How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history | Hacker News Reader

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

seungylee14.substack.com

134 pointsmcyc105 comments

It seems like every major infrastructure folly, at its heart, simplifies to "Someone made their career espousing a certain worldview, and when facts changed in future decades, were unwilling or unable to change their now-famous beliefs."

In this case, car > rail.

Which was true and progressive, for a period! Say, 1950 to 1970? But then became false as the growth rate of cars outscaled roads.

> 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 automobile, tire, and petroleum industries though.

I think it's fair to say mass adoption of automobiles was viewed progressively in that time period. Certainly not by all, but by many. It was a new disruptive technology that allowed you to move people and things in a cost efficient way that previously wasn't possible. When your only option for public transit required an upfront investment in fixed rail lines, and then a cheap comfortable bus with rubber wheels and adjustable routes comes along, it seems like a huge innovation.

Also from the article: "A widespread misconception exists that well-functioning streetcar systems were intentionally put out of business by a conspiratorial alliance of tire and auto manufacturers in the 1940s and 1950s…In reality, many streetcar companies were never reliably profitable, and they suffered from overcapitalization, inadequate maintenance, and poor service". In comparison to that, all these cheap and reliable "rubber tires" vehicles probably seemed pretty progressive.

Of course, knowing what we know now, it's easy to see how incredibly short sighted this was. I sure wish we hadn't ripped out all those rail lines.

They're trying to rip out rail lines right now in Santa Cruz

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 limited to what they could carry. In their day, these were very progressive changes.

The entertainment industry would be far different if not for automobiles. Look at woodstock. Such iconic american activities and mass gatherings would not have been possible without widespread cheap personal transportation.

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 and now those suburbs are in dire need of urbanization. That’s due to general growth over time. While it looks terrible now, that’s more because people are greatly resisting converting suburban areas to urban, and doesn’t invalidate the initial decisions to create suburban areas.

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.

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.

Mass Suburbanization is bankrupting American cities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Thanks, great video!

> 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?

To be fair it was going to be underground through the park

> What does “true and progressive” mean?

"For whom" may be the more pertinent question. It's impossible to untangle mass the politics of transit in that era from the politics of segregation. Hence the famous bus incident.

When are we going to start treating failure to change your mind as the moral failing that it is?

It's absolutely a moral failing, but an understandable one.

If you spend 10+ years as a proponent of something, become famous and well-compensated for your expertise in it, and are surrounded by colleagues and employees who also believe in it... it's very hard to say "We've become wrong. Let's do things differently."

It's the personal version of successful companies failing to adapt to innovation in their market.

When are we going to stop pretending that mass transit is politically (or even physically) viable in the vast majority of the US landmass?

> the growth rate of cars outscaled roads

That's underselling it a bit. The growth rate of roads was deliberately stalled in the 70s. We just elected not to build new infrastructure in most places, and coast with what we had. There are some exceptions, but they are just that -- exceptions.

Meanwhile, it seems that the same people who didn't want to build any more road infrastructure also didn't want to build mass transit rail infrastructure either. And so here we are.

Now, it's probably too late without a major cultural shift and realignment of priorities and sensitivities. We give everyone a seat at the table and every last one of them has veto power. So ... nothing happens. Without unanimous consensus.

Hell, Oregon & Washington spent $175 million just to plan out a new bridge, and over $100 million of that was just pretty pictures. In the end, too many vetoes, too much fighting, we gave up. Eventually we will try again but maybe it will take the existing I-5 bridge dropping into the river from old age before agreement can be reached.

Cost disease. Other countries have been completing public works projects of similar-or-larger scope for dramatically less than it costs here. How can anyone rationally accept $175 MILLION (pinky finger) for bridge planning?

There are two many people sticking their hands out in American projects.

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.

M25 from J14-J15 (Heathrow Airport), but I think that's the only place. And it's not through a city.

There were plans for three circular motorways in central London. Thankfully people came to their senses and it was only partially completed.

> We just elected not to build new infrastructure in most places, and coast with what we had.

If you're talking about facilitating more automobiles, I am not sure what you are going to be able to do in the Bay Area, L.A., etc.

I don't think it's for lack of trying or resources, roads simply don't scale. Bad weather, one bad accident on the freeway, rush "hour" (ha ha).

See also John Forester and the cult of “vehicular cycling”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)

https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a32257789/vehicular-cyclin...

In a market-republic society, initiatives such as private automobile technology create a formidable alliance of interests which mass behind the concept of "car > rail":

- Automobile manufacturers: they can sell more cars.

