This is a really excellent analysis of the pros and cons of BART. A few excerpts:<\/p>\n
BART focuses its primary trunk service on San Francisco, with it
\nforming the head of a squid. The four endpoints on the east side of
\nthe Tube form its tentacles, with a secondary trunk formed through
\nOakland….<\/p>\n
In the East Bay, this squid service also took on the characteristics
\nof a gorilla. It was very burdensome to maintain both San Francisco-
\nlike train and bus service. BART had something that AC Transit
\ndidn’t: funding primacy.<\/p>\n
When counties buy in to BART by joining the district, they take on
\nthe responsibilities of funding both their construction and and
\noperations within their jurisdictions. This solved the problem of
\nthe who’s-subsidizing-whom issue, but there was always a threat of a
\ncounty chiseling its obligation. So the BART service obligations were
\nthe first to be paid. It sounded like a fiscally upright arrangement.<\/p>\n
The burden would then fall on bus riders. Since BART only had to
\nbe concerned with its trains and would get first dibs on money, it
\ndidn’t have to worry about local bus service. AC Transit bore the
\nbrunt of service cuts, even though there was very heavy demand for
\nlocal East Bay bus service….<\/p>\n
The Bay Area’s biggest loser has to be samTrans. San Mateo County bet
\nit all on a massive BART extension and watched it backfire bad. San
\nMateo opted out of being a charter member of the BART district, but
\nit still got service as far as Daly City, on the northern edge of the
\ncounty line, and then Colma, the city where the dead outnumber the
\nliving. The line kept creeping southward, going in as far as Millbrae
\nand San Francisco International Airport. The county paid for these
\nextensions by pawning samTrans service. The massive service expansion
\nsouthward proved to be a colossal failure. Airport ridership had been
\nabysmal, plus BART was largely duplicating the service of the more
\nculturally ingrained Caltrain commuter rail service. The saddest part
\nof all: samTrans lost more bus riders than BART gained rail riders.<\/p>\n
Now the squid-gorilla is coming after Santa Clara County, with a
\nlong-term vision of forming a ring around the Bay. The Valley
\nTransportation Authority is grappling with paying for an excessively
\nexpensive BART extension, all while being infamous for having an
\nextensive but unproductive light rail network. It also already has
\nservice along both sides of the bay by the more antiquated technology
\nknown as conventional rail. BART would be astronomically expensive,
\nredundant and if light rail has been any indication … Santa Clara
\nCounty should know what the First Rule of Holes is.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Just yesterday I was reading an editorial that used San Mateo County BART as a success story. <game show eeeeennnnnnnt><\/p>\n
I haven’t read the whole series but I suspect it’s worth reading.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, tonight I’m off to Sunnyvale City Hall to tell the City Council that that all road users deserve safe accommodation.<\/p>\n
More later: I’m planning a letter to the Menlo Park City Council telling them I think they have their heads in the sand (or somewhere else, perhaps) if they really think opposing high-speed rail on the Peninsula is a good plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I enjoyed MetroRiderLA’s series of posts on transit in the Bay Area. My most-used system: Caltrain Best line: The January 17 journey on Train 362 was very fast. Then again, this trip didn’t cover anything south of Millbrae. Had there been more time, this 10-part miniseries would have been a Greek epic, with the transit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,13,14,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}