Cyclists: Let the Backlash Begin (or Not)
Verizon Droid: Big Deal? Or Just Another Late Arrival Rival?
Car Thief Steals Vehicle To Get To Auto-Theft Trial
3rd Annual California Dreaming Same-Sex Ballroom Dancing Competition
Photo du Jour 501
Because these are confusing times, there are confused people out there trying to do us harm. Take, for example, the foolish opponents of the measure to extend Bay Area Rapid Transit to Santa Clara County. These lost souls, you see, tried to get a temporary restraining order against getting BART to do its job: moving people from point A to point B and easing traffic congestion. But San Francisco Superior Court Judge Peter Busch -- the fairest and most heroic judge of them all -- denied their request. Measure B, which passed by the two-thirds required yes votes this last election, will extend BART to San Jose and spread happiness throughout the land.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
most of the opponents are probably drivers. anyone who relies on public transit to get to the south bay from the city knows that this will be a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge help.
YAY! About 10 years too late, but YAY! nonetheless!
If only Santa Clara County had got on board with BART from the start, instead of opting for the idiotic "Expressway" road system.
SJ BART opponents have a point: BART is an expensive mode to expand. The cost of expanding BART from Fremont Station to Santa Clara/Mineta Airport would probably be enough to run hourly service on the Capitol Corridor, ACE and Caltrain and make those lines a true regional network.
SJ BART will also duplicate the light rail and expressway systems that Santa Clara opted to fund at the expense of opposing a measure to extend BART to their county, a measure that all 9 counties had a chance to appprove after World War II that only San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa supported.
I support any mass transit expansion, but it's a shame that Marin, Sonoma and Santa Clara have been stymied year after year with transit measures that have barely passed. Hopefully Measure B gives Santa Clarans what they need.
This map is probably more accurate considering the extension will be from the East Bay, not Millbrae.
it's not 10 years late ... try ... 20-25...
This is unfortunate. Extending BART just doesn't make sense down there. It's a suburban region where commuter trains capable of expressing (like electrified Caltrain rail over the Dumbarton from SM county) would be infinitely better suited. BART is a great urban transit solution - I wish it extended to the Richmond, southeastern SF, and basically all over the city. But it's a rather poor choice for suburban commuting, and the money could be way better spent on other transit projects. People in the Bay Area just have a hard-on for BART because it's the only transit many folks in the eastern suburbs know.
Isn't this the same Judge Busch that ordered the injunction on the bike plan?
Sounds like he made a good decision here. It's so easy to hate on judges until you agree with them :)
NO ONE IS GOING TO TAKE BART FROM THE CITY TO SAN JOSE!
ok, I'll stop with the caps.
It'll take and hour and 15 min to get to the South Bay on BART, whereas it'll only take a half hour on a high speed train, or 45 minutes on electrified Caltrain (Caltrain Baby Bullets now take one hour). This project is a gross misuse of public money, when better, more frequent service could be achieved at a much lower cost by upgrading existing rail corridors, rights of way, and service. Most sustainable transportation planners actually oppose this project because it represents the demise of much better transportation projects and solutions (like say Dumbarton rail, Caltrain Metro East, and expanded light rail in San Jose). Trust me, I'm one of them. BART is the wrong technology for the South Bay, and it should focus on improving and expanding its urban service, like say a line down Geary, in-fill stations, and a second transbay tube.
Please read this:
http://transbayblog.com/2008/10/01/a-series-on-bart-to-san-jose/
NO ONE IS GOING TO TAKE BART FROM THE CITY TO SAN JOSE!
No one cares about your 20th century thinking.
SF isn't the only metropolis in the region, and hundreds of thousands of people travel the East Bay-San Jose corridor every day. The corridor currently has two congested freeways with no room for expansion, and no reliable transit option.
In the long run, the benefits of integrating with the rest of the East Bay BART system are probably going to make the extension worth its high price.
"SF isn't the only metropolis in the region, and hundreds of thousands of people travel the East Bay-San Jose corridor every day. The corridor currently has two congested freeways with no room for expansion, and no reliable transit option."
