From Redwood town to Redwood City Sequoia Station’s redevelopment in the modern era BY MATEO MANGOLINI Staff Reporter
Image Credit to the RWC website
Sequoia Station, that sea of asphalt favor of walkable and bikeable paths and a and concrete, is seen by some as a relic of a new underground parking space. The removal bygone era, a monument to cold, calculating of the parking lots is notable, as it would urban planning that seeks only to maximize discourage cars from frequenting the area. profitability over enjoyability. Based on its “Part of our plan is to implement a corridor emphasis of wide open parking lots and big plan, which adds bike lanes, wider sidewalks, retail chains, it’s no surprise that Sequoia slows down traffic a bit and allows people to Station traces its roots back to the ‘90s, when have safe walking connections and safe biking such design principles were the norm when it connections across town, which is another big came to commercial zones. However, where benefit of a project like this,” Chammorro said. one may see a relic of the past, others see Both Chamorro and the city hope that potential. such an endeavor will connect both sides of This was the basis for Alan Chamorro, the city, allowing those from across the tracks, one of the Senior Vice Presidents of Lowe especially from Sequoia High School, to have Real Estate, to an even easier time undertake a massive reaching Redwood and unprecedented City’s downtown project on the commercial areas on Peninsula in foot. conjunction with This push for Eden Housing (a [This project] is really about a more climateproperty developer placemaking. conscious city isn’t with a specific only relegated to emphasis on Alan Chamorro, Regional Senior Vice Chamorro and Lowe. affordable housing), Caltrain, as part President of Lowe Real Estate Caltrain and the city of a larger project itself : completely spanning much of renovating the the bay, has hopes of station from the ground up, in order to create a electrifying its railways by 2024. Electrification, space for socialization, leisure and recreation. a process that removes the local fuel source on One look at the redevelopment plan’s a train in favor of a railway-wide conductor, outline reveals its gargantuan scale: the first would move Caltrain away from powering its thing that stands out is a removal of the trains on fossil fuels, in addition to allowing massive central parking lot in the station, in more train cars to be used at once.
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“We’ll be running clean, green trains that are powered primarily by green power,” Dan Lieberman, a spokesperson for Caltrain, said. “They’re also faster to accelerate and decelerate, so we can also bump up the level of service.” However, Caltrain’s ambitions for its rail network do not end there. Further down the timeline, through an additional two tracks and a grade separation project, the Bay Area’s premier railroad service hopes to turn Redwood City into the rail hub that, in some ways, it already is. According to Lieberman and Brian Fitzpatrick (another representative of Caltrain’s real estate wing), Redwood City is already their fifth busiest station. This comes as no surprise, considering Redwood City’s central location on the Peninsula, between San Francisco in the north and San Jose in the south. “[Redwood City] has had the highest traffic of any station in San Mateo County so it has been growing pretty steadily for us,” Lieberman said. There are also supposedly hopes of connecting Redwood City across the Bay to other East Bay rail networks through a project known as the “Dumbarton Line”, which would make Redwood City the primary stop for those from either side of the Bay wanting to cross over without a car. What is known for sure, however, is that the rail platform will be moved some 200 feet north, closer to the Peet’s Coffee than to the old rail platform site, in
