Silicon Valley Can't Get Transit Right
m.theatlanticcities.com
m.theatlanticcities.com
When I first came to the Bay Area, it took me an inordinately amount of time to realize that the BART didn't go all the way around the Bay. I just assumed that it did because it's what made the most sense.
In fact, the county of San Mateo voted against BART because they didn't want people from other counties to come and take their jobs. So, because of this, you have a ridiculous patchwork and mishmash of transit "solutions" from various levels of government, none of them really working well. If you had a BART that went around the Bay, you could eliminate Caltrain completely, and move that money into making BART even better. Of course, those are at different levels of government, which means that you couldn't really do that.
It's at the point now where, except for people that take Caltrain during rush hour, and MUNI in SF, most public transit around the Bay is for poor people. Most people with higher paying jobs can't afford how slow public transit is, and it creates this negative feedback loop where they don't get enough funding to justify a better schedule, etc.
Yes, Google has a great bus system that is a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring people. But this is private transit, and it doesn't directly translate to public transit. If you have to service an area like the South Bay, you have to not only service the areas that people need, but then you have to deal with unions, costs, etc.
In your example, it would be like saying 'the midwest' or something general like that.
That said: Europe was able to solve this and it's even more of a giant clusterfuck of governments. One region of one state of one country should be able to figure it out.
Yes. How dare the county of San Mateo concern itself with the needs of the people who actually live there. Inexcusable.
The argument that public transit might steal jobs is one of the lamest excuses I've ever heard for not having it.
Governments are going to have to get over it; mass public transit is best option for the future of everyone.
I'm going to have to say that is not true simply because there's no best that fits everyone.
Mass public transit does include airplanes and sea vessels by the way...
Seeing the pathetic state of public transit in the Bay Area, and thinking how much better it could have been, it incenses me to see how darwinistic capitalism rides roughshot over the common interest.
Here the story from our local paper, lest we don't forget history:
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.
Mr. Bohannon claimed that BART would take shoppers away from Hillsdale and into San Francisco, Mr. Mader said, adding that "shopping was rather good (in San Francisco) at the time." For his part, Mr. Chess was protecting Southern Pacific, Mr. Mader said. 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!"
EDIT: cited from http://www.almanacnews.com/story.php?story_id=10935
EDIT: clarification
"I think developers represent change, and change is difficult," he says. "A lot of people in Menlo Park don't want change, so they don't want development. ... But now here we are — a very wealthy community that has turned its back on development for many, many years."
He recognizes that a lot of the anti-development sentiment comes down to a key issue: the fear that developing the city will lead to more traffic.
"Like it or not, Menlo Park, like every other city on the Peninsula, is growing," he says. "What was going on here in the 1950s is not going on now — this is a major urban center. ... I don't like the traffic either — every time I go home in the afternoon, I can't stand driving by Hillview School."
EDIT: cited from http://www.almanacnews.com/story.php?story_id=3655
Under actual "darwinistic capitalism" anybody who wanted to would be able to start a competing transit service, even if it stole all the customers of a current one. At a minimum, you'd see a thriving private jitney industry - private bus services outcompeting the public ones and private part-time cabs underpricing the metered ones. No, to get mass transit this bad requires active interference with the workings of "darwinistic capitalism". In particular, laws making it illegal to compete with the established quasi-monopoly firms. The government at various levels doesn't just do a bad job of providing transit, they also make it illegal to compete with the crappy transit they provide. Fix either half of that equation and things are a lot better.
Many taxi companies are required to serve anyone at any time(24/7/365) for fixed prices, regardless of the cost of the trip. It is unlikely that the new transit service will steal all the unprofitable customers.
Many of the regulations around transportation are very utilitarian. There are people who can not drive and are unserved by public transportation, but will die if they do not have access to transportation. We the people(you too) have decided to contract out their transportation to cab companies. In exchange for this incredibly unprofitable mandate, cab companies get price fixing which is essentially a monopoly on many routes.
Now the cab driver has no incentive to avoid passengers who want to cross a bridge to a less profitable area (ever try to get a cab to Brooklyn from downtown manhattan?) and no incentive to take the long way around to bump up the meter charge in slow periods - the driver's interests and the passenger's are aligned. Better yet, drivers have the flexibility that they can negotiate other fares when that's appropriate - for instance, charging more in a hurricane.
Rigidly fixed prices are NOT a good thing for customers if you want there to be service at any time to/from any region. Fixed prices mean many areas get little or no service - the cabs stick to the more popular routes and people who live in poor neighborhoods get shafted.
The regulations on cabs are not at all utilitarian - they are pure rent-seeking. Concentrated benefits accrue to the few who own medallions; distributed costs are paid by drivers and passengers everwhere.
