There really is an enourmous amount of TOD planned for Downtown Berkeley! Once all of that proposed stuff is built, Berkeley will grow by about 20-30% in population. And surprisingly, unlike most other cities in the Bay Area the city of Berkeley actually allows and encourages all those proposed buildings to be built. Every time I'm there there's always a few more new mid-rise or even high-ish rise buildings! I can't believe that I'm saying this given Berkeley's rabidly NIMBY past. The city has been incredibly NIMBY both in recent history when Berkeley essentially banned new construction during 1970s-2010s, and in the early 20th century when the Elmwood district in Berkeley literally invented single family exclusionary zoning. But yeah... they're building a ton of housing now, like actually meaningful increases in their housing stock every year by some single digit percentage points. Incredible!
Lol, I always wondered about that! They named their town after the hill that's the standout feature in the neighboring town. Mark my words, El "Cerrito" wanted to do an imperialism and conquer Albany! Those bloodthirsty Cerritonians... Cerrinians 😁😁😁
The first place I lived after moving out of my mom's house in Santa Clara was in the south campus area of Berkeley, and for most of the time I lived there I commuted to San Francisco via BART, walking through campus to get there & back home. Both south campus and downtown were definitely target-rich environments for tasty food. I didn't get to north campus much, but I recall there being a nice zone around there as well. And then you go west and north of downtown, and it's suburbia.
It's suburban-ish, but those are old streetcar suburbs that are both taller and naturally denser than the typical 1950s suburbia that you see in most American cities. A very sizeable chunk of those houses are not single family and have at least an ADU. In some cases they have 2-3 units and and ADU on top of it. Every few blocks you see evidence of what used to be little bodegas on the first floors of some houses. In other words, it's not typical American suburbia. It's something very different, and frankly just better. We need to make a clear distinction between suburbs that can sustain high-quality transit and urbanism, and useless 1950s crapola suburbia that was deliberately designed to be unwalkable to deter the "dangerous inner city kids" from getting to those neighborhoods. That kind of suburbia needs 10x more density before you can run even a basic bus line, let alone proper transit.
@@TohaBgood2 oh indeed, I know someone who lives in a duplex with an ADU (co-owned as a TIC with an old friend, the way TICs are supposed to work), about 6 blocks west of Shattuck, so, a nice walk. It gets worse the further west & north you go, until as noted you get to the North Berkeley area.
@@dwc1964 Yep! Basically, most everything within walking distance of the old streetcar corridors is not regular suburnia and is actually quite dense, despite appearances. It might look somewhat suburban, but a ton of those houses are actually old duplexes and triplexes. Some were sadly merged into giant single family homes, but most still appear to be duplexes and triplexes at least on paper. But the farther walk from those old streetcar corridors, the more likely you are to hit genuine 1950s infill suburbia. These houses are usually squatter and shorter (1 story vs 2-3). They usually sit on smaller lots, and are usually much uglier stucco-clad "starter homes" rather than the more typical Berkeley brown shingles or victorians. I never understood why this weird mix of density and car-oriented suburbia exists until I looked at a streetcar and interurban map of the East Bay.
My one of my best friends lives in Richmond and BART is the only way we can connect. Love how the train gets to Hayward without switching trains. Also have you heard the story about the decline of Bayfair Mall? It's rather sad because no one views subway connected malls as a good thing in the Bay Area now.
