How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
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How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
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Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#2The population of Marin County is only 258k, and more like 175k when Bart planning began. Building that line would probably serve more people in SF than in Marin, so it never really made sense.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#3I feel there has to be a huge amount of cronyism and corruption going on in the California government, otherwise how can anyone explain the astronomical costs in every rail project.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#4The really dumb thing was San Mateo county backed out initially, so that for a long time BART didn't go to SFO.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#5Reminds me of this additional BART fubar, thanks to which we have no BART all the way around the bay.
Basically two self interested people on the San Mateo county board of supervisors kept the county residents from even voting on participating in the BART system! One was the head of Caltrain, fending off competition, the other a real estate developer.
NB, the Bohannon's are now mega rich real estate owners [1] in the Bay Area.
Electric trains could have been here long ago. In the late 1950s, San Mateo County was one of five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area Transit District. The district could assess taxes and issue bonds and had a round-the-Bay light-rail system planned, according to a history at the website of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).
The plan derailed, according to the BART account, because San Mateo County supervisors were "cool to the plan." They chose to exit the district in December 1961, citing the proposed system's "high costs" and the "adequate service" from Southern Pacific commuter trains, now Caltrain.
George Mader, who retired in 2010 after 45 years as Portola Valley's town planner, has another angle. The "cool to the plan" characters were two men of influence, he said in a March 11 letter to Portola Valley Mayor Ted Driscoll.
The "major problems," Mr. Mader said, were T. Louis Chess, who chaired the county Board of Supervisors and worked for Southern Pacific Railway, and David D. Bohannon, a "major player" in the county and the developer of the then-new Hillsdale Shopping Center.
BART would take shoppers away from Hillsdale and into San Francisco, "where shopping was rather good at the time," Mr. Mader said. For his part, Mr. Chess was protecting Southern Pacific. And the county voters would have had to decide on whether to join BART.
"These short-sighted and selfish people did not let the residents vote," Mr. Mader said. "A travesty!"
As for high-speed rail today, Mr. Mader suggests "a much better solution" to the route controversy: Stop it at San Jose and extend BART around the Bay using the money that would have been spent on the South Bay and Peninsula sections of a high-speed rail line.
[0]https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2011/03/29/planner-has-alte...
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#6I feel there has to be a huge amount of cronyism and corruption going on in the California government, otherwise how can anyone explain the astronomical costs in every rail project.
California cronyism is enforced by the CEQA. If your project doesn't buy off the right people, then they will ruin it with interminable environmental-impact lawsuits, a problem largely orthogonal to any mitigation of environmental impact.
There's also a measure of incompetence, like the story the LA Times had about the high speed rail planners who asked the Central Valley farmers if they could just put their grown nut trees into pots for a few years while the rail line is being constructed. And, of course, all the financial estimates were laughably optimistic from project inception.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#7Why does the article take so long to explain what BART stands for? Even then, it assumes a lot of prior knowledge.
This is one of the reasons I tend to read the comments on articles more than the articles themselves.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#8"The story goes: Marin County, worried about cost of the extension and engineering concerns of running BART on the Golden Gate Bridge, ultimately backed out of the BART District. Fin."
I want to push back on this slightly ...
The received wisdom - repeated ad infinitum - among bay area progressives is that Marin County rejected BART based on racist, exclusionary, NIMBY concerns. That is how "the story goes" in these discussions.
I have never heard anyone mention engineering issues.
The reality - which the article explains - is that both of these narratives are wrong:
Marin County approved BART and was ready to proceed and it was the San Mateo rejection that ultimately killed it.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#9The population of Marin County is only 258k, and more like 175k when Bart planning began. Building that line would probably serve more people in SF than in Marin, so it never really made sense.
Urban rail is one of the few things where "if you build it, they will come" is actually true, so Marin's population would almost certainly be much larger today if it was connected by BART.
Whether that's a good thing is, of course, a separate question.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#10The population of Marin County is only 258k, and more like 175k when Bart planning began. Building that line would probably serve more people in SF than in Marin, so it never really made sense.
It's the other way around, isn't it? Having public transit would have allowed more people to move out of the city while commuting there for work. Analogous to what happened with the subway in New York, which made outlying boroughs accessible.