to do is be willing to pay for it, and chase down the federal funds to help leverage what local governments/taxpayers can pay.
Light rail and bus service are being restored, and ridership is definitely on the way back up--maybe not to pre 2020 levels, but especially since Uber and Lyft have started raising their rates as they can no longer afford to lose such huge amounts of money, the people who shifted from transit to rideshare appear to be shifting back to transit. As with rail, we can use lots and lots more buses. But we get more buses by being willing to pay for them. Ebikes are also going to be a game changer--but they work very well with transit, and are a good argument for streetcars over buses; modern low-floor streetcars can have bikes roll on without having to lug them up stairs, while on a bus you have to hook the bike to the front (if the bus even has a bike rack.)
The problem isn't density, plenty of low density places that have very viable rail transit.
The problem is light rail is being misused. There are far too many light rail stops on the grid (like 50% of the stops). Yet the bulk of the ridership comes from folks in the suburbs. Meanwhile, even with half the light rail stops, it is more convenient to own a bicycle versus using light rail to get around on the grid!
The grid should only have 3 stops. The downtown station, state capitol, and one in midtown. Shift emphasis on getting suburban commuters downtown as fast as possible. With express trains every once and a while for far out stops like Folsom, Watt Ave, and CRC.
The grid should have a streetcar/trolley like Portland. With lines going on I + Q streets, and lines going on 10th and 21st. Basically a kind of tic tac toe shaped street car line. By doing that you would always be less than a mile from a street car stop. You could traverse the whole grid on foot.
The problen really is density and design. For transit to be useful it really does need to run with some level of frequency so you can get to your destination without waiting a half hour or or hour for the next bus to arrive. We don't really have the density to support a useful transit network in Sacramento. Transit in Sacramento is a massive time black hole and a massive money blackhole because we designed the transit network in Sacramento not to move people around to where they want to go quickly, but to try to get the most federal money and to say look at what toys we have. For transit to work technology should be applied to solve actual transit problems. The busiest bus routes are along stockton blvd in terms of ridership, but that is not where we built light rail. The biggest transit destinations are downtown and Sac State and again light rail doesn't connect those locations, instead we put the highest frequency service in places where it was easy to get rail lines approved along existing rail lines, but those are neighborhoods that were zoned for warehouses, which again really isn't a place anyone lives in or really needs to go to. So the underlying geometry of the service sucks. The transit service we have is expensive but really doesn't get anyone where they need to go. We have this incredibly expensive service next to the Haggin Oaks golf course and the Folsom automall and down the middle of a freeway. Who is taking transit to any of these locations? But the rail network doesn't connect to the Arden Fair Mall, to ARC, to Sac State, to the Sunrise Mall, to Kaiser. It doesn't really work to get people to where they want/need to go.
But the bigger problem is that the network to be useful actually needs to be more bus centric because buses actally take people to where they need to go, but the bus service keeps being cannabilized to pay for light rail that doesn't go to where people need to go. If they never built light rail and just spent the money on increasing the frequency of the bus service, the network would be a lot more useful. Because the majority of the region is built out at a level that justifies bus service, but not really rail service. But we have the fancy toys with a generally useless service that keeps getting both more expensive and less used.
The bus service in Fosom was much better when it was ran by Folsom and light rail never came here.
The problen really is density and design. For transit to be useful it really does need to run with some level of frequency so you can get to your destination without waiting a half hour or or hour for the next bus to arrive. We don't really have the density to support a useful transit network in Sacramento. Transit in Sacramento is a massive time black hole and a massive money blackhole because we designed the transit network in Sacramento not to move people around to where they want to go quickly, but to try to get the most federal money and to say look at what toys we have. For transit to work technology should be applied to solve actual transit problems. The busiest bus routes are along stockton blvd in terms of ridership, but that is not where we built light rail. The biggest transit destinations are downtown and Sac State and again light rail doesn't connect those locations, instead we put the highest frequency service in places where it was easy to get rail lines approved along existing rail lines, but those are neighborhoods that were zoned for warehouses, which again really isn't a place anyone lives in or really needs to go to. So the underlying geometry of the service sucks. The transit service we have is expensive but really doesn't get anyone where they need to go. We have this incredibly expensive service next to the Haggin Oaks golf course and the Folsom automall and down the middle of a freeway. Who is taking transit to any of these locations? But the rail network doesn't connect to the Arden Fair Mall, to ARC, to Sac State, to the Sunrise Mall, to Kaiser. It doesn't really work to get people to where they want/need to go.
But the bigger problem is that the network to be useful actually needs to be more bus centric because buses actally take people to where they need to go, but the bus service keeps being cannabilized to pay for light rail that doesn't go to where people need to go. If they never built light rail and just spent the money on increasing the frequency of the bus service, the network would be a lot more useful. Because the majority of the region is built out at a level that justifies bus service, but not really rail service. But we have the fancy toys with a generally useless service that keeps getting both more expensive and less used.
The bus service in Fosom was much better when it was ran by Folsom and light rail never came here.
Sacramento's lack of density is exactly why light rail is condusive to park n ride. The busiest line is from Folsom to downtown. Light rail should be functioning like Chicago's Metra system. Functioning to get people from the burbs into downtown. It should not be trying to function like BART or the NYC subway.
Buses are wretched and no one takes it if they don't have to. Most would rather walk. Light rail has real potential to get commuters out of cars. They just need to build it to the airport, Elk Grove, and Citrus Heights.
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