Yeah when I visited Bayfair Mall about a year ago it was very dead and a lot of stores had already been closed, pretty sad to see it be a shell of its former self
@@todgod I’m trying to find a place to meet my best friends in between Richmond BART and Milpitas station and with the shoddy condition of Bayfair Mall, that’s off the table. Oakland BART stations don’t fit the bill because there are very little public places that feel safe. One lives in Richmond the other Hayward
@@todgod also stoneridge mall and great mall are the best transit shopping centers along BART. I never been to stoneridge mall but do know my ex girlfriend hang around there a lot. I think one good reason I’m happy she dumped me is that she doesn’t appreciate public transport like us. As stated in my other response BART plays a key role in dating relationships for me. Need a place where my best friends can see if a potential date is good or not
Minor nitpick: the hill you picture and hint that it might relate to the naming of the City of El Cerrito ... is named Albany Hill - and is entirely within the City of Albany (not El Cerrito)! It's even in a different COUNTY. Albany is in Alameda County and El Cerrito is in Contra Costa County. More substantive nitpick: I was hoping to see a bit of background when you talked about this line. Specifically a bit of history: the portion traversing Berkeley was originally planned as above ground and routed well away from Downtown and away (although not as far away) from the present day Ashby station. Berkeley Citizens felt strongly that BART should go through Downtown Berkeley and voted to assess themselves (as a special assessment on their property taxes) to pay the additional cost to go through Berkeley underground to make this happen!
Yeah there’s so much history I didn’t get into with part one of my BART series that talked about the history of BART, that’s why I love the Bay Area so much
Great Video but I think your definiton of North Bay is confused. Every area / station mentioned in the video is in the East Bay (Alameda and Contra Costa counties). The North Bay is Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano and is not served by BART
980 is not the highway that BART runs between, next to the Temescal neighborhood at the MacArthur station. That's Hwy 24. 980 - the one that's being buried - is far south of there, and west of downtown. The area around the MacArthur BART station isn't really "West Oakland" - that's south of the 580 freeway.
This is correct. And the highway (State 24) near the BART station is a major route between the Caldecott Tunnel (which had a third bore added a couple decades ago) and I-580 and on to SF, so this section of highway will likely never be removed.
@@leetramp indeed, as long as cars need to get from east of the hills to downtown Oakland and points south and west, that bit of freeway will have to exist. However, the way it's set up, and particularly the whole area with the 24-580 and 580-80 interchanges and all the various ramps is simply awful, and I'd love to see that whole thing completely redesigned and simplified, and maybe cut a lane or two here & there while we're at it.
None of these stations seems to serve a proper park, though, either presently or in the plans. I'm a great fan of Montreal's Angrignon, Taipei's Daan Park, and so on. We need proper neighbourhoods, but we also need places to chill out!
One thing I noticed you missed about the Ashby Bart station and the push back against TOD dev. There is the Ashby flea market on Saturday and Sunday mornings that is a moderate income source for resellers. The development could end the Ashby flea.
Totally fair. There should be a flea market in San Jose type of compromise where there’s still space for a flea market to take place with apartments surrounding it! Would make for a great environment
Great video as usual. If all of the downtowns and station areas were like downtown Berkeley for the smaller cities there wouldnt be a housing crisis in the bay area
Note that BART is actually in the Highway 24 median east of 580, including MacArthur through Rockridge stations (and again from Orinda to Walnut Creek of course). 980 is only between 580 and 880. Talk of removing 980 has been going on for years. It Could Happen. But it's unlikely to affect the immediate MacArthur surroundings even if/when it happens. ***ninja'd of course***
I lived for a little less than a year a couple of blocks from the Ashby BART station. One thing I'll say for the parking lot there - it hosts a flea market every Saturday which is where I got a good deal of my furniture (the bits that aren't prefab, that is), along with my cast iron skillets & various other items of cookware, dishes & silverware, and lots of other stuff too. Last time I was there, it was a sorry shadow of its former self, but it may just have been off-season; I'll have to check it out again during the summer. I wonder what'll happen to it when the parking lot is redeveloped.
I think making a series of housing complexes entirely affordable housing, like is planned at Ashby Station, is a bad idea because you end up with a neighborhood entirely populated by poor people, which is a ghetto. Its going to reaffirm economic segregation by creating a neighborhood people actively avoid and negative public perceptions of dense housing. Mixed-income communities are much preferrable. What they should do instead is have only about half of the units be designated affordable housing to allow a more diverse mix of income levels within the same community.
