For us stupid Europeans - what is BART? First two paragraphs don’t explain it.
From my last visit there in winter, it seems to serve as a homeless encampment (at night at least), but also as a cheap transportation device for the brave.
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
#92For us stupid Europeans - what is BART? First two paragraphs don’t explain it.
Its a subway type system in the bay area (Bay Area Rapid Transit). It's central location is san francisco. If you live in the san francisco neighboring cities you can use this BART system to get to work. It also connects two airport systems: SFO and Oakland.
https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/BART-...
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#93For us stupid Europeans - what is BART? First two paragraphs don’t explain it.
It's a cross between a metro system and a regional rail system in San Franciso, California. Provides regional rail service using metro technology. An odd singular hybrid.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Below is a video of a Marin County Supervisor reading a letter sent in by a prominent local doctor regarding the SMART train project. It's this kind of thing that IMHO, is at least part of the reason why there will never be BART to Marin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfO8CCMmHjA
I think that congestion charging is the way around this. If you want to drive to the city, fine, but it will cost you $50. Train suddenly looking like a decent option.
Bridge toll is already $10.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> car > rail. Which was true and progressive, for a period! Say, 1950 to 1970? What does “true and progressive” mean? The freeway expansions of the mid 20th century cutting through city centers were disastrous all over the USA, right from the start. Horrible for urban society, economy, equity, ... Thankfully San Francisco was never turned into https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... Great for…
The urban sprawl created by the automobile was not a bad thing in its time. It democratized living. No longer were workers beholdant to landlords owning buildings next to the factory. Now everyone could live basically wherever they wanted. A new job no longer meant moving house and home across the city. Consumers had a far wider choice in where they purchased goods. And when they spotted a good deal they were not lim…
It was only really beneficial for a small and arguably already well off population of largely white, middle and upper middle class people. And in the process of doing that excluded the rest of society from its benefits.
Sprawl particularly exasperated inequality by basically requiring everyone who wanted to succeed to own a very expensive (both upfront and overtime) thing.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#96The 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.
Calling a city with 2-300k residents basically "too small for public transit to work" is definitly the most US thing I heared in a while.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most other counties don’t attempt to build motorways through cities the way we do in the US. Until moving to San Francisco I’d never seen a 6 lanes each way motorway. Gained a new appreciation for the public transit in U.K. cities outside of London which I’d previously considered shitty.
I did a quick survey of Asia and it seems like they are happy to build expressways through downtown. Tokyo has them, Shanghai has them, Taipei has them, Seoul has them.
East Asian expressways often are less disruptive to the city than in the US. There typically aren't as many, they're narrower, and the ramps and interchanges aren't as big or as numerous.
Not always true, but by and large they don't dominate the city core nearly as much as in most of the US. Comparing Detroit's interchanges vs Tokyo's is stark: Tokyo is an order of magnitude larger city, but has fewer of those large cloverleaf interchanges that take up a ton of space and ruin the walkability of the area. Detroit has multiple in the city center.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The urban sprawl created by the automobile was not a bad thing in its time. It democratized living. No longer were workers beholdant to landlords owning buildings next to the factory. Now everyone could live basically wherever they wanted. A new job no longer meant moving house and home across the city. Consumers had a far wider choice in where they purchased goods. And when they spotted a good deal they were not lim…
Yeah, suburbanization produced a tremendous amount of value allowing people to live in large, SFH homes with yards without having to pay high prices for land. I think we’ll always have suburbs at the urban:rural transition and that the automobile will play an important role in making them work. In a lot of urban areas now the population/demand is such that people have expanded well pass the initial sets of suburbs an…
As another commenter opined, in retrospect the greatest failure seems to have been missed planning to evolve suburbs into cities of their own.
An alternate reality would have seen the US purchase rights of way between traditional urban cores and new suburb centers, then run rail (and upzone density around that rail) once that suburb attained sufficient population to merit. Then build sufficient park-and-ride capacity to handle the suburb's population's last mile needs.
So basically, what China does. Except with less upfront heavy construction (because the US doesn't need to drive a demand-based economy) and more emphasis on right of way purchase (because the US has stronger property rights).
Instead, we largely grew the first generation of suburbs and then... just didn't invest or plan non-road transit. And so began growing suburbs outside of suburbs, and none of them connected with a high-throughput transit network.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#99Earlier 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 a marketing problem, it's a comfort problem.
Source: Me who lived in the Bay for years without a car and knew the VTA, Caltrain and BART like the back of my hand.
Re: How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
#100> But Jenkins vehemently opposed BART’s extension on the “human aspects involved in such a project.” You don’t say? http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html That little spot of blue there in Marin County is Marin City, the remnants of the World War 2 ship-building company Marinship’s company town. > In a 1960 letter to a bridge district board member, Jenkins argued that the only hope for BART to succeed was with en…
Nice history! I ride by that powerhouse regularly. There are old train tracks peppered throughout lower Marin that speak to a different kind of place than it is today.
Sorry for veering off topic but by chance do you mean actual rails and not just visible ROWs like the elevated Center Blvd between San Anselmo and Fairfax? If so I’d love to know where so I can go get some photos of them and especially of their steelmarks showing the foundry name, year, and month they were rolled. I’ve explored a lot of it between Sausalito and the Alto Tunnel and never noticed any, but I also wasn’t looking very hard :)