Enough said.

Hercules dumps plans for parking garage near waterfront

By Tom Lochner

Hercules has dropped the idea of a large commuter parking garage near the Hercules Waterfront that was much-hated by residents who prefer a more pedestrian-friendly ambiance.

The city and developer AndersonPacific LLC have reached consensus on all significant issues related to development of a 40-acre site along the waterfront that will include about 1,300 homes as well as restaurants, shops, offices and an intermodal transit center with an Amtrak Capitol Corridor station and a ferry terminal connecting to San Francisco, City Manager Nelson Oliva said.

George Szabo, a consultant to the city, had proposed situating the railroad station north of Refugio Creek and combining it with a 385-space parking garage and a community or conference center at the end of John Muir Parkway. But waterfront residents blasted the structure design as a “monolith” and a “big box” they said would reorient the waterfront primarily to automobiles and only secondarily to pedestrians and bicycles.

The consensus approach puts the station back on the south side of the creek and a smaller parking garage on the fringe of the waterfront area, with limited parking closer to the waterfront itself. It also calls for a more modest train station building than a civic building once envisioned by AndersonPacific that would have combined the station with a community center; the consensus plan separates the two uses.

“The Szabo Plan … is no more,” Waterfront Watch, a neighborhood organization, said on its Web site.

City officials said the so-called Szabo Plan was an alternative and not something to which the city had committed.

The consensus plan also provides for more efficient circulation of the buses that will serve the intermodal transit center and strives to keep commuters’ cars out of the immediate waterfront area, Oliva said.

“It’s great,” said Jim Anderson, president of AndersonPacific. “We’ve resolved our issues, we resolved the city’s issues and we’re on a fast track to try to figure out how to get things going so we can get something on the ground.”

While further steps are needed for actual approval of the consensus plan, both parties agree “the project is back on track and moving in the right direction,” Oliva said.