Your "zone" idea is logical. So logical that it is the law in some places, like the Bay Area which is the subject of the comment you replied to.
(2) Out-of-Town Trips. Drivers are authorized to collect 150 percent of the metered rate for out-of-town trips exceeding 15 miles beyond City limits. http://www.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/transporta...
>>>Rigidly fixed prices are NOT a good thing for customers if you want there to be service at any time to/from any region.
This holds true for NY, where you can't call a cab with a phone. Other places you can call, and the cab is legally required to come and pick you up.
>>>The regulations on cabs are not at all utilitarian - they are pure rent-seeking
I agree that some are, but I think that I have listed some laws do service the public good. Am I wrong? NY tip: you can implement the zone system yourself on an ad-hoc basis - give them enough money and they will take you to Brooklyn. I hope you have a lot of money though :) .
The San Jose light rail line referenced in the article is literally right outside my front door. Yet I have never ridden it, despite living in San Jose for over a decade. Why? Because it simply doesn't take me anywhere useful in a useful amount of time. It can't even take me to the airport well, and that airport is only a couple miles away. That's sad.
There is plenty of money in Silicon Valley, and plenty of need for relief from traffic congestion. It's true that San Jose is low-density. But I know we could do a lot better than we're doing. There's not even a fast, frequent train between San Jose (10th largest city in the US) and San Francisco (14th largest city in the US), for chrissakes. That's pathetic.
Good public transportation, along with solid city centers, begets population density (and economies of scale).
Poorly planned public transportation lingers as an afterthought; a mistake; a rallying cry that public transportation does not work in low-density areas.
There also is a fairly fast, frequent train between San Jose and San Francisco. CalTrain. One of the baby bullet trains will get you into SF faster than you can drive there, and when the new transbay terminal is completed, it will drop you off right in the middle of the city (the current station at 4th and King isn't the most convenient location, but even if you walk from there to market st. I bet you would get there faster than you could drive).
In addition, there are only a total of eleven of those baby bullet trains, per day. At many hours of the day, you can't get one at all.
On average, given the average wait time til the next train and other factors, I can drive to SF about 2.5 times faster, round-trip, than I can reach various common destinations using CalTrain plus whatever else is available.
It's true that if you are commuting in rush hour only, versus heavy traffic, and your destination happens to be very close to a CalTrain station, and you live close to the CalTrain station to begin with, the train will win. But not under most other conditions.
https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.258034,-121.963785&t=...
This is the interchange at Highway 85 and Winchester Blvd. (The red roofs are Netflix and the Aventino apartment complex.) It's a half-interchange, only connecting with traffic on 85 to or from the north (west). But note the unusual configuration of the interchange: why all that empty space between the ramps and the freeway?
It's because the interchange was designed as a folded diamond:
http://www.smartmotorist.com/images/driving_guideline/folded...
http://www.smartmotorist.com/driving-guideline/driving-on-ex...
But the Town of Los Gatos didn't want extra traffic on Winchester, so they only allowed half the interchange to be built. The result is unsurprising: traffic to or from 85 on the south (east) has to get to Winchester via Highway 17 and Lark Avenue a half-mile to the south.
Lark would be a busy street without this, but with the extra Winchester/85 traffic it gets some real traffic jams. So instead of the bit of extra traffic on Winchester, there's a big mess on Lark.
The happy rich people live in the suburbs because they don't like the people in the inner cities and the only way they can limit their interaction is with distance. Why do you think the shiftiest neighborhoods are always around the greyhound station? For example of this extreme anti-poor paranoia: Palo Alto recently threw a huge fit because they wanted to put in a 7-eleven saying that it would attract an undesirable element. (http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2199808...)
If VTA (being in the center of the valley) implements some sort of GPS tracker on their trains, I think it give people a better idea when to head for the train station.
It has absolutely fantastic public transit everywhere, even outside the denser urban cores.
AFAICT, this comes from the way the city is structured: dwellings and businesses tend to cluster around rail lines and stations, increasing their efficiency, which makes it easier to support a large number of rail lines (rail transit is a profitable business in Tokyo), and that in turn increases the effectiveness of the network (the well-known "network effect"). Even though most rail transit is private and run by a huge number of different companies, they well-recognize the importance of the network effect, and so tend to cooperate, trying to make transfers easy and liberally using interlining.
There are also well-developed secondary transit networks (bus and bicycling) that increase the effective coverage of the rail lines.
However, Bay transit is very good compared to most of the rest of the US.
And it's not necessarily correct to assume that the great intellectuals in the area are drawn to working for public administration as bureaucrats.
EDIT: Although, to be fair, the Valley and San Jose are way too low density to support a decent transit infrastructure. San Francisco's MUNI disaster is a problem of a different order.