Totally fair point, I didn’t think about that. I’m not a huge fan of economic segregation, and I think mixed income neighborhoods are very healthy and provide social and economic cohesion with a diverse set of tastes and business. Thank you for your comment
The camera shot at 4:45 looks like it was filmed in 30 fps then down-sampled to 24, and you can really notice the skipped frames in the panning motion - it's very jarring. Please make an effort to correct these issues, Taran Van Hemert's video on the topic is very informative about it, linked below. th-cam.com/video/p3Jb3UPAw-w/w-d-xo.htmlsi=bek77RFGrH1bCpmp
also i would like to add that el cerrito del norte is one of the most critical stations on the system as it has a ton of buses to areas to the north (the ggt 580 to marin, vine 29 to napa, soltrans lines to all across solano county, and the j westcat to hercules) and the proximity to the 80 basically means that it is the point at which some drivers get off the freeway and park to go into the city which is the reason for the big lots you may get to this eventually but there have been plans to do something similar to eBART to take some load off of the 80 north of richmond, creatively named wBART. They wanted to put it in the median of 80 but they kinda reversed course and want to run it on the congested line that amtrak runs on
Babe wake up new todgod video
I was loading up the video ready to make this comment 😭
I fucking love trains
Me too man
@@todgod same
There really is an enourmous amount of TOD planned for Downtown Berkeley! Once all of that proposed stuff is built, Berkeley will grow by about 20-30% in population. And surprisingly, unlike most other cities in the Bay Area the city of Berkeley actually allows and encourages all those proposed buildings to be built. Every time I'm there there's always a few more new mid-rise or even high-ish rise buildings!
I can't believe that I'm saying this given Berkeley's rabidly NIMBY past. The city has been incredibly NIMBY both in recent history when Berkeley essentially banned new construction during 1970s-2010s, and in the early 20th century when the Elmwood district in Berkeley literally invented single family exclusionary zoning. But yeah... they're building a ton of housing now, like actually meaningful increases in their housing stock every year by some single digit percentage points. Incredible!
6:58, fun fact that hill isn’t even in el Cerrito, it’s Albany hill… in Albany… but that’s the hill that el Cerrito is named after.
Lol, I always wondered about that! They named their town after the hill that's the standout feature in the neighboring town. Mark my words, El "Cerrito" wanted to do an imperialism and conquer Albany! Those bloodthirsty Cerritonians... Cerrinians 😁😁😁
The first place I lived after moving out of my mom's house in Santa Clara was in the south campus area of Berkeley, and for most of the time I lived there I commuted to San Francisco via BART, walking through campus to get there & back home. Both south campus and downtown were definitely target-rich environments for tasty food. I didn't get to north campus much, but I recall there being a nice zone around there as well.
And then you go west and north of downtown, and it's suburbia.
It's suburban-ish, but those are old streetcar suburbs that are both taller and naturally denser than the typical 1950s suburbia that you see in most American cities. A very sizeable chunk of those houses are not single family and have at least an ADU. In some cases they have 2-3 units and and ADU on top of it. Every few blocks you see evidence of what used to be little bodegas on the first floors of some houses. In other words, it's not typical American suburbia. It's something very different, and frankly just better.
We need to make a clear distinction between suburbs that can sustain high-quality transit and urbanism, and useless 1950s crapola suburbia that was deliberately designed to be unwalkable to deter the "dangerous inner city kids" from getting to those neighborhoods. That kind of suburbia needs 10x more density before you can run even a basic bus line, let alone proper transit.
@@TohaBgood2 oh indeed, I know someone who lives in a duplex with an ADU (co-owned as a TIC with an old friend, the way TICs are supposed to work), about 6 blocks west of Shattuck, so, a nice walk. It gets worse the further west & north you go, until as noted you get to the North Berkeley area.
@@dwc1964 Yep! Basically, most everything within walking distance of the old streetcar corridors is not regular suburnia and is actually quite dense, despite appearances. It might look somewhat suburban, but a ton of those houses are actually old duplexes and triplexes. Some were sadly merged into giant single family homes, but most still appear to be duplexes and triplexes at least on paper.
But the farther walk from those old streetcar corridors, the more likely you are to hit genuine 1950s infill suburbia. These houses are usually squatter and shorter (1 story vs 2-3). They usually sit on smaller lots, and are usually much uglier stucco-clad "starter homes" rather than the more typical Berkeley brown shingles or victorians.
