I’d rather be…

I haven’t read the Alameda Point Master Plan yet.   I skimmed it and from what I could tell from a quick glance through, it looks very similar to the draft development concept, only some sections are better fleshed out.    There will be a public hearing in front of the City Council, sitting as the ARRA, in early January.   I expect that there will be talk about public land trusts and the same old same old about why couldn’t SunCal develop a Measure A compliant plan.   There will be the requisite revelatory statement about, “Alameda is an island!” as though that person is the first person to have recognized that fact.  The historic preservation folks will be out to decry that SunCal still hasn’t saved enough “historic” buildings.    But even so, probably few people will have read 25% of the text in that Master Plan document, which is why they probably loaded it up with so many graphics and photos.

A few things I did note in my brief skimmings.  Edmundo Delmundo had a question about timelines, well my fellow blogger, you have your answer at the very end of that Master Plan, it gives you a very rough timeline about what are the next steps (starts at p. 172 on the reader).   Also, Edmundo D. had a post about the lack of soccer fields in the new Alameda Point plan, the initial development concept appeared to take away eight soccer fields and replace it with only four.   I don’t know if this was a swap out they made because of the pressure from the soccer folks, but it appears that as a part of the internal park system (separate from the Sports Complex) SunCal is proposing to have two additional fields in the community park that will be situated near the Big Whites (p. 50 on the reader) .   Although there also is a large swath of green space in the section called Linear Park that appears to have soccer fields mapped out (p. 45 on the reader) so that would bring the grand total — including the Sports Complex fields — to nine, assuming of course Linear Park is to be used as soccer fields.

And while we’re on the subject of recreation facilities, I think this alternative proposal for the Sports Complex was definitely a result of the criticism that there weren’t enough soccer fields in the plan.   There are now two options, one with the orginial four soccer fields, and the other with five soccer fields.   But certainly something had to give in order to accomodate the fifth soccer field in option number two, and that is the swimming complex.   Basically there will either be a sports complex with four soccer fields and a swimming complex or a sports complex with five soccer fields.  Personally, I would go with the swimming complex one.

Of course one of the main concerns around any development is traffic, so SunCal has developed an entire Tranportation Strategy for that.   It talks about the phasing process such a smaller shuttle that will potentially run shuttles every 10 – 15 minutes from Alameda Point to the 12th Street BART station, I imagine that the plan is that as capacity and demand grow, the shuttles may graduate to full size buses that could be eventually taken over by AC Transit.  And just to answer a question that was proposed before about the possibility of PRT (which is not counted out in this plan, but also not part of the “Day One” strategy but rather as a possible long term solution along with light rail) running on streets with overhead electricity, there are renderings on p. 28 of the plan that shows how it would look running down Clement and what it would look like crossing Park street on Clement.

So those were the big things I noticed, but I probably won’t do a thorough reading or break down until after the holidays because I really do have better things to do.   Like baking cookies.  Or wrapping caramels. Or planning out the holiday dinner (I have to cook two).

Happy Holidays and happy skimming!