If low density is why San Jose can't support a decent transit infrastructure, then how can Denver do it with even less density?
I share your enthusiasm for the upcoming expansions, in particular the line to the Airport. The train is one of the big perks of living in Denver. It's awesome and only getting better.
Silicon Valley office space seems to be a little more spread out. When I was visiting a client in Santa Clara last year, I had to walk almost two miles to get to a light rail station to go have a nice dinner in downtown Mountain View. (And there were no buses available to cover that distance -- at least not that Google Transit knew about.)
(Disclaimer: My experience with San Jose is mostly limited to the airport area, and the Silicon Valley suburbs to the north.)
Perhaps their citizens can not emerge from their bubbles far enough to believe it, but it's true.
The bay has regular bus service, sidewalks and bike lanes. Also trains. If you drive, you can do so from one place to another and find a parking place.
As someone who doesn't like to deal with cars, when I lived there it was very nice compared to the rest of the country, at least the 30 or so cities and towns I have lived in and the few hundred that I have stayed in for more than a few days, most of which it was extremely troublesome to get about without a car, and unlike San Francisco.
FWIW, I've lived in 9 cities in 3 countries across 2 continents. This includes San Francisco, and I can tell you, I've lived in metro areas substantially smaller than the SFBay and had better transit. There are many places in the US substantially worse, but there are also many others with a similar density profile or population size that are substantially better.
The CalTrain, which is the closest SF Bay equivalent to MTA commuter trains, stops in San Francisco, but far from local mass transit connections (either MUNI light rail or BART), to the point where there is an industry for private shuttles. This is a significant barrier to the adoption of commuter rail for people who work in the city but want to live further out.
Similarly, once in the Peninsula or South Bay, the CalTrain is often not near a mass transportation connection. Some of the major tech firms are located "near" CalTrain stops, but nearness is often at automobile-scale, as opposed to walking or cycling scale.
You need a pretty-damn-good local transit solution to support commuter networks.
There is a significantly different topography in the bay that greatly complexifies rail projects. Effective rail coverage on a large grid is not possible due to water and hill issues.
Perhaps the reversal of the standard commute is a relatively new and somewhat unusual phenomenon? I'm not trying to say it is, just posing the question... is this happening to the same extent in New York, London, Paris, or Chigaco (ie., people flipping the old commute pattern on its head by living in dense areas and commuting to work in spread out areas)? It could be that SiliValley is dealing with a relatively new and unique problem here.
In New York, I get the feeling that they commuters go from high density housing to high density job areas. In LA, they go from low density housing to low density job areas (though I gather this is changing and that LA is building much higher density areas now). In Chicago... I'm speculating, but I get the impression it's still commute from low density housing to high density work areas... in this case, it just might not make sense to compare the bay area to these other areas.
It would be ironic if the US is able to leapfrog other countries in autonomous vehicle networks because it lags so badly in transit, but I bet that's what's going to happen.
On another note, this is a solution that Silicon Valley is uniquely qualified to implement for itself. Get on it.
It takes an hour to go from Mountain View to Downtown SJ. The same drive takes ~15 min with no traffic or about an hour in awful traffic.
The route from MV to SJ goes through no where. It parallels the sparsely populated Tasman for much of it, though it will go near the upcoming 49ers stadium.
It doesn't go to Valley Fair Mall or Santana Row, just about the only two places worth going in SJ.
It doesn't go to Santa Clara University or the Airport.
In total, it's the world's slowest train to nowhere for nobody.
I largely agree with this, it does go to the Santa Clara convention center which is nice. And some of the San Jose government facilities. But generally it does not go to places that a steady stream of people would want to go to.
This means buses in Palo Alto coming from the north, terminate there. It means buses coming from the south also terminate there!
And it means Palo Alto is not even reached by ValleyTransit's light rail, while SamTrans has no light rail.
In other words the increasingly central node between San Jose and San Francisco, is also one of the least centrally connected.
With SamTrans focused on how to bring commuters to San Francisco from San Mateo county suburbia, and ValleyTransit focused on how to bring suburban Santa Clara county residents to downtown San Jose: both systems lack an overall peninsular focus that ought to recognize the increasing prominence the peninsula has in terms of the job market! Too bad.
If you want to be green out here you have two options, learn to LOVE biking or be prepared to leave hours ahead of when you need to in order to get anywhere at all.
The frequency of trains depends on the time of day and the station you depart from / want to arrive at.
For example, Mountain View and Palo Alto both have trains as many as four times an hour in the mornings (7-9am) and afternoon/early evening (4-7pm).
Just looking at the MV -> PA schedule; during off-peak hours there may only be one an hour (4-5am, 10am-2pm, 8-11pm) or one every half-hour. If I was to