BART isn't the only reliable transit option we have at our disposal, but it sure is the most expensive and "sexiest." The corridor obviously needs expanded, more frequent and reliable transit service, that's a no-brainer. But which alternative (BART vs. what else we could build with that money) creates more stations around which to focus more widespread transit-oriented development, so as to help transform the overwhelmingly suburban, auto-oriented South Bay into a denser, more livable place? Which provides better and more equitable transit coverage, so that a greater number of people are closer to a superior transit option? That's the point.
BART to San Jose is more about civic pride than transit efficacy. We could do so much more with that money to make that corridor, the entire South Bay, and really the entire region a more connected, sustainable place.
@sirwalterralegh:
I think transit expansions aren't supposed to be based on current population density distributions, they are supposed to be one of the factors in determining future population density changes. The areas in which the expansion will occur may be crappy sprawled-out suburbs now, but the presence of the BART line (or any other decent transit network) nearby will help encourage denser development in those areas.
On the other hand, expanding into established crappy suburbs isn't ideal. It's a lot better to expand into emptier places where construction and nearby development will be cheaper.
If you worked at Cisco (or on the East side of San Jose near Milpitas) then Caltrain is NOT a viable solution for commuting two/from work. From door to door you are talking over 2 hours. Granted the baby bullet gets you to Mountain View from 4th and King in 45 minutes, but then you have to board VTA light rail to go the last 12 miles. VTA is slow Slow SLOW!!! Literally traveling at about 12 miles per hour you arrive at the Cisco campus 2 hours or more after you locked your front door when you left your home.
BART is needed to serve the east side of San Jose, which as you'll notice, is a very large city.
Interesting comments. And well spoken -- clearly San Jose is a more important city to the region than San Francisco is. 2x the population, far more jobs, far higher average income, etc.
Too bad Bart is only going to stop in San Jose -- it would be nice to have it be a viable subway system for the City itself. They need it!
The problem here is all these regional transit agencies. Why does every county have to have their own? The bay area needs ONE way to get around, and so far Bart is the closest thing we have.
A dark day for Democracy and clean elections -- a ruling ranks up there with "Gore v. Bush".
Despite a minuscule margin of victory, the registrar (in defiance of State law) refuses to do a manual recount. A lawsuit is filed before the certification deadline, whereupon the Attorney General inexplicably intervenes in the case, forcing change of venue. This change of venue gives just enough delay, allowing for the registrar to quickly "certify" the election before the new judge even hears the challenge.
Regardless of what one thinks of the BART project, this is how Banana Republics operate.
Those of us who work and live in Silicon Valley, and try to use VTA public transit know the following:
1. The BART route was literally dusted off from the 1950's Plan, and makes no sense given today's situation. The line runs FAR to the east of the main employment areas. Bizarrely, it enters downtown San Jose from the SOUTH and EAST, taking the slowest, most circuitous route possible.
2. The BART extension would be built almost entirely within an existing rail ROW -- which could simply be upgraded to standard passenger rail at 1/100 the cost, running modern European electric EMU trains.
3. As an archaic 1960s technology, the BART investment will be utterly incompatible with the new 800-mile high-speed rail. HSR, not BART is the wave of future.
LenPetro,
The bottom line is that downtown San Jose is the natural location for an intermodal transfer station, since the vast majority of commuters won't need to use it!
In contrast, the intermodal rail-to-BART transfer station at Fremont would almost inevitably suck. The Millbrae Caltrain-BART station was built about as well as possible--with a common platform for easy transfers -- but the lack of a timed transfer, and the wide gaps in the Caltrain schedule combine to make it a pretty worthless option. If EB-SJ passengers had a similar transfer at Fremont, I would expect similarly low ridership. To get commuters out of their cars, you really need a one seat ride.
I don't think there's a case for any other extensions of the existing BART system (except possibly to Livermore). However, cutting BART off at its present extent would have been a mistake, and I'm glad the South Bay voters went for it.
By the way, many of the concerns of the transbay blog series are obsolete--no matter what, we're going to get Caltrain electrification as part of the high speed rail corridor, and I believe the Dumbarton rail extension is already financed.
Dumbarton Rail is not fully funded, and what funds it has are being fed into, you guessed it: BART. Of course, redirecting money from cost-effective transit into costly and under-performing BART extensions is par for the course in the Bay Area.
You might also want to take a closer look at the long list of concerns I raised in that series of posts. By no means are "many" now "obsolete."
"Theo" obviously isn't familiar with the Valley and the commute patterns. First of all, the transfer would be at Union City, not Fremont. Very, very, very few people commute into San Jose from points further north than that. Spending an extra $6 BILLION to eliminate one transfer for an extremely tiny portion of the ridership is insane.
As for the Millbrae transfer, he's right -- it completely sucks. There was no attempt made to coordinate Caltrain and BART schedules. For a better example of what's possible, look at the "eBART" project, which will run European DMU trains and have proper schedule coordination. The 2-minute cross-platform transfer there will be very similar to what is done at MacArthur now.
San Jose is NOT the most sensible BART extension. Dublin to Livermore (which Theo did cite), Richmond to Hercules, Pittsburg to Antioch, and the western and northern reaches of San Francisco (Presidio, Richmond District) all qualify and are all as equally congested as the Fremont-San Jose Corridor. Those regions have also been paying BART property taxes for 60 years. Santa Clarans have not. It's a shame that a bond on a ballot in San Jose will place energy into building an extension for a county that bought into the BART district (much like the failed San Mateo County extension) rather than BART taxpayers who pay year after year after year for naught.
That comment about EMUs and 1/100th of the cost of BART and outdated technology ... et al (bikerider) -- brilliant!
A dark day indeed for obstructionists.
Every proposed BART extension has a group that believes their proposed BART extension is more worthy. No matter what gets built or where, someone is going to scream.
dantsea: The vast majority of funding for the BART project isn't coming from Santa Clara, but various Federal/regional funds programmed by MTC. When you include the equally insane Muni central-subway project, there is some $10 billion in new capital funding being spent.
Now, do you spent that $10 billion on conventional rail (cost: $1-10m per mile), or by digging giant money pits at more than 100 times the cost? The only reason we have to "choose" between Geary Blvd, Hercules, San Jose, or Livermore getting rail service is because of we have a corrupt and insanely evil transportation "planning" agency.
Oh, cheer up. It'll be a bitter disappointment for everyone.
The Millbrae station sucks in so many ways I can't even begin to count. Because of the moronic design that Quentin Kopp forced on us for BART to SFO, there is no good way to take Caltrain to SFO, and due to low ridership there isn't even the BART shuttle anymore which was promised to South Bay riders.
Lots of people back in the day had a better idea: a station that would serve SFO that would (shocker I know!!) include BOTH BART and Caltrain service. This was the "COST" idea which would have extended the airport people mover to a station directly opposite the airport, where the big elevated wye is now. Had this been built, many more people could be taking BOTH BART AND Caltrain to the airport, since BART wouldn't be sending half of all southbound trains to Millbrae. But because SFO had this vision of a grand new international terminal with BART inside, nobody with actual power was willing to consider a more practical option that would serve the majority of fliers who fly domestic anyway, and also all the train riders.
Some say this was because BART fans really wanted to make it possible to extend BART down the peninsula, and maybe this is so, but for now, Millbrae is a giant white elephant - and one that may end up NEVER being fully used, because CA HSR is planning a new, four track, express station at -- where you might ask? -- SFO.
All this is to say that design matters. Now that BART has in fact been approved, the designers had damn well better build it so people will actually use it, both at the stations and at the transfer points. For better or worse SJ Diridon is one of these. They had better get it right.
@Chiot Moite wins the Public Transport Darwin award.
"If you worked at Cisco (or on the East side of San Jose near Milpitas) then Caltrain is NOT a viable solution for commuting two/from work. From door to door you are talking over 2 hours."
http://www.landyacht.com/Ciscocaltrainsite1-4.htm