In the latest decision on a long series of legal challenges by Peninsula cities and environment groups to the California High Speed Rail project, the Third District Court of Appeal has upheld the final programmatic environmental impact report for the portion of the project that calls for a route from the Central Valley over the Pacheco Pass into Bay Area suburbia. >>read more

What happens when you go through years of planning and actually building TODs, only to have the T suddenly vanish?

This is the question on the San Francisco Peninsula and in the South Bay, where Caltrain is proposing radical service reductions and the closure of numerous stations.

It's also a question that other places are likely to confront as public budgets grow more austere and the Republican Party ramps up its attacks on seemingly all transportation that doesn't involve automobiles.

The proposed Saltworks project in Redwood City is, as one of its designers says, a potential "game changer" for the Bay Area. Proposed by landowner Cargill and developer DMB, the project would provide 8,000 to 12,000 high-density, mixed-income housing units in a decidedly suburban town halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, and within close proximity to hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The Bay Area has seen similar projects in recent years, but they have been in San Jose and San Francisco proper. Even those suburbs that have embraced relatively dense, transit-oriented development haven't seen anything on the scale of Saltworks.