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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

#71

Post by warning26 »

gumby wrote: post #47
yzmtf2008 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thankfully San Francisco was never turned into https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... I'm definately not one for more highways, but this map doesn't look _that_ different from SF today?

Do you remember the elevated freeway above what is now Hayes Valley, or the huge elevated freeway that blocked the view of the bay and made the embarcadero dark and grungy? And they wanted to build more .

Yup, this plan called for not one but two freeways through golden gate park. After all, why waste space on a park when it could be freeways?

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#72

Post by chipotle_coyote »

yodon wrote: post #41

This reads like a highly fanciful interpretation of a hard set of large scale planning decisions that needed to be made, trying to frame it as some kind of "Machiavellian" conspiracy. Light rail in the US in the past 50 years has objectively been an over priced under utilized boondoggle. It's entirely believable buses may well have been the far better option for crossing the golden gate, even if a guy who works for t…

As others have pointed out, BART is not a light rail system any more than Caltrain is.

I haven't taken the AC transit bus system from SF to the East Bay, so maybe it's an exception to the general rule of trains going faster than buses. I have taken buses in San Francisco and the South Bay, though, and a few times I've taken AC Transit buses around Oakland/Alameda, and I'll just say those rides have...not been exceptions to that general rule. When a bus and a rail system are going between roughly the same points, assuming the rail line has dedicated lanes/tunnels and gets priority over car traffic when it has to intermingle, it's going to win nearly every time.

Having said that, I think if a city is willing to put in dedicated bus-only lanes/streets with their own priority signals, they can get a bus system which meets or beats light rail -- actual light rail like Muni or VTA -- for less money. I've seen this in some areas and they're pretty great. But they're far from common, I suspect because they tend to meet the same kind of pushback from people doing "rational economic analysis," e.g., pointing out that it's going to be way cheaper if you just uses buses and do not give them any special treatment. I mean, yes, it will, absolutely, and it'll be way slower than rail.

For the record, I just looked up the speed difference between a BART ride between Embarcadero and Ashby and the Transbay bus going from the Salesforce Transit Center to the same Ashby station, and it's 20 minutes by BART compared to 40 by bus. If you want the same two starting points, then it is still faster to walk from the STC to the Embarcadero station and catch BART than it is to take the bus. And of course it is, because BART trains hit 80 mph when they're in the Transbay Tube! I believe you when you say that you, specifically, made it to the office or back home faster when you took the bus, but that's not because the busses were faster. They were not.

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#73

Post by genocidicbunny »

bryananderson wrote: post #51
BrianHenryIE wrote: post #20

I learned recently, there used to be trains on the Bay Bridge! https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/50-years-since-trains-cr... I'm surprised there's not an easy rule of thumb: if a road has over two lanes in each direction, the route is busy enough to sustain trains/light rail.

You can step inside (and perhaps even ride) a Key System bridge unit at the Western Railway Museum near Suisun City, which has its own electrified railway line! Once upon a time, this line was part of an electric railway connecting Oakland and San Francisco to Sacramento. A hundred years later, electrification between Sacramento and the Bay is a long-term wish list item for Capitol Corridor. It is such a shame that t…

It didn't just atrophy, in many places in the US it was actively attacked and killed off in favour of the automobile.

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#74

Post by yodon »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #72
yodon wrote: post #41

This reads like a highly fanciful interpretation of a hard set of large scale planning decisions that needed to be made, trying to frame it as some kind of "Machiavellian" conspiracy. Light rail in the US in the past 50 years has objectively been an over priced under utilized boondoggle. It's entirely believable buses may well have been the far better option for crossing the golden gate, even if a guy who works for t…

As others have pointed out, BART is not a light rail system any more than Caltrain is. I haven't taken the AC transit bus system from SF to the East Bay, so maybe it's an exception to the general rule of trains going faster than buses. I have taken buses in San Francisco and the South Bay, though, and a few times I've taken AC Transit buses around Oakland/Alameda, and I'll just say those rides have...not been excepti…

I like your analysis and discussion, but the speed issue isn't about peak speed or speed between easy matching points (which of course mainly means time to go from one BART station to another by bus or by BART since BART can only go between BART stations, and that's a test that BART will always win and that the buses don't optimize for precisely because BART handles it better, including factoring in the walk from STC to BART in the analysis). The real test as a passenger is actual travel time from one's starting point to one's destination. If your start and end align closely with the details of a rail route, rail will almost always win, but most of the surface area isn't close to a rail route or station (at least in the Bay Area) and bus systems are able to reach more points and adjust routes more frequently than rail systems, enabling them to do better optimizations for better total travel times for more passengers, particularly as demographic and land use patterns change.

SF has BART. It should maintain it and make the most of it, but I'm far from convinced it would be the right place to put that amount of transportation dollars if SF didn't have BART and were trying to define its future mass transit system. That's the scenario the planners described in the article were trying to consider, and I'm very willing to believe there were much more legitimate reasons for favoring bus systems than the author of the article implies.