- Fuel industry: Petroleum exploration, extraction, refining, transportation, distribution, and retail sales.

- Independent automobile dealers and repair facilities: sales & services.

- Auto suppliers: Support industry based around the manufacturing and repair.

- Construction companies: Road and highway construction and maintenance.

- Travel and tourism: Auto travel and auto-based tourism ("road trip", car rentals associated with other transport, etc.) emerge.

- Real estate. Automobiles promote suburban sprawl real estate and development. This brings in construction, development, finance, brokers, title insurance, and more.

- Media: Auto advertising becomes a major component of print, broadcast, and cable media.

- Training and instruction: Drivers' training and related services.

- Licencing: Government infrastructure around vehicle and driver certification and registration.

- Sport: Auto racing creates its own fandom and dynamics.

- Popular culture: Various fandoms, tribes, and allegiances based around specific brands, concepts, and activities.

It would be difficult to intentionally devise a more effective self-sustaining, self-perpetuating market-political consortium. I don't believe that the automobile-support-industrial-complex was intentionally conceived --- it is an emergent concept. But once emerged it's phenomenally resilient.

We've seen a few related sectors. The military-industrial complex identified by Eisenhower is one. I'd argue that the healthcare-industrial complex is another. The food and ag sector likely a third.

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?

The claim was that rail works if there is enough traffic between two points. That claim is false. It's false even if it's the same traffic at both points.

Hub and spoke is a specific kind of a set of pairs of points. (One point in each pair is in all members of the set.)

Hub and spoke doesn't work unless there's enough traffic to each of the endpoints.

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 the US allowed its passenger rail system to atrophy.

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

The Key System - "Wheels of Progress" (1945-1948)[1]

[1] https://archive.org/details/MarchofP1945

Mildly interesting; the main bridge in Lisbon, Portugal (Ponte de 25 abril) was built by the same company as the golden gate bridge and looks almost identical. It had a railway added in 1999 underneath.

> the main bridge in Lisbon, Portugal (Ponte de 25 abril) was built by the same company as the golden gate bridge

I don't think this is true, according to Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was build by McClintic-Marshall, and the Ponte de 25 abril by the American Bridge Company [0]. You might be confusing this with the Bay Bridge [1], which was build by the same company and also had rail service until 1963.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bridge_Company

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_...

It is especially confusing to visitors from San Francisco, because the bridge has an architectural design like the Bay Bridge, but is painted orange like the Golden Gate Bridge!

i guess it kinda sorta does. but not really.

Reminds 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...

[1]http://www.ddbo.com/mengat-office

As I understand it, the Southern Pacific was concerned less with avoiding competition for its Peninsula Commute service than with ensuring that it wouldn’t ever be required to take over BART and bear its operating losses. This was long before Amtrak or the 4R Act, and railroads were still under strict economic regulation by the ICC and CPUC, so the prospect of being ordered to take over a money-losing passenger operation was a real concern.

That’s also the actual reason, or so the story goes, for BART’s non-standard 5′6″ (1676 mm) track gauge: the physical impossibility of interchange with SP’s lines was one more assurance that the SP wouldn’t be entangled with BART or its costs.

"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.

I mentally applied the 5 Whys to each of these explanations. I suggest others do the same.

I think you're conflating several different strands of this story - the idea that San Mateo withdrew from BART in part for NYMBY-ish and exclusionary reasons is fairly well supported.

It’s fascinating how quickly “NIMBY” has become a very generic and rather vicious moral pejorative applied to anyone that does not support development.

It previously described people who did not support development in their neighborhood, but would support it elsewhere.

Now it just means “anyone opposed to any development I deem a moral/ethical/equity imperative”.

I remember when pro-development sentiment was recognized as gentrifying wealth extraction, and both anti-progressive and anti-environmentalist.

Now it’s somehow exclusionary and anti-progressive to not support high-density development projects backed by national real estate firms with trillion-plus dollar investment funds.

Wealth extraction from a permanent renter class is progressive orthodoxy, and individual residents are the baddies. Talk about a PR coup.

We are not talking about the same type of development today as in the midcentury decades. In those days, “redevelopment” was a euphemism for the wholesale destruction of entire neighborhoods by use of eminent domain, whether the residents liked it or not. Promises to maybe someday build replacement housing which the old residents could afford were never kept. The “redevelopment” process also had a funny way of only happening to minority neighborhoods. This was indeed gentrifying wealth extraction, and racist to boot.

The housing developments which get fought over in SF today are not demolishing tenants’ existing homes—indeed SF has laws preventing demolition of housing which has been tenant-occupied at any time in the last several years. These developments would only add new supply to the market. Turning a Nordstrom valet parking lot into new housing (24% of which is below market rate) is not the same thing as wiping out thousands of exiting homes to build pricier ones.

