In Silicon-Valley-speak, disruptive innovation can send pulses racing and imaginations soaring. For many, it’s code for problem-solving, especially the gripping kind of kraken-like problem that has stared down conventional thinking for decades and that finally meets its match when a visionary in a black turtleneck steps onstage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center and introduces a breakthrough so elegant and simple that the audience of four thousand rises over wild applause.
For others, “disruptive innovation” just sends eyes rolling. It smacks of the naïveté and self-importance that makes Silicon Valley so ripe for lampooning, either by parody (“Silicon Valley”) or documentary (“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”). If these skeptics applaud when a would-be Elon Musk proposes to blast off into outer space in his bargain-basement rocket, it’s the hope that he’ll actually do exactly that.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled over California Forever, the “new city from scratch” proposed by a group of tech executives and venture capitalists who, around 2010, began buying up thousands of acres of farmland at the 45-mile halfway point between Sacramento and San Francisco in Northern California’s Mega-Region. Dubbed by the press as “Silicon Valley billionaire investors,” the backers of California Forever envision a new city of 400,000 inhabitants as helping solve the Bay Area’s chronic housing crisis in this strategic location between Silicon Valley’s tech campuses, San Francisco’s office towers, Oakland’s shipping and industrial zone, and Sacramento’s Capitol dome (Map 1).
The California Forever plan features thousands of new homes at a walkable, quasi-urban density, laced with parks and anchored by a new commercial downtown, an industrial-technology zone and a “maker & manufacturing” district. If you search the renderings online, you’ll see one of children bicycling in the center of a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood street. Another shows California Forever from a distance, a compact hill-town surrounded by vineyards that looks like a postcard from Provence or Tuscany. A third rendering shows coffee drinkers gathered beneath umbrellas scattered throughout a sunny, pedestrian-only plaza. A fourth rendering features a sexy new light-rail train in the equally-new downtown, thronged by commuters happily waiting to board.
Here is where the record-needle in my head comes to a groove-scratching halt.
We don’t know where the light-rail train came from or where it will go. More unsettling, though, is that not one of these renderings shows any evidence of an automobile. There are no cars, driving or parked. No trucks unloading at the curb, no garages loom beneath the walk-up townhouses, no freeways wind through the vineyards. The two “recreation” renderings show kayakers on the Bay and a couple bicycling a dirt path through a flowering countryside, but don’t dare suggest there might be a trailhead parking lot where they left their SUVs.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And indeed, if you study the renderings closely, you’ll notice what’s missing: the hundreds of thousands of cars that would glut the notoriously-tangled tentacles of the region’s highway network (Map 2).
History has taught us that widening congested highways without providing real transit alternatives fulfills that doom-loop prophecy of “If you pave it, they will drive,” so let’s set Map 2 aside. Instead we’ll study the region’s rail and ferry network, which densely serves the Bay Area and Sacramento but bypasses California Forever altogether (Map 3).
It’s as if the project backers wanted to wish away congestion with a pretty picture of a light-rail train that has no connection to the rest of the region. As such, California Forever is effectively a gated community, singularly-dependent upon people driving Teslas, or automobiles at any rate. It’s a cloudy, even perilously naïve, Silicon Valley notion that 400,000 new residents could move to this isolated location and not completely bring this epically gridlocked part of the Bay Area to a complete standstill.
One solution could be selling the thousands of acres that the California Forever backers purchased and buying bits and pieces of undeveloped land that is served by the existing transit systems. However, cramming 400,000 new homes into these bits and pieces is physically implausible. As a Bay Area planner for three decades, I can only see a future of price-gouging, inter-jurisdictional zoning wars and interminable lawsuits.
That’s why I believe a better solution is for the California Forever backers to invest in the unfunded transit plans in the area that are already on the books. Not only would this make California Forever more livable for the new residents, it would reward the long-standing members of the existing Solano County communities next door for their hard work, building a vision to make their lives better, too.
