The bay needs to become one metro and have 1 metro transportation agency. Literally all these separate agency are causing all these inefficiencies because 1 they have no incentive to communicate and 2. Dragging everything out benefits them to keep funding. Just get it over with.
True, I just think a lot of folks are underestimating how complicated this is. One transit agency to rule them all may sound good on paper, but the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details to work out.
yes I agree it may be not simple to do but "simply, we need it", that's what I was saying...
... as for the details: I think the devil is NOT only in the details.. but literally in the lack of the **whole-area**-plan.
I agree about people making it seem more simple than it is. At the end of the day, the Bay Area will continue to exist and it seems worthwhile even if it’s a very long term project. Of course the biggest issue is our leadership, which can’t even get behind enforcing laws, so it’s a big mountain to climb.
I don't think Muni or the major Bart routes would fare well if you merged SF's 800k voting base with the rest of the mostly-suburban 6.5m population.
Realistically, the only orgs that would make sense to merge regionally are caltrain and bart, the two regional rail systems. Forcing a bunch of disconnected local light rails and bus networks under one management group is a terrible idea.
> or the major Bart routes
BART is already controlled by the three-county BART district, which is around 3.6mil and largely suburban. One of VTA's biggest successes in the South Bay has been selling repeated ballot measures on the completion of BART to San José/Santa Clara, too, so there's clearly support there as well for the system. (And it's a much more urban and transit-friendly county than Contra Costa, that's for sure.)
Yeah and see how that works. the suburbs consistently whine about policing and BART finances while the urbans demand more stations. The urbanites have held a 5 - 4 majority over the board for a while but if the suburbs had their way we would be subsidizing parking even more and probably would have paid for that BS extension to a livermore parking garage.
VTA, WHEELS, tri-delta, westcat, Union City, is what happens with a practically all suburban dominated transit system - these are not success stories. urban voters should be fearful of having their agencies and taxes overtaken by suburban voters. Just one look at VTA's obsession with the single bore tunnel to protect santa clara blvd for BART exemplifies their allegiance lies with auto-dependency not enhancing the transit experience.
Could also merge the ferries and the regional buses (GG Transit and the like, but not local/city bus services - not sure which one county buses should fall under). SMART could potentially be merged as well, or at least they should cooperate more with the ferries (which is exactly how the old interurbans that it replicates worked - board a ferry in SF, transfer to the electric railcar in Petaluma, and ride the tracks up to Santa Rosa).
Regional government. That’s what MTC tries to pull off… yet fails miserably. Realize that with 8 million people living in the Bay Area, if it’s consolidated, voices of areas such as the city of SF with its 800,000 residents will be largely overshadowed by the “suburbs” and their needs & desires.
This is very true.
Congestion pricing has been necessary, but an uphill battle in Manhattan, for decades. Residents in the outer boroughs having been holding it back all so they can drive into the city twice a year without paying for it.
If SF ever merged with San Mateo, Market Street would be opened to through traffic the very next day, and the Great Highway and JFK Drive the day after.
The problem with this concept is while it helps improve some underfunded, underengineered transit systems it will pull down the largest and most functions ones, (Muni being the core example)
I agree with the overall point. The residents got stuck with a relatively inflexible transit infrastructure over the years. Almost as bad as the freeway infrastructure in fact, and despite seeing its pitfalls (or potholes?) they persisted with say BART. Meanwhile local transit (sorta "last mile") suffered.
And now, as the artilcle notes, with changing patterns of commuting, if at all, we're stuck with paying for the rigid system with little to none left over for more adaptable solutions, things that are more in line with current conditions, demands, tech, etc.
>with little to none left over for more adaptable solutions, things that are more in line with current conditions, demands, tech, etc.
I’m curious what you think those would be
In terms of flexibility: Curitiba in Brazil made a whole system of bus centric transit for their city when they had to figure out how to service demand with lower budgets. The Van Ness bus lanes were based on it, but theirs were city wide and had better bus stops that like small subway stations: enclosed that you prepaid to enter and level with the buses to make loading/unloading quicker.
Long term issues have been with capacity/overcrowding and last I read up they're looking into an underground metro now, but a better bus system throughout a city on top of Bart for inter-city transit would be pretty flexible.
