Choo-choo, round two

Greg Taylor will tell you that the future of downtown Sacramento lies in its empty spaces. The possibility of a vibrant downtown where thousands live and work depends on how we fill the holes, the empty lots and abandoned industrial spaces.

Of all the holes there are to be filled, none presents a greater opportunity than the swath of nearly deserted rail yards just north of downtown.

“This is a chance to build a rich city center—a dynamic, urban civic space,” said Taylor.

That’s why he’s fighting a proposal by Union Pacific to move the operations of the city’s historic rail depot two blocks north, away from downtown.

Taylor, an urban planner, is the unofficial spokesperson for a group of neighborhood, preservation and environmental groups that call themselves the Save Our Rail Depot Coalition. The coalition is promoting a vision of the rail yards as a continuation of the existing city grid, with an emphasis on a mix of housing and business that will help bring the central city back to life. The proponents say it is critical that the depot stay where it is, lest the entire rail yard area remain forever disconnected from the rest of the city.

“Great cities don’t just push their railroads aside. Great cities build on top of them,” said Taylor.

The coalition advocates an expansion of the existing site into a single transit hub that would merge Amtrak, light rail, buses and potentially high-speed rail into one location. Over time, the area around this hub would be developed as a dense mix of housing and businesses easily accessible without a car.

Taylor says that even though the 700-foot move that Union Pacific and a group of transportation interests are proposing for the depot may not sound like a lot, it would have a dramatic effect. He added that moving the depot north and spreading out the different bus and rail services will hurt overall mass transit use and disconnect the redeveloped rail yard from the city core.

Taylor cited a Department of Transportation study that indicates people are three times more likely to use mass transit if there is a station within a quarter-mile of their destination than they would if the station was a quarter-mile to two miles away.

“The distances sound small, but when you add those two blocks, you get a tremendous fall off in ridership,” said Taylor.

The new vision for the depot and surrounding property have once again put Union Pacific on the defensive.

To help push its own proposal for the area, Union Pacific has formed the Sacramento Intermodal Transportation Alliance, which also includes Amtrak, Greyhound, the California Department of Transportation and Regional Transit.

SITA’s proposal would move Amtrak’s operations north of the existing depot to a new building to the north. The existing railroad depot, which is a nationally listed historic building, would remain where it is and become home to a new Greyhound bus station and perhaps some retail stores.

The plan also calls for a new light-rail station between the bus and rail facilities. The transportation group touts the plan, which it calls the “Sacramento Transplex,” as a state-of-the-art facility that meets a wide variety of transportation needs while preserving the historic depot.

But opponents say the proposal is just a short-term development scheme, a way for Union Pacific to unload some of its surplus property without consideration to the needs of the city.

“Immediacy and profitability, that’s what their plan is about,” said Roxanne Miller with the Save Our Rail Depot Coalition. Miller added that moving the depot is the only way to open up property for development right away.

The site to the north is the same one considered earlier this year when Union Pacific attempted to sell the land to the Mills Corp. Mills wanted to use the entire 37 acres for a massive retail project. But the plan was withdrawn in the face of opposition from neighborhood and local business groups who felt that the parcel should include a mix of housing and businesses and who objected to moving Amtrak away from the city grid.

The 37 acres is the only section of the 240-acre rail yard that is not currently contaminated from almost eight decades of heavy industrial use. The remaining 200 acres, most of it to the north, will undergo cleanup for at least five more years.

The Save Our Rail Depot Coalition formed in the aftermath of the Mills controversy. Many of its members felt that Union Pacific and Mills went out of their way to avoid public input.

There is obviously some lingering resentment towards Union Pacific, which SITA representatives are acutely aware of.

“This is certainly not a done deal,” said SITA spokesman Marc Carrel. “The community is going to be a part of the decision making process.”

Amtrak plans to add several more commuter trains to its daily operations to keep pace with the influx of people to the Sacramento region. The number of passengers passing through the Amtrak depot is projected to double over the next five years, from 750,000 to 1.6 million. To accommodate the flood of new passengers, SITA representatives say that Amtrak needs to reduce the time it takes to move a train through the station and increase the length of the passenger platforms. Currently, the tracks curve sharply to the north at 7th and H streets, causing trains to slow to about 10 miles per hour. To solve this, said Carrel, the tracks need to be straightened, and that dictates the placement of the new depot site.

It is these technical considerations, said Carrel, that are driving the need to move the depot north. “We didn’t just throw this proposal together over the course of a couple of weekends,” he added.

The coalition’s plan does call for realigning the tracks to the north to create a gentler curve, but not so far that the depot operations would have to move.

Carrel is skeptical that one single hub is workable, even if the existing depot were added on to significantly.

“We’re trying to be forward thinking without being dreamers,” said Carrel.

The SITA group has also raised concerns that adding on to the existing rail depot would threaten its status as a nationally recognized historic place. But local preservationists dismiss that argument.

“It’s just not true," said Kathleen Green, director of the Sacramento Heritage Alliance, an organization of local preservation groups. Green explained that she believes nothing in the Taylor plan is contrary to the guidelines provided for in the National Register of Historic Places.