I would start with the Capitol Corridor Amtrak line that runs between Sacramento and the Bay Area (Maps 4 & 5). The closest Amtrak station at Suisun City is 12 miles to the north of California Forever and served by only 12 trains a day with one or two hours between trains. The trains also don’t reach San Francisco: this requires a cumbersome transfer to a bus that crosses the Bay Bridge. Future plans call for increasing Amtrak service to every half-hour and for a direct trans-bay link to Downtown San Francisco (which—incredibly—has never had an Amtrak train station). From there, Amtrak would use the Caltrain line connecting San Francisco to Silicon Valley: a major centerpiece of the region’s ambitious “Link21” plan, which remains unfunded.
Next, I’d look at the San Francisco Bay Ferry network connecting San Francisco to Vallejo, about 35 miles west of California Forever (Map 6). There has been a ferry renaissance flourishing throughout the Bay Area, and one proposal would extend service to Antioch, 10 miles closer.
In the meantime, riverboat cruises are proposed to reconnect San Francisco and Sacramento for the first time in 80 years, passing (but not stopping at) the historic riverfront city of Rio Vista, only 4 miles from California Forever (Map 7). As with Amtrak, expanded ferry infrastructure and services remain unfunded.
Finally, building a third proposed transit extension in the area could tie these all together. The Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) trains began operation north of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2017, and they connect to San Francisco by ferry (Map 8).
SMART is now studying an (unfunded) extension from Marin County east to the Suisun City Amtrak Station (Map 9).
If this connection were built and the tracks continued east into California Forever, then SMART could play the role of that sexy new light-rail train. Extending the tracks just another four miles to the Rio Vista riverfront would not only connect California Forever’s 400,000 new residents to Amtrak and to the ferries, this would also be a tremendous boost in access for the nearly one million existing residents in the transit-starved communities along that east-west swath of Marin, Napa, Sonoma and Solano Counties (Map 10).
And these communities are important. Some urbanists compare a healthy American city to a healthy body. The downtown office core is the brain; the commercial district the heart; the parks the lungs, and the mid-town apartments stem outward to the residential neighborhoods the way our trunks stem into our fingers and toes: the whole ensemble thriving only when interconnected by arteries. I see the better analogy with an entire metropolitan area rather than one city, because no city in America functions completely onto itself. Instead, the city depends upon the surrounding smaller towns and their shopping centers, industrial zones and agricultural lands at the periphery. Embedding a huge community like California Forever at the anemic outskirts of a metropolis is akin to grafting a head onto a fingertip: it would overwhelm the circulatory system where its capillaries are nowhere near robust enough to carry the load.
The Bay Area is a truly unique animal in America. More like an octopus than a human, it has three distinct hearts (San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose) as opposed to one. Purely from a traffic perspective, it’s almost impossible to identify where the writhing appendages of the Bay Area’s eight-million-strong commuter shed ends and those of Sacramento’s two-million-plus begins. It might be healthiest, then, to view the whole of the Northern California megapolis as one incredibly complex cephalopod of many heads and hearts. One where economic vitality surges back and forth—by train, boat, car, and bus—around the clock. Instead of a floundering catastrophe that would strangle Solano County, California Forever could be the funding catalyst that un-jams blockages and spurs long-standing transportation goals into dynamic realities.
That’s why it is so important for the architects of California Forever to understand the bracing urgency of its mission and its position. True to Silicon Valley form, the vision is bold: a new city, of 400,000 to address the chronic, local shortage of affordable housing. As the ink-cloud settles, however, it’s clear that the solution cannot be about grafting a kraken’s head to the end of the skinniest tentacle. Instead, it can be about transplanting yet another beating heart into the body of a living organism. This can only work if we fortify the core circulation system to absorb the flow so that the whole of this enormous and fluid animal can thrive.
Main illustration of squid eating San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge by Anthony Albert.
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Peter Albert, Anthony Albert, Tony Albert
