Will you be inconvenienced by the BART strike?
If the strike happens, I'm working at home. I don't think I'd want to be on the road tomorrow. (I ride BART daily to and from the office in San Francisco.)
We'll see how dirty this gets depending on how long it lasts. I'd offer an opinion on the matter, but I don't know enough about the numbers to say anything meaningful.
Anyone from the Bay Area want to comment?
We'll see how dirty this gets depending on how long it lasts. I'd offer an opinion on the matter, but I don't know enough about the numbers to say anything meaningful.
Anyone from the Bay Area want to comment?
Comments
Originally posted by SpcMs
Bart Simpson??
Bay Area "Rapid" Transit
I got a taste of blogger-esque, citizen journalism last night. I was posting strike-related information before all the local news outlets. Reminded me of MacWorld NY keynotes... but perhaps that's just because I'm very tired.
Looks like I'm riding BART this morning!
Since the bay area's freeways already run at close to 100% of capacity (it seems like all the time, but certainly during commute hours), shutting down BART means putting many thousands of cars on roads that can barely handle what's already there.
The big problems with bay area transit are:
--Too many people, too many cars
--Years of development that favor the stand alone, single family house, meaning that the housing tracts keep getting further away from the jobs.
--Patch work transit systems across multiple government entities that don't coordinate. The "bay area" is comprised of over a dozen cities, three of which (SF, San Jose, and Oakland) are enormous. We have freeways, light rail, ferries, commuter trains, buses, and subways, many serving multiple cities but most behaving autonomously, with their own local tax and funding structures. CalTrans, California's highway agency, sometimes seems to be imposing "solutions" better suited to LA than northern California.
BART is a little empire unto itself. It seems to be chronically cash strapped, even with increasing rider-ship and ever increasing fares.
It recently completed an ambitious expansion to the SF airport, but it cost billions. Because of the heavy infrastructure, extending BART is like building the pyramids.
If we could go back in time, I imagine most folks out here would have opted for a "real" area wide subway type system instead of BART-- that is, a system with lots of branching lines that go a lot of places, instead of the big circle around the bay that BART can manage. And I'm sure we'd trade "fancy" for "cheaper and more of it".
Of course, when BART was conceived and begun-- in the late sixties-- bringing commuters from "the outlying regions" to downtown SF seemed perfectly reasonable, but the dispersed growth in the region since has made a hash of that idea.
BART is a vestige of 60's technocratic utopian design: "futuristic" in a dated way, sleek, expensive, and intent on imposing it's version of how people should live and work.