I never understood why this weird mix of density and car-oriented suburbia exists until I looked at a streetcar and interurban map of the East Bay.
My one of my best friends lives in Richmond and BART is the only way we can connect. Love how the train gets to Hayward without switching trains. Also have you heard the story about the decline of Bayfair Mall? It's rather sad because no one views subway connected malls as a good thing in the Bay Area now.
Yeah when I visited Bayfair Mall about a year ago it was very dead and a lot of stores had already been closed, pretty sad to see it be a shell of its former self
@@todgod I’m trying to find a place to meet my best friends in between Richmond BART and Milpitas station and with the shoddy condition of Bayfair Mall, that’s off the table. Oakland BART stations don’t fit the bill because there are very little public places that feel safe. One lives in Richmond the other Hayward
@@todgod also stoneridge mall and great mall are the best transit shopping centers along BART. I never been to stoneridge mall but do know my ex girlfriend hang around there a lot. I think one good reason I’m happy she dumped me is that she doesn’t appreciate public transport like us. As stated in my other response BART plays a key role in dating relationships for me. Need a place where my best friends can see if a potential date is good or not
7:59 🤣
FYI, your narration has gotten even better!
Thank you! I do my best to clarify my speaking haha
Another amazing overview! Thanks dude! We appreciate all your hard work!
Minor nitpick: the hill you picture and hint that it might relate to the naming of the City of El Cerrito ... is named Albany Hill - and is entirely within the City of Albany (not El Cerrito)! It's even in a different COUNTY. Albany is in Alameda County and El Cerrito is in Contra Costa County.
More substantive nitpick: I was hoping to see a bit of background when you talked about this line. Specifically a bit of history: the portion traversing Berkeley was originally planned as above ground and routed well away from Downtown and away (although not as far away) from the present day Ashby station. Berkeley Citizens felt strongly that BART should go through Downtown Berkeley and voted to assess themselves (as a special assessment on their property taxes) to pay the additional cost to go through Berkeley underground to make this happen!
El Cerrito was named after Albany Hill though, and yes Albany is a different city in a different county, I am aware 👍🏽
Yeah there’s so much history I didn’t get into with part one of my BART series that talked about the history of BART, that’s why I love the Bay Area so much
9:48 Berkeley is not the North Bay, everyone forgets about Marin 😢
(Except I'm eternally thankful you made a video on the SMART train system up there)
Yeahhh I know, meant to say North East Bay lollll, and of course! I loved making the SMART video
Great Video but I think your definiton of North Bay is confused. Every area / station mentioned in the video is in the East Bay (Alameda and Contra Costa counties). The North Bay is Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano and is not served by BART
Yeah my bad. I meant to say “north-east” bay and got slipped up
980 is not the highway that BART runs between, next to the Temescal neighborhood at the MacArthur station. That's Hwy 24. 980 - the one that's being buried - is far south of there, and west of downtown. The area around the MacArthur BART station isn't really "West Oakland" - that's south of the 580 freeway.
This is correct. And the highway (State 24) near the BART station is a major route between the Caldecott Tunnel (which had a third bore added a couple decades ago) and I-580 and on to SF, so this section of highway will likely never be removed.
@@leetramp indeed, as long as cars need to get from east of the hills to downtown Oakland and points south and west, that bit of freeway will have to exist. However, the way it's set up, and particularly the whole area with the 24-580 and 580-80 interchanges and all the various ramps is simply awful, and I'd love to see that whole thing completely redesigned and simplified, and maybe cut a lane or two here & there while we're at it.
new TOD god video dropped, we're so back
Good stuff! Love the content!
Thank you! Appreciate it!
None of these stations seems to serve a proper park, though, either presently or in the plans. I'm a great fan of Montreal's Angrignon, Taipei's Daan Park, and so on. We need proper neighbourhoods, but we also need places to chill out!
