Those residents who like to complain about the "out-of-control" development going on in Cupertino, especially in the downtown or "crossroads" of the city, should recognize that it could be worse; they could live in Emeryville. Emeryville has to have the worst planned downtown I have ever seen. How city planners and council could have coupled monstrous developments without adequate preparation is truly a mystery. My guess is that it was a case of the town's eyes being bigger than its stomach. The longing for revitalization of a town lacking a strong financial base has made negotiating the downtown area in any reasonable hour, like other than 3 a.m., an absolute nightmare.
First, a little history: Emeryville is located on the San Francisco Bay between Oakland and Berkeley, and has a population of approximately 7,000. It was originally a suburb on the north side of Oakland that was developed by Joseph Emery, a businessman who came to the Bay Area in 1850. He spent more than 20 years building up the "Emery tract" around the railroad. The town was eventually incorporated in 1896.
For the next century, Emeryville was never exactly a diverse commerce center. It was home to a large railroad yard and many large warehouses. The town's education centers weren't exactly thriving either. Proposition 13 succeeded in seriously undercutting the schools' funding, making them some of the poorest in the state.
The city's "downtown" was built around an exit off of Interstate 80. There was, and still is, a small-strip mall complex with a Circuit City, Tower Records and various small clothing stores. Eventually a multi-screen movie theater opened up nearby, and was soon joined by a Borders Books. In the early 1990s, the city paved over the railway yard and started building large destination stores, like Home Depot, Pak 'N Save, K-Mart and Toy 'R Us. All enjoyed moderate to decent success
Then the town of Emeryville enjoyed some good fortune. The dot-com boom, and the companies started looking for large buildings on cheap real estate. Emeryville, with its abundant warehouses and relatively low rents, was an ideal alternative to the more crowded and expensive SOMA district of San Francisco. Dot-coms of all shapes and sizes came to town. Ask Jeeves has its headquarters in Emeryville, and even Pixar, the Disney-affiliated animation company, set up shop.
With all the booming dot-com business came all the owt-of-town investors looking to make deals. So Emeryville decided to green light multiple hotel developments to accommodate the business, rather than sending them to Oakland or San Francisco. At least four monster-sized hotels broke ground in the late 1990s. However, before many could even open for business, the dot-com crash hit. Bye-bye out of town money, hello empty hotels.
But Emeryville struck the jackpot soon after. IKEA, the famous Swedish stores specializing in cheap, assemble-it-yourself furniture, opened its doors on the city's main "downtown" drag, Shellmound Avenue. Business quickly started booming, as people came from far and wide to buy dressers that will fall apart if you moved them across the room.
However, the town was soon faced with another crisis of bad planning: none of the roads was built to handle such an influx of traffic. Shellmound Avenue is four lanes wide, two going in each direction, which isn't nearly enough to handle all the IKEA traffic. There was barely enough room to add a left-turn lane into the IKEA parking lot for southbound traffic.
Furthermore, all roads leading to Shellmound are similarly ill equipped. In fact, the only six-lane road is Powell Street, which runs from the Interstate 80 Exit, over the railroads and of town, toward Oakland. The town hastily threw up a bunch of traffic signals have only succeeded in further snarling traffic on the city streets. On a weekday evening in the pre-holiday season, I've watched traffic stretch for a good mile in either direction on Shellmound.
Then things got even worse, traffic-wise, when Bay Street shopping center opened in Shellmound Avenue. The Bay Street shopping center is a Santana-Row styled development, with both businesses and residences stacked side by side. On the business side, the center houses a GAP, a new Old Navy stores, a Coach store, a Pottery Barn, a Banana Republic a Barnes & Noble and a 16-screen multiplex. Because of pressure by the merchants, the center opened in time for the holiday season, which was too early. Now, instead of just the IKEA customers coming from throughout the Bay Area using the ill-equipped four-lane roads, there are hundreds, if not thousands more cars clogging Shellmound trying to get into the shopping center.
There isn't any way to make things better. The area is so built up, there's no room to add more lanes of traffic. There's also no room to add an interstate exit, and yes, the area needs one. On a late Sunday afternoon during the post-holiday rush, traffic was gridlocked for more than a mile just to use the existing exit. It even overflowed onto Highway 580, headed toward the Bay Bridge.
If the town of Emeryville had used some foresight, it could have saved residents and visitors a lot of headaches. Emeryville wanted so much so quickly that the community wasn't prepared for the consequences.
Of course, Cupertino is different in many ways from Emeryville. It's a lot easier to get around on De Anza and Stevens Creek boulevards and the roads are much better managed. But some of Emeryville's follies sound a bit familiar for this city (adding numerous hotels, building all the way up to the curb, possibly eliminating lanes of traffic on Stevens Creek). Cupertino should sit and think before taking steps to revitalize the "crossroads." Before the council and planning commission determine what the city "needs," they should make sure if the residents of Cupertino can live with it.
Jesse Ducker is the editor of the Cupertino Courier.