Anti-development sentiment is very understandably fed by the memory of the vast harms of the “redevelopment” years. But we have to recognize the difference.

I'm using it to make to describe the history in less morally direct and potentially forum-inflammatory terms. The fairly recent history of urban and transit planning in the US is, in reality, full of decisions and outcomes of highly dubious morality. This is a pretty vanilla mainstream interpretation rather than some just-so story promulgated by 'progressives' as the GP appears to suggest.

The three choices are mandate sterilization or birth control, restrict movement with internal borders, or build more housing.

Until the anti-development types acknowledge this they are completely full of shit.

We’ve literally created a situation where the next generation has nowhere to live. That’s why people are mad.

Marin doesn't have the built environment to support BART anyway. In 1960 it was the smallest of the proposed counties, having a population only about as large as Berkeley. It remains ridiculously small.

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.

I 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.

I wonder if this decision contributed to San Francisco's population declining year after year from 1950 until 1980, before growing again. SF's population today is only about 12% larger than it was in 1950. Basically, SF has looked the same from a traffic standpoint for the past 70+ years, which is pretty astounding.

Reading the article, it mentions that "traffic control" for buses was one of the reasons pushed for why a subway wasn't needed. Interesting! As someone who lived and worked and rode the bus in SF for a total of six years, I'd just like to know what happened to that plan?? Buses should never have to stop for traffic, in my opinion.

And on top of that, the rebound is not evenly distributed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...

The really dumb thing was San Mateo county backed out initially, so that for a long time BART didn't go to SFO.

Yeah, see my comment explaining why. Basically corrupt f*ks did it.

> 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 entirely new housing and business developments along its routes

Thirty-thousand people would have lived here — now it’s a ghost town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marincello

I particularly “like” this Marincello opposition piece with what I assume is Mt. Tam being encircled by a menacing and dangerous invader whose color-coding is entirely arbitrary, I’m sure: https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2013/11/marin-sna...

As mentioned in the article, here’s a map of the NWP electric interurban rail system that ran passenger service in Marin until 1941: https://i.redd.it/zrvygksiojm51.jpg

One of its electric powerhouses still stands near the junction at Baltimore Park, and it’s in that beautiful Beaux Arts architectural style that was still popular in the 1910s.

Imagine if Marin looked like the rest of the areas surrounding SF: endless, endless suburban sprawl.

They made the right choice to prioritize open space and minimal development.

You can ascribe whatever motives you like, but we know what the result would have looked like, and it was not a winning idea.

False dichotomy imo since the sprawl is a direct result of the same exclusionary mindset that economically disincentivizes (and often outright forbids) upzoning. Remember that the very concept of single-family zoning / minimum parcel sizes was a Californian invention, first codified in 1916 in Berkeley shortly after the state passed a law prohibiting land ownership by nonwhites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...

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 :)

https://youtu.be/0c0TzJTs82s

This is the best resource I've seen.

There are also some tracks halfway up Railroad Grade on Tam. When there are heavy rains, railroad ties wash onto the trail pretty regularly, too!

Curious: do you think the Alto tunnel will ever get reopened? :)

Neat, I’ll have to go check that out again. As for the tunnel I’m not really plugged into the local politics enough to have an informed guess. From what I’ve read SMART seems to be widely hated by these same groups of extreme-anti-growth people, and the other tunnel whose name I forget has already set the precedent of SMART sharing the tunnel with a walking/bike trail. That makes me lean toward “probably not” since it could incentivize southward SMART expansion from the current Larkspur terminus :/

e: I also want to go look for any remnants of the White Hill / Bothin Tunnel if it isn’t on a parcel owned by someone who would mind. There is a trail right there that goes down to the parking area at the SFD Blvd bridge, but the actual portal remains (if there are any) might be on the Girl Scout Camp’s land. Unsure.

Good info!

Re white hill, are you thinking of Tamarancho?

Yep, here-ish for the later standard-gauge tunnel over toward Railroad Ave in Woodacre:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0043212,-122.6207934,115m/da...

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1SkFrgLj-TR4gyw9Y4m...

Some relevant pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130107031505/https://www.marin...

https://www.marindirect.com/fxhistory/whiteshill.html

http://www.pacificng.com/template.php?page=roads/ca/npc/gotg...

Why 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.

It's a newsletter about transit, for transit nerds. If you're subscribing to that newsletter, you know what BART stands for.

