On the one hand, it is a transit station so that’s good. On the other that parking crater is just sprawling… You could have more structured parking and development on top. If they dont have a long term plan to convert that space to TOD, that’s really too bad.

The proposal calls for 851 spaces of replacements parking for BART plus 775 new spaces for 596 units. How many spaces are being displaced? It seems like the city is doubling down on parking for a development that is right next to a transit station.

A 1.3/1 parking to unit ratio seems high for something served so well by transit.

One small quibble … Walnut Creek DOES have a bustling, people-filled downtown. Most suburban cities of Walnut Creek’s size in this country would kill to have as lively of a downtown shopping/entertainment/dining district as “the Creek.”

Unfortunately, the BART station is just a little too far for most people (not me) to use it to access the downtown. (Although the City of Walnut Creek has tried hard to bridge the gap by providing a shuttle service.)

Once the transit village goes in, perhaps the walk from BART to the downtown will seem more doable to more people.

In any event, seems as though Walnut Creek will not be a Parking Madness contender in future years, and that’s a good thing!

Walnut Creek Bart currently has 851 surface parking spaces (not including the existing garage which will not change), all of which will be displaced by construction of the transit village. All of these spaces will be replaced in a multi-story garage built as Phase 1 of the Transit Village.
The parking requirement for the transit village falls under the BART proximate reduction allowed in the City’s Parking Ordinance. BART Proximate is an parcel that is within 1/2 mile from the BART station. The BART Proximate Parking Requirements are I space per studio; 1.25 spaces per 1 bedroom unit; 1.5 spaces per 2 bedroom unit; and 2 spaces per 3 or more bedrooms unit.

Fair enough, and I didn’t intend at all to knock downtown Detroit. I wish nothing but the best for Motown, and I’ve certainly read about the revival of downtown, Midtown, and other areas there. I just haven’t been there, whereas I’m very familiar with Walnut Creek.

It’s basically a political impossibility to eliminate commuter parking for BART and not replace it. Walnut Creek has a lot of wealthy, entitled people who count on being able to drive and park at their local BART station, and who would be very, very upset if that ability were taken away. Even Berkeley couldn’t or wouldn’t do it with the site that became the Brower Center.

So Walnut Creek could either do nothing, or replace the parking and get a project that will result in vastly improved urbanism in the area (plus deliver a whole lot of new customers for BART).

This is a case of a half a loaf (or, in my opinion, three quarters of a loaf) being much better than no loaf at all. And a great example of past decisions being an unavoidable constraint on future ones.

While in line with the requirements of comparable suburbs, 1.25 spaces is a lot for a single bedroom unit, especially in a transit oriented neighborhood (I’m living proof, by the way, that you can have a high quality of life in Walnut Creek without a car or parking space, as I live car-free near the other Walnut Creek BART station).

If the city wants to get serious about using space well, it should reexamine those minimums, and even consider getting rid of them altogether. If people don’t want to rent apartments that lack dedicated parking, developers won’t build them. You can typically count on a developer building an appropriate number of spaces so that the units move. Locking them into an artificial floor locks us into poor urban design for decades.

Still, I’m glad to hear that something is being built on these lots. As Mr. Wegmann says, above, it sounds like it’s a step up from what’s there now.

Wow. You’re right. The four nearest buildings to the parking crater are parking garages. That is crazy!

Walnut Creek also has a ton of high density mixed-use development going in near the BART station. It’s really impressive. I think the challenge is that, once you get out if downtown, there are a lot of single family subdivisions that aren’t very transit-friendly and It’s hard to imagine Ygnacio Valley Rd ever being bike friendly without a road diet. It seems bike share could work really well between BART and the downtown area.

Detroit absolutely deserves to be smacked when they take their own precious riverfront property and waste it. I am as left as it comes on Streetsblog and I am sympathetic to a lot of Detroit’s complaints about maltreatment but there is a consistent refusal among Detroiters (much less Detroit-area suburbanites!) to accept any responsibility for how things got so bad. This is part of it: taxpayer-subsidized waste, plain as day. The Renaissance Center is a disaster; there is no real street access for their People-Mover stop. It’s a fortress of cars downtown and it makes absolutely no sense except for the clueless suburbanites who work there and see nothing wrong with parking downtown, for free, next to the greatest natural attraction for 100 miles, every day. And having like 3 empty parking spots for every car on the busiest days, too.

Sometimes it’s also that no one wants to be the only building in the middle of a sea of parking, so none of the private owners are trying to redevelop. But if the city announced some plan that gave an incentive, they might all redevelop at once.

Detroit by a mile, since it is a parking wasteland downtown. (Although not exactly surprising — were you expecting GM employees to bike to work?)

Walnut Creek is part of a damned-if-you-do trade. It’s a car based society, the cars are not going to entirely disappear. So do you bring the cars downtown and make a mess of that area (as in Detroit or some of the other featured downtowns) or get people to drive to transit in the suburbs and then take a train, thereby preserving a dense and walkable downtown at the cost of parking lots all over those transit station? Walnut Creek is really no different than GO stations outside Toronto, or any suburban stations on nearly any large commuter rail system, especially the newer (post-auto-age) ones.

In Detroit, it is quick and easy to access the buildings from the waterfront. In Walnut Creek, the city has gone to great efforts to encourage driving and discourage biking and walking. The Iron Horse Trail (managed by EBMUD, not WC) is 3.5 blocks away, yet to walk takes 15 minutes because of the long intersection signal timing. The roar of 75,000 cars a day traveling along Ygnacio Valley Road makes for an unpleasant experience at best.

There is no bike route to the East, West or North of the BART station (nor is anything planned). To the south, the bike lane exists on both sides for only one block, and even then is sandwiched between 35mph drivers and streetside parking. That is literally the only bike route in downtown. WC has a parking garage on nearly every block, and plans to spend$15+ million on another garage just three blocks south of the BART.

I’m not quite sure what the point of this exercise is–perhaps to parody Curbed’s neighborhood beauty contests? But it seems like one point would be to highlight the communities that are the worst offenders–the places that aren’t trying to fix these massive parking zones.
Walnut Creek doesn’t fall into that category. There was a lot of bad planning in the 60’s and 70’s–especially when the merchants insisted that the BART station not be built in the actual Downtown. It would ruin the downtown, don’t you know. But every single station on that BART line has masses of surface parking and most of them have no intention of fixing the situation.

That’s not correct. The proposed casino land was east of this location. These parking lots are on top of a former rail yard. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/4402

Not sure what you’re referring to there, the link doesn’t work right for me. I can zoom into a Google Street View of the center but I don’t see anything I don’t remember: it’s possible to traipse across the lawn after taking stairs down all the way to a raised grassy area but there’s no street access to the stop, you have to go inside the building first. The waste to which I referred was the people-mover stop itself, actually, not the bailout.

This is, unfortunately, a typical treatment for BART stations: add more parking, aboveground and underground, and call it a “transit village.” They’ve even used the new urbanist term Transit-Oriented Development for this.