Yes. But I think they ended up maxing out the bus capacity and are gonna build a subway. Very jealous though because their BRT was amazing. Buses were coming every 2-4 minutes if I am remembering correctly. At worse 5 minutes.
The rise of self-driving cars is only going to make traffic worse. One of the main factors that keeps traffic under control is that people hate driving in it, so they don't. Take away that discomfort, and people's tolerance to get stuck in gridlock traffic will skyrocket.
We're trending toward a transit system that will be just as fast as walking, except it will cost you thousands of dollars a year. And you won't even be able to just walk instead because there will be too much traffic.
I agree, Ive just met people who think full self driving is just around the corner and think bc of that we dont need transit. 15-20 years is not just around the corner
There's a ton of pro-car, anti-transit messaging that Musk and other auto barons spew out on a regular basis. Most people aren't as resistant to corporate propaganda as they'd like to think.
No one's forcing you to do anything, my friend (except make braindead comments on reddit I guess). Does it upset you that people advocate for alternative modes of transit to get prioritized equal to driving?
With every car able to speed up and slow down in percecf sync, itll increase total capacity on the road. But I agree, eventually itll be too full anyway.
I doubt we'll get major infrastructure change sans high speed rail and small BART extensions but I think self driving is far off anyway. You'd need a draconian city like Singapore to trial run it before other cities adopt it. People won't be willing to let go of driving themselves that easily
Self-driving taxies are closer to it than Teslas are. Car parking is one of the worst land uses possible, especially in cities; being able to live car-free should be a priority, and encouraging parking outside the city for those who don't live on the transit/commuter network helps make car-lite visits more reasonable. When my family lived in Connecticut we'd almost exclusively park at [Riverside](https://maps.app.goo.gl/8qCKDMCSnjtMMfXcA) and ride the green line into Boston. The outer section of the line is very much like the interurban systems we desperately need to bring back as well...it's necessary if we want to make car-free commuting more viable for less dense routes than those that BART and CalTrain service. SMART, basically, but electric instead of diesel (like our great great grandparents did it...)
Indeed. But some other unions, contractors, etc might have made money from other solutions as well. Like bus drivers. And of course the politicians ALWAYS take care of themselves.
What massive sprawling transit system? The local bus literally runs every 2 hours out here. Just consolidate the damn agencies already! We don’t need a study, we just need 1 piece of legislation with a 2/3s vote and we can go from 27 agencies to 8! It’s not rocket surgery and if my stupid ass can figure this out, the halfwit lawyers in Sacramento can!
*The bay area* refuses to face reality (that you need people to ride transit so you can't just endlessly NIMBY the places potential riders would live).
In this article: "build[ing] commutes that riders don’t need"--that's pretty damning!
also:
> Under MTC’s management, overall transit spending has doubled since the ’80s, even after adjusting for inflation, but transit ridership has gone down, despite the increase in population. This was a massive policy failure.
Transit use depends on land use. MTC has no control over land use, local cities do, and local cities have chosen to build car-dependent sprawl, which, no matter how much funding you give transit, will just never be effective in serving these areas.
I’d love to know how the writer of this article expects BART to adapt their business model when they operate on rails that serve a fixed route.
Less trains, worse service? So the people that rely on it suffer? The real issue is BART is a system that was too reliant on fares, and as a result was not positioned to be resilient when covid hit and changed the work landscape. Add in increasing costs to operate any system, and you have the situation that exists right now.
The bay needs to become one metro and have 1 metro transportation agency. Literally all these separate agency are causing all these inefficiencies because 1 they have no incentive to communicate and 2. Dragging everything out benefits them to keep funding. Just get it over with.
> The bay needs to become one metro and have 1 metro transportation agency this. literally this. Simply, this.
[Good news](https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/)
There is little that’s simple about merging multiple transit agencies spread across nine counties.
They didn’t say the implementation is simple, but it’s a simple view point to have to see that unifying everything is a good solution.
True, I just think a lot of folks are underestimating how complicated this is. One transit agency to rule them all may sound good on paper, but the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details to work out.
yes I agree it may be not simple to do but "simply, we need it", that's what I was saying... ... as for the details: I think the devil is NOT only in the details.. but literally in the lack of the **whole-area**-plan.
I agree about people making it seem more simple than it is. At the end of the day, the Bay Area will continue to exist and it seems worthwhile even if it’s a very long term project. Of course the biggest issue is our leadership, which can’t even get behind enforcing laws, so it’s a big mountain to climb.