It's an article written by a Bay Area person for other Bay Area people, so it's assumed you know what it is. Kinda like how articles about computers don't tell you what RAM is.

Yep, perfect time to use a hyperlink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

The 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.

Urban rail usage in my city was down 20% from 2000 pre-covid and has lost another 60% or so from Covid. That's despite a ~25% increase in population.

Similar story around the US. Outside of NYC public transit usage is declining.

Seattle's Link light rail, a relatively new thing, has been extremely successful. Ridership for the first few years well exceeded expectations. I'm not sure of the COVID impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_light_rail

You don’t say where you’re from, but pre-Covid, BART’s usage had gotten so high that planners were trying to figure out how to squeeze more trains into limited headways so that the downtown track platforms didn’t become unsafe from overcrowding at rush hours. Literally it was as many trains as they could fit on the tracks.

So, add SF to your list — it’s not just NYC.

At least, it wasn’t. BART ridership is still down 60+% from peak pre-Covid.

There were 8% fewer transit (bus and rail) trips in the Bay Area in 2018 than in 1982, despite the population increasing by over 30% and the transit systems were expanded during that time period. BART had a 17% decrease in ridership from 2015 to 2018 despite them increasing train service by 15%, which is probably what you're referring to. As of December 2021, BART ridership is only 25% of what it was pre-covid and they have reduced service to 75% of what it used to be.

From the BART Wikipedia article:

"After six straight years of expansion, ridership growth began to slow in late 2016, dropping by 1.7% in October 2016 from the prior year. Although the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017, showed an average weekday ridership of 423,395, the second-highest in BART's history, this was a 2.3% drop from FY 2016. Ridership continued to decline by approximately 3% per year between 2016 and 2019, mirroring a nationwide decline in mass transit ridership in the second half of the decade."

Interesting, though I think this misses the whole story. (In particular, BART at peak hours was dangerously congested, though I won't argue with data showing that other uses declined enough that the average was below zero.)

But perhaps this speaks to your broader point about car ownership and public transit use. Even SF itself has more registered vehicles than inhabitants.

> There were 8% fewer transit (bus and rail) trips in the Bay Area in 2018 than in 1982

Btw, I'd be curious to read the source for this!

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.

That’s a bit of a catch-22 because part of the reason the county is isolated and small is because there are few good commuting options to the rest of the bay where most of the work is there.

If they added BART there, the potential for adding density would make more sense. Obviously other factors like terrain and NIMBY-ism play roles as well, but you don’t need to reject all rail options within reach of a major metro just because people don’t live there yet.

> there are few good commuting options to the rest of the bay where most of the work is there

Ferry service from Marin is pretty reasonable during commute times. It's a 30 min ride from Sausalito to SF. Bart from Marin to FiDi probably would be similar, just with more frequent trains.

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.

Its a entire county. Wikipedia lists 11 cities and towns in the county, the largest of which has a population of 57k.

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 the light rail system today doesn't think so.

Having ridden both BART and the AC transit bus system across the bay from SF to the East Bay countless times, I'll take the bus over BART every time. The bus system is better, cheaper, cleaner, safer feeling, and faster.

Bus systems are cheaper and more flexible in the face of population density changes and land use changes than light rail. You don't need a conspiracy to have concluded bus systems are a better transit solution than light rail. Rational economic analysis can get you to buses just as easily (though you do have to fight off the lobbying campaigns by the large construction firms that want to tap the insane stream of public funds available when building a light rail system).

Having ridden VTA busses, VTA light rail, Caltrain and BART for years, I’ll always take railed transit over busses any day. Like it’s not a close contest.

> 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 the light rail system today doesn't think so.

BART is not light rail, it is a fully grade separated heavy rail rapid transit system. Muni operates San Francisco's light rail network

Regardless of the pros and cons of rail vs buses, isn’t it machiavelllian to sabotage a project because you personally don’t like it? It would have been one thing if he’d lobbied against rail, the claim is he pushed for a false claim that the Golden Gate Bridge couldn’t support it. That’s different

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 peak hours, which suggests that there's meaningful demand for public transit that isn't being satisfied by the buses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So well written and you're working for BART? What's going on with this world? Promote this guy.

For us stupid Europeans - what is BART? First two paragraphs don’t explain it.

Bay Area Rapid Transit (?)

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.

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-...

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.

Definitely not singular. BART was highly influential when built, unfortunately. WMATA has some of the same mixed s-bahn u-bahn characteristics, especially with the silver line extension

When was the last time anyone in this thread saw an SF BART terminal of late?

Marcus Yallow in shambles.

SF needs a Robert Moses type figure

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