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Comment by favflam | Hacker News Reader

I visited San Jose Diridon station. It was surrounded by parking lots. It was amazing to me that a train station with connections south and north to both San Francisco and Oakland is a desolate wasteland of parking lots devoid of people. If this happened in another country, the city planners would be voted out of office or disappeared.

That place should be full of 5-10 story buildings bustling with offices, shopping, and apartments/condos. California is urinating away so much potential.

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Also, it is embarrassing that San Jose International airport does not even have a rail connection. Even second tier cities overseas make sure to have rail connections for foreign visitors who probably don't have a driver's license.

This is probably just because more people are working remotely than 3 years ago. Those lots would have been full in 2019.

The issue is not that the parking lots are empty, but that the rail station is surrounded by parking lots at all. This is a terrible waste of transit infrastructure! Rail stations should be located in densely developed areas close to destinations. If you put a station in a low-density area, that creates an opportunity to build a new efficient urban center. (In some countries, the land-value increment created through this kind of development is a large source of funding for transit infrastructure).

Most of the rail is meant to transport people from low density areas to city centers. I’m not sure how you would solve that problem without doing that?

San Jose has so much sprawl that for commuter rail, you really want that parking.

I respectfully disagree.

Trains and real estate go hand in hand. Without real estate, trains lose money. Without trains, real estate is worthless (hence parking lots, which are low value).

Trains and car owners don't mix. Trains + dense real estate usage displaces car owners and low-density real estate usage.

Cities should make car owners bicycles or ride the bus to the train station (ie remove parking lots) or cities should just not bother with trains.

The US is the wild west and always will be. We are fundamentally a country that loves big desolate places that require rugged individualism to navigate. You can argue that there are pockets where this isn’t true, but I lived in post 9/11 NYC to see the worst pathologies of suburbanism creeping into Manhattan. The few real human scale areas (downtown,fidi) become disneyfied and overwhelmed. I have found it easier to embrace this reality than deny it.

It will be soon:

https://realestate.withgoogle.com/sanjose/

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