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#75

Post by yodon »

mjg59 wrote: post #57
yodon wrote: post #41

This reads like a highly fanciful interpretation of a hard set of large scale planning decisions that needed to be made, trying to frame it as some kind of "Machiavellian" conspiracy. Light rail in the US in the past 50 years has objectively been an over priced under utilized boondoggle. It's entirely believable buses may well have been the far better option for crossing the golden gate, even if a guy who works for t…

Pre-COVID, AC transit moved a total of about 50% as many people across the bay per day as BART did in a single peak hour. The bus may well meet your specific requirements, but it's pretty clear that that's not the case in general. That may not have generalised to the Golden Gate crossing, but there's evidence that the bus service there is insufficient - the Larkspur ferry was operating at above nominal capacity at pe…

People don't like buses, at least in the US. That's a marketing problem which greatly reduces both ridership and funding, two things which then make many of the negative perceptions of bus systems into realities.

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#76

Post by mjg59 »

yodon wrote: post #75
mjg59 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-COVID, AC transit moved a total of about 50% as many people across the bay per day as BART did in a single peak hour. The bus may well meet your specific requirements, but it's pretty clear that that's not the case in general. That may not have generalised to the Golden Gate crossing, but there's evidence that the bus service there is insufficient - the Larkspur ferry was operating at above nominal capacity at pe…

People don't like buses, at least in the US. That's a marketing problem which greatly reduces both ridership and funding, two things which then make many of the negative perceptions of bus systems into realities.

It's not just a marketing problem! With three minute headway, you can turn up a train that can carry up to ~2000 people (under BART's definition of crush load) and have another train there three minutes later. The largest AC Transit transbay bus holds 78 passengers, which means to provide an equivalent service you'd need 25 of them leaving every three minutes, or a double decker coach leaving the Salesforce terminal every 8 seconds. This is, given the infrastructure that exists, obviously impossible. Even given a world where instead of building the transbay tube we built another bridge devoted to buses, it wouldn't be possible without demolishing a bunch more of downtown to build a much larger bus terminal (or, alternatively, building it underground instead, and then we're really getting into a position where the economic benefits of buses are much less compelling)

I'm a big fan of high quality long-distance bus transit, and I've used it a bunch whenever I'm in Seattle. But it's really not obvious to me that experiences of buses in San Francisco give a great deal of information about how viable they as an alternative to genuine rail rapid transit systems.

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#77

Post by yodon »

mjg59 wrote: post #76
yodon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't like buses, at least in the US. That's a marketing problem which greatly reduces both ridership and funding, two things which then make many of the negative perceptions of bus systems into realities.

It's not just a marketing problem! With three minute headway, you can turn up a train that can carry up to ~2000 people (under BART's definition of crush load) and have another train there three minutes later. The largest AC Transit transbay bus holds 78 passengers, which means to provide an equivalent service you'd need 25 of them leaving every three minutes, or a double decker coach leaving the Salesforce terminal…

You've obviously thought about this a lot and these are obviously far from trivial optimization problems to select between. The problem with the 2,000 person train calculation is that the train is already full by the time it hits downtown, by virtue of the nature of the route it travels which was defined in 1960. It's not able to pick up anywhere near 2,000 people at the downtown stops during rush hour, so that 78 passenger bus with a route designed to start where and when it is needed ends up being far more competitive with the nominally more load carrying train than the simple calculation suggests.

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#79

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

anamax wrote: post #36
BrianHenryIE wrote: post #20

I learned recently, there used to be trains on the Bay Bridge! https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/50-years-since-trains-cr... I'm surprised there's not an easy rule of thumb: if a road has over two lanes in each direction, the route is busy enough to sustain trains/light rail.

> if a road has over two lanes in each direction, the route is busy enough to sustain trains/light rail. That's necessary, but not sufficient. Rail requires enough commonality or at least linearity of both source and destination. If it's an octopus on either end of said road, rail doesn't work.

What, does hub-and-spoke not work?

Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history

#80

Post by mjg59 »

yodon wrote: post #77
mjg59 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a marketing problem! With three minute headway, you can turn up a train that can carry up to ~2000 people (under BART's definition of crush load) and have another train there three minutes later. The largest AC Transit transbay bus holds 78 passengers, which means to provide an equivalent service you'd need 25 of them leaving every three minutes, or a double decker coach leaving the Salesforce terminal…

You've obviously thought about this a lot and these are obviously far from trivial optimization problems to select between. The problem with the 2,000 person train calculation is that the train is already full by the time it hits downtown, by virtue of the nature of the route it travels which was defined in 1960. It's not able to pick up anywhere near 2,000 people at the downtown stops during rush hour, so that 78 pa…

I used to work at 24th and had no problem getting a seat in peak hours - the majority of the people taking BART eastbound across the bay are getting on at downtown stations. Given existing infrastructure, it would be literally impossible to shift that load to buses instead.
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