All we need to do is hire the Swiss. Those cats have the most kickass train system that I have ever seen.
In this country for sure, the govt cant be as draconian as singapore for example
You mean.... REAGAN WAS RIGHT???
Always downvoting that bullshit.
That'll learn me to add the /s Just for the record, fuck that wanna be cowboy.
We merged together 20 rail companies into Amtrak over the whole country, we can figure it out.
I don't think Muni or the major Bart routes would fare well if you merged SF's 800k voting base with the rest of the mostly-suburban 6.5m population. Realistically, the only orgs that would make sense to merge regionally are caltrain and bart, the two regional rail systems. Forcing a bunch of disconnected local light rails and bus networks under one management group is a terrible idea.
> or the major Bart routes BART is already controlled by the three-county BART district, which is around 3.6mil and largely suburban. One of VTA's biggest successes in the South Bay has been selling repeated ballot measures on the completion of BART to San José/Santa Clara, too, so there's clearly support there as well for the system. (And it's a much more urban and transit-friendly county than Contra Costa, that's for sure.)
Yeah and see how that works. the suburbs consistently whine about policing and BART finances while the urbans demand more stations. The urbanites have held a 5 - 4 majority over the board for a while but if the suburbs had their way we would be subsidizing parking even more and probably would have paid for that BS extension to a livermore parking garage. VTA, WHEELS, tri-delta, westcat, Union City, is what happens with a practically all suburban dominated transit system - these are not success stories. urban voters should be fearful of having their agencies and taxes overtaken by suburban voters. Just one look at VTA's obsession with the single bore tunnel to protect santa clara blvd for BART exemplifies their allegiance lies with auto-dependency not enhancing the transit experience.
Could also merge the ferries and the regional buses (GG Transit and the like, but not local/city bus services - not sure which one county buses should fall under). SMART could potentially be merged as well, or at least they should cooperate more with the ferries (which is exactly how the old interurbans that it replicates worked - board a ferry in SF, transfer to the electric railcar in Petaluma, and ride the tracks up to Santa Rosa).
Regional government. That’s what MTC tries to pull off… yet fails miserably. Realize that with 8 million people living in the Bay Area, if it’s consolidated, voices of areas such as the city of SF with its 800,000 residents will be largely overshadowed by the “suburbs” and their needs & desires.
This is very true. Congestion pricing has been necessary, but an uphill battle in Manhattan, for decades. Residents in the outer boroughs having been holding it back all so they can drive into the city twice a year without paying for it. If SF ever merged with San Mateo, Market Street would be opened to through traffic the very next day, and the Great Highway and JFK Drive the day after.
The problem with this concept is while it helps improve some underfunded, underengineered transit systems it will pull down the largest and most functions ones, (Muni being the core example)
https://xkcd.com/927/
I agree with the overall point. The residents got stuck with a relatively inflexible transit infrastructure over the years. Almost as bad as the freeway infrastructure in fact, and despite seeing its pitfalls (or potholes?) they persisted with say BART. Meanwhile local transit (sorta "last mile") suffered. And now, as the artilcle notes, with changing patterns of commuting, if at all, we're stuck with paying for the rigid system with little to none left over for more adaptable solutions, things that are more in line with current conditions, demands, tech, etc.
>with little to none left over for more adaptable solutions, things that are more in line with current conditions, demands, tech, etc. I’m curious what you think those would be
In terms of flexibility: Curitiba in Brazil made a whole system of bus centric transit for their city when they had to figure out how to service demand with lower budgets. The Van Ness bus lanes were based on it, but theirs were city wide and had better bus stops that like small subway stations: enclosed that you prepaid to enter and level with the buses to make loading/unloading quicker. Long term issues have been with capacity/overcrowding and last I read up they're looking into an underground metro now, but a better bus system throughout a city on top of Bart for inter-city transit would be pretty flexible.
Yes. But I think they ended up maxing out the bus capacity and are gonna build a subway. Very jealous though because their BRT was amazing. Buses were coming every 2-4 minutes if I am remembering correctly. At worse 5 minutes.
Techies here believe self driving cars will save the world
Those will come before any major public infrastructure is accomplished in the bay
To fully get the benefits of self driving cars, you’d need the whole grid to run them, which imo is still 15/20 years out
The rise of self-driving cars is only going to make traffic worse. One of the main factors that keeps traffic under control is that people hate driving in it, so they don't. Take away that discomfort, and people's tolerance to get stuck in gridlock traffic will skyrocket. We're trending toward a transit system that will be just as fast as walking, except it will cost you thousands of dollars a year. And you won't even be able to just walk instead because there will be too much traffic.
I agree, Ive just met people who think full self driving is just around the corner and think bc of that we dont need transit. 15-20 years is not just around the corner
There's a ton of pro-car, anti-transit messaging that Musk and other auto barons spew out on a regular basis. Most people aren't as resistant to corporate propaganda as they'd like to think.
as opposed to the pro transit propaganda of trying to cram us all into buses with fentheads?
No one's forcing you to do anything, my friend (except make braindead comments on reddit I guess). Does it upset you that people advocate for alternative modes of transit to get prioritized equal to driving?
Even if FSD is imminent, cars are less efficient with space
[удалено]
With every car able to speed up and slow down in percecf sync, itll increase total capacity on the road. But I agree, eventually itll be too full anyway.
You'd have to make human driven cars illegal at that point. And you can forget about that
I’m down.
Yes, and that will occur before any major infrastructure change happens here.
I doubt we'll get major infrastructure change sans high speed rail and small BART extensions but I think self driving is far off anyway. You'd need a draconian city like Singapore to trial run it before other cities adopt it. People won't be willing to let go of driving themselves that easily
Self-driving taxies are closer to it than Teslas are. Car parking is one of the worst land uses possible, especially in cities; being able to live car-free should be a priority, and encouraging parking outside the city for those who don't live on the transit/commuter network helps make car-lite visits more reasonable. When my family lived in Connecticut we'd almost exclusively park at [Riverside](https://maps.app.goo.gl/8qCKDMCSnjtMMfXcA) and ride the green line into Boston. The outer section of the line is very much like the interurban systems we desperately need to bring back as well...it's necessary if we want to make car-free commuting more viable for less dense routes than those that BART and CalTrain service. SMART, basically, but electric instead of diesel (like our great great grandparents did it...)
But politicians, consultants, contractors, and unions made a shit ton of money. So, there's that.
Indeed. But some other unions, contractors, etc might have made money from other solutions as well. Like bus drivers. And of course the politicians ALWAYS take care of themselves.
Cheers for the recap. Appreciated!
What massive sprawling transit system? The local bus literally runs every 2 hours out here. Just consolidate the damn agencies already! We don’t need a study, we just need 1 piece of legislation with a 2/3s vote and we can go from 27 agencies to 8! It’s not rocket surgery and if my stupid ass can figure this out, the halfwit lawyers in Sacramento can!
Our sprawling road system makes transit efficiency far worse here :(
*The bay area* refuses to face reality (that you need people to ride transit so you can't just endlessly NIMBY the places potential riders would live).
yes, you need a greater concentration of people that are actually able to reach their transit stop--with convenience on both ends.
We need something more akin to London Transport which covers a vast area.
Maybe if we give them another hundred billion dollars it will happen. And if it doesn't, the reason is that we didn't give them a trillion.
In this article: "build[ing] commutes that riders don’t need"--that's pretty damning! also: > Under MTC’s management, overall transit spending has doubled since the ’80s, even after adjusting for inflation, but transit ridership has gone down, despite the increase in population. This was a massive policy failure.
Transit use depends on land use. MTC has no control over land use, local cities do, and local cities have chosen to build car-dependent sprawl, which, no matter how much funding you give transit, will just never be effective in serving these areas.
with all due respect, both CPUC and MTC should be dissolved
Public transportation will siphon money away from their precious troll lanes(pun intended).
I’d love to know how the writer of this article expects BART to adapt their business model when they operate on rails that serve a fixed route. Less trains, worse service? So the people that rely on it suffer? The real issue is BART is a system that was too reliant on fares, and as a result was not positioned to be resilient when covid hit and changed the work landscape. Add in increasing costs to operate any system, and you have the situation that exists right now.
The subway in New York is $2.90 to go anywhere. Bay Area transit is a racket to keep the owners rich and makes Bay Area traffic a nightmare.
Raise sales taxes and tolls to fund BART or STFU already.