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Comment by theatrus2 | Hacker News Reader

The bay is sufficiently less population dense, making lots of projects "bang for the buck" seem off.

Population density is certainly part of it. Manhattan has about 4x the population density of San Francisco. But 24 hour subway service can be practical with lower population density. E.g. Chicago has a lower population density than San Francisco, but has 24 hour service on the red line (along the lake shore) and a very robust commuter rail service. The key difference is commuting patterns. In the Bay area, people commute haphazardly between suburbs. In NYC and Chicago, everyone from the suburbs commutes downtown in the morning and back out to the suburbs in the evening. It's much easier to have an effective transportation system when everyone is going in the same direction.

The problem here is that BART is not a metro service - MUNI is supposed to be, but doesn't do a particularly good job of it, so BART has been co-opted over the years by residents in some neighborhoods to pick up the pieces.

San Francisco first needs to figure out what BART is - if its future is as a rapid transit municipal system (that's tied together with other municipalities), or if it should be strictly a commuter and inter-city transport system.

The current operating model is not a bad one assuming what you want is a regional commuter rail system, it fails utterly at being municipal transport.

I'd suggest that the "failures" of BART are really the extension of the massive, completely unmitigated clusterfuck that is MUNI. Looking at the recent history of MUNI is like watching a really bad slapstick act - it'd be funny if it weren't so damned sad. MUNI is broken, its system of governance is broken, and the propensity for California/Bay Area to engage in hyper-democracy is keeping it broken (ballot measure ALL the things!)

San Francisco holds 800K people in 47 square miles of land - the argument that this is insufficient density for a proper rapid transit and municipal transport system is IMO complete bunk.

Most suburban Chicago commute lines have much lower service frequency than BART. More comparable to CalTrain along the Penninsula, with some 1-2 hour midday gaps in service.

Yes, Metra is to the "L" as Caltrain is to BART. But Metra has 488 miles of track versus Caltrain's 78 miles of track. It carries 300,000 riders per weekday versus Caltrain's 42,000 riders per weekday. Chicagoland is bigger than the SF Bay, but not dramatically so. 10 million people versus 7 million people, at roughly the same density.

Caltrain map: http://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html

Metra map: http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_m...

To be fair, when you include BART's ridership (379,000), the Bay Area beats Chicago. You might also want to include the Capitol Corridor and ACE lines, which have minuscule ridership (5300 and 3700 daily, respectively), but add considerable trackage (168 and 84 miles). San Francisco's Muni Metro is a hair under 37 miles, but transports 162,000 riders daily. There's also San Jose's LRT, but let's leave that out for now.

A comparable rail map for the San Francisco Bay Area: http://www.urbanrail.net/am/snfr/sf-bay-area-map.htm

That puts the Bay Area commuter rail at 472 track miles and 598,000 passengers daily. Rather closer to your Chicago numbers.

But we've got to add in Chicago's CTA 'L line (709,000 daily riders, 108 miles). Tips lead to Chicago again.

Chicago benefits greatly from having grown up around (and not torn down much of its) commuter rail lines, including significant urban and suburban growth from 1860 - 1910, pre-automobile. It's occasionally noted in both areas that commute times a century ago were comparable to, or faster than, today (dedicated rights of way, less traffic, arguably fewer safety restrictions). The Bay Area notably tore down its old Key System commute rail, and several counties (San Mateo, Marin) have fought BART extensions for a half century, and saw much of its growth in the car-friendly post-WWII era.

The Bay Area's layout is actually fairly rail-friendly, with a few major transportation corridors (Peninsula, East Bayshore, CA-24, I-580, I-80, US 101 north of SF), though overall densities are low. Chicago has experienced a great deal of sprawl in the past 30 years, as well as employer flight to the suburbs, greatly increasing suburb-to-suburb commuting, though both SF and Chicago have also seen an increased appeal of the inner urban core especially for younger professionals.

Hella less traffic on 101 though.

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