Even though the article says the clinic may only be open for five years, it’s a good start. I guess the next question is, what is the City doing to pursuade the VA to build their permanent East Bay multispecialty care center here? Seems like it would fit in pretty well near Washington Township and Kaiser, no?

Even though it won’t open until January, it’s coming, and that’s a good thing.

Vinnie, exactly. There needs to be a plan. Lay the groundwork, have a vision. Execute over time. If we don’t plan for alternative modes of inner-city transportation our ability to get from here to there will become more difficult and time consuming, not to mention frustrating.

Pacific Commons was designed with the auto in mind and not much else.

Mowry Gateway – Yes, this is a horrible location. I lived one block from there, but when I first heard of the Puppy Love protests I had no idea where the store was. That whole stretch of stores is out of sight. The other side of Farwell (by the retired theaters) is even worse off. (But it was an excellent place to teach my kid how to ride a bike. No cars to worry about.) This is the kind of retail location, next to the freeway, that retailers should be interested in, let we’ve let this become rather vacant. I think we should try and revitalize these areas (i.e. the Hub) before trying to invent new retails centers.

Shinn Connection – This was proposed a while back and it didn’t make sense to me. I believe the idea was to link BART with Amtrak/ACE. I didn’t get how this would work. High density without transit is not what we need.

Light Rail on Fremont – I love the idea but I’m cautious. There was a famous paper on light rail called ‘A Desire Named Streetcar’ that talked about light rail projects where the ridership was overestimated and costs were underestimated. If we really want this, we need to start planning that area for the kind of development that would generate the demand. The problem with the chicken and the egg analogy is that the chicken (the light rail) is an all or none proposition. In this economy, it’s probably unrealistic to even talk about it right now. The egg (development that is appropriate near a light rail corridor) can, and should, be planned for now.

Possibly, if Fremont had a viable public transit system in place prior to the A’s announced move there wouldn’t have been as much of an argument about traffic and parking.

The argument now is we don’t have the housing density to support it. To which I offer the same question.

Take a peek at the list of cities planning light rail. How many of them have a ball club. There’s more to it than a MLB franchise. It’s called infrastructure. Build it and they will come.

Where or what is worth a light rail system in Fremont?

And I meant to say “Amtrak” rather than “CalTrain” as it’s Amtrak that runs the trains along the East Bay Corridor

Once upon a time, there were proposals, from passenger rail advocates, for a BART transfer station near Shinn. As far as I know, Fremont planners/staffers/officials were never interested in that idea.

The north end of Shinn St. is less than a mile from Fremont BART by foot or bike.

Now that Puppy Love love is closed it’s ripe for development?? Hopefully that is your idea of a joke. Mowry just east of I-880 needs serious work. Something has to be done with the Cinedome 8 East Site. I’d like to see someone buy it and make it Cinearts Fremont (Century’s brand of independent theaters), but alas we might not have the demographics to support an independent film theater here. If something won’t be done, should be demolished for something else (Performing Arts Center? Makes more sense there than Little Kabul).

The rest of that center, besides Olive Garden and arguably Market Broiler, is dead. The only thing I like about it besides Olive Garden is that instead of getting gelato at OG, you go cheaper and better by running over to Gelato Classico after your OG meal.

On the other side of the street, I’ve been pissed off ever since Massimo’s closed it’s deli, leaving only it’s restaurant. Now I don’t know where in the tri city area where you can get a delicious coppa sandwich (coppa is my favorite deli meat but is expensive and hard to find). The row where Puppy Love was is dead besides the Indian businesses and perhaps the one dentist there. The rest of it pretty slow, besides Lucky and OSH. I’m not seeing what can be done there.

Maybe they mean the oddly-situated farm between Fremont and Paseo that was confirmed here to be owned by the city and leased by the farmer. That land sticks out like a sore thumb, since it won’t be used for Route 84/East-West Connector anymore.