A real estate firm did a quantitative analysis for the San Francisco Bay Area:
Estately Real Estate Search analyzed the last six months of home sales for houses, townhouses, and condos that were within a one-mile radius of each BART and Caltrain transit stop. We then broke them down by price per square foot.
At an average of $1,630 per square foot, Caltrain’s California Avenue stop in Palo Alto is the Bay Area’s most expensive transit stop to buy a home near. Pittsburg/Bay Point BART stop, the furthest from downtown San Francisco, is the least expensive at $219 per square foot on average.
Here is the map:
It would be interesting to see how these values compare to home prices outside of that one-mile radius. In other words, is there a price premium for living near these transit nodes? Some studies have documented this transit-oriented value, such as this one [PDF] from APTA, Center for Neighborhood Technologies, and the National Association of Realtors in 2013. But this Estately study could be expanded to show the trend in the Bay Area. Otherwise, it’s hard to know how much rail transit impacts the prices.
Meanwhile, this study is a nice complement to the UC Berkeley Law and Next 10 report released last October that grades rail transit station neighborhoods in California, including in the BART and MUNI systems.
In recent years, we’ve had public transit, and we’ve had private employer-based transit. Maybe now we’re about to see the ultimate hybrid: private companies sponsoring public transit improvements.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that major Silicon Valley corporations, frustrated with poor Caltrain commuter rail service [map to the left] and facing opposition to their so-called Google luxury buses, are forming the “Caltrain Commuter Coalition.” The group includes the 49ers, Oracle, LinkedIn, Stanford University, HP and other firms yet to be named:
The group will work with Caltrain — a partnership of San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara county transportation agencies — to press for funding to expand the commuter railroad’s capacity, replace its trains pulled by diesel locomotives with electric trains, extend the tracks to the Transbay Terminal and make other improvements.
“This is the result of conversations we’ve have had for years with these companies,” Seamus Murphy, Caltrain’s director of government and community affairs, said Sunday. “They realize that they can’t continue to rely on shuttles or expand shuttles, and they’ve been frustrated, frankly, that they can’t rely on Caltrain or public transportation.”
If done right, this could be a very positive development. First, cash-strapped transit agencies like Caltrain could use the private dollars to bolster existing transit service to benefit everyone. Second, private companies would no longer have to pay for curb-hogging shuttles that inspire hatred from many locals. And finally, it’s a sign that public transit like Caltrain is providing a societal good — in terms of usefulness, ridership, and general potential — if private employers are willing to invest in it.
I should also note that this development could save the High Speed Rail Authority some money. The agency has proposed using rail funds to electrify Caltrain and extend it to the future Transbay Terminal. I assume with this privately funded effort, that need would no longer be there.