I agree! Bring back the third place
One thing I noticed you missed about the Ashby Bart station and the push back against TOD dev. There is the Ashby flea market on Saturday and Sunday mornings that is a moderate income source for resellers. The development could end the Ashby flea.
Totally fair. There should be a flea market in San Jose type of compromise where there’s still space for a flea market to take place with apartments surrounding it! Would make for a great environment
Ah yay the area I actually know!
Great video as usual. If all of the downtowns and station areas were like downtown Berkeley for the smaller cities there wouldnt be a housing crisis in the bay area
I 100% agree!!
Note that BART is actually in the Highway 24 median east of 580, including MacArthur through Rockridge stations (and again from Orinda to Walnut Creek of course). 980 is only between 580 and 880. Talk of removing 980 has been going on for years. It Could Happen. But it's unlikely to affect the immediate MacArthur surroundings even if/when it happens. ***ninja'd of course***
Have you thought of using a TOD rating scale? 1 a TOD desert, 2 TOD lackluster, 3 TOD decent, 4 TOD Alright alright , 5 TOD Paradise 😁
That’d be cool and I’ve thought about implementing that system, but it would be so subjective and people would start wars in the comments haha
@@todgod comment wars = more activity on the channel 😁
I cant recall a single incident where I was stuck in traffic in downtown Oakland.
Yes Downtown Berkeley is where the students live.
Soon 🙏😭🙈
Hope you enjoy it!
I lived for a little less than a year a couple of blocks from the Ashby BART station. One thing I'll say for the parking lot there - it hosts a flea market every Saturday which is where I got a good deal of my furniture (the bits that aren't prefab, that is), along with my cast iron skillets & various other items of cookware, dishes & silverware, and lots of other stuff too. Last time I was there, it was a sorry shadow of its former self, but it may just have been off-season; I'll have to check it out again during the summer. I wonder what'll happen to it when the parking lot is redeveloped.
My Wednesday is made
Let’s gooooo !!
If you would come to New Jersey and Staten Island, you would find 6 different metro systems between NYC and Philly.
Yeah man, the Bay has a lot of catching up to do..
I think making a series of housing complexes entirely affordable housing, like is planned at Ashby Station, is a bad idea because you end up with a neighborhood entirely populated by poor people, which is a ghetto. Its going to reaffirm economic segregation by creating a neighborhood people actively avoid and negative public perceptions of dense housing. Mixed-income communities are much preferrable. What they should do instead is have only about half of the units be designated affordable housing to allow a more diverse mix of income levels within the same community.
Totally fair point, I didn’t think about that. I’m not a huge fan of economic segregation, and I think mixed income neighborhoods are very healthy and provide social and economic cohesion with a diverse set of tastes and business. Thank you for your comment
go bears 🐻
Da Bears (of Cal)
I live in Antioch and take eBART to work most days for the last two years. PM me if you need info for the next video
The camera shot at 4:45 looks like it was filmed in 30 fps then down-sampled to 24, and you can really notice the skipped frames in the panning motion - it's very jarring. Please make an effort to correct these issues, Taran Van Hemert's video on the topic is very informative about it, linked below.
th-cam.com/video/p3Jb3UPAw-w/w-d-xo.htmlsi=bek77RFGrH1bCpmp
I appreciate this! Thank you! 🙏🏽 I’ll look toward fixing that problem in the future
@@todgod glad to help. This series has been absolutely amazing and so great to hear about all the projects in planning or progress
gob ears
richmond is not north bay lol
East Bay I know I slipped up
can you delete osman's bot comments
also i would like to add that el cerrito del norte is one of the most critical stations on the system as it has a ton of buses to areas to the north (the ggt 580 to marin, vine 29 to napa, soltrans lines to all across solano county, and the j westcat to hercules) and the proximity to the 80 basically means that it is the point at which some drivers get off the freeway and park to go into the city which is the reason for the big lots
you may get to this eventually but there have been plans to do something similar to eBART to take some load off of the 80 north of richmond, creatively named wBART. They wanted to put it in the median of 80 but they kinda reversed course and want to run it on the congested line that amtrak runs on