Will you be inconvenienced by the BART strike?

xoolxool
Posted:
in AppleOutsider edited January 2014
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?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    spcmsspcms Posts: 407member
    Bart Simpson??
  • Reply 2 of 7
    durin oakenskindurin oakenskin Posts: 202member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by SpcMs

    Bart Simpson??



    Bay Area "Rapid" Transit
  • Reply 3 of 7
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    No, because I live in Austin.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    meaninglessmeaningless Posts: 51member
    Nope. I'm in the city and rely more on the MUNI. Anyway, looks like the strike is on hold with that "tentative" deal they made last night. Part of me expected that though - that dramatic race down to the last minute. I think that public backlash sobered them up in the end though. It seems that alot of people still remeber the last strike in the 90's. Anyway, public transport here is in a bit of a pickle no? High cost of living, rising operation costs - and nobody wants to pay higher rates.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    xoolxool Posts: 2,460member
    Looks like the strike was averted, and at the 13th hours.



    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!
  • Reply 6 of 7
    colanderofdeathcolanderofdeath Posts: 1,261member
    I'm sure that my brother will be happy. He has to take the BART from Daly City to Richmond every day.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    For non-Bay Areans, BART is the local light rail system. Not really a "go anywhere" system like NY's subways, it was conceived as, and still largely is, a feeder train from the suburbs to downtown SF.



    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.



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