Orphan Road

When you're building a new BART station from the ground up, you might as well build transit-oriented development around it, affordable housing and all:

Housing on both sides of the station will be located within a quarter mile — or 10-minute walk — of Safeway, Target and Stoneridge mall. The developer may also consider establishing a Flexcar program on-site, to allow residents to rent vehicles.

The two-story BART station building will be constructed in the I-580 median and will connect via pedestrian bridges over the freeway to the mixed use projects in Pleasanton and Dublin.

Four-story parking garages for BART patrons will also be constructed on each of the Pleasanton and Dublin station-area properties.

Garages, eh? Shh...don't tell the Sierra Club!

I kid. Seriously, though, this sounds pretty cool. Too many BART stations are surrounded by freeways and parking lots and other trappings of suburbia. Nice to see that they can adapt.

Nice article in the SF Chronicle about the intrepid souls who commute by train from SF to Sacramento each day:

The Capitol Corridor is a line made possible by the voters, who in 1990 approved Prop. 116 to provide state funding for intercity passenger rail service. Until 1998, there were only four trains each direction per day and the morning commute was essentially westbound only. Now there are 16 roundtrips. The State of California owns the rolling stock, Union Pacific owns the tracks, BART supplies administration, Amtrak staffs the trains and stations and a joint powers authority oversees it. The Capitol Corridor is like Caltrain with more layers of agencies.

Between four morning trains, 1,000 passengers ride from the Bay Area to Sacramento daily. Emeryville is by far the busiest station, with 135 daily commuters. They may be unhappy about spending four hours a day on a train, but they are less unhappy than they would be spending three hours a day in a car. By either mode of transit they are less unhappy than they would be living in the great Central Valley.

Read the whole piece for the stories of SF denizens who take the Muni bus to the Transbay terminal, then the Amtrak bus to the East Bay, and only then begin their journey. It reminds you how small the Puget Sound region really is. I'm sure there are people with 4-hour commutes here, but one has to really want to live or work far out there to have one.

The new design for the San Francisco Transbay Terminal. Just gorgeous.

(via)

Wired's Autopia blog has been doing some neat coverage of Bus Rapid Transit. Check it out. In this edition, they talk about the Geary Way bus route in San Francisco.

Alameda County (Oakland and Berkeley, CA) is looking at BRT. On the plus side, they can get the whole 16 miles up and running in 4 years for just $400M ($25M/mile is dirt cheap for a transit project). The downside is that, to make it work, to make it truly BRT, you need a dedicated lane, meaning you'd have to remove a general purpose lane.

The key point of controversy is the same thing that makes BRT so effective – the dedicated lane. Telegraph Avenue and East 14th would both lose a lane for car traffic in each direction. Congestion on both streets has grown increasingly frustrating in recent years for both automobile drivers and bus riders. With buses stuck in unpredictable traffic, their average speed has declined 10 miles per hour over the past 10 years. Opponents of the project claim the loss of a lane will make traffic unbearable, while proponents note that the increased speed and reliability of the bus will finally create a viable alternative to private car travel. The Draft EIR found that the removal of a lane would not significantly increase congestion, since the new bus is expected to take a significant number of drivers off the road.

And this is where it starts to fall apart. Grade-separated transit (light rail, monorail, subway, etc.) creates brand-new rights-of-way. Buses, usually, do not. They have to either (a) share with cars, which reduces their speed, or (b) build exlusive new rights-of-way, which makes them nearly as expensive as light rail.

Alameda County is trying an option (c), which is to steal lanes from general traffic. As you can see, it isn't going over too well, no matter that the EIR finds otherwise. Taking lanes is never an easy sell.

But the fissure here is useful in illumnating the various sides of the debate. As Rob Johnson (whom I assume is the same Rob Johnson from Transportation Choices Coalition) wrote in a comment at the bottom of this too-clever-by-half Crosscut article,

It seems as though all light rail critics in this region are quick to support bus service when comparing the two, but their support dissapears when it's actually time [to] fight for more bus service increases.

They're all for more bus service, but only when it's a matter of trying to deflect attention away from rail.

San Francisco's embarcadero is the most often mentioned comparison to the Alaskan Way Viaduct. So while In SF last weekend, I made sure to snap a few pictures of their waterfront, which now has a lovely street boulevard with an electric streetcar in lieu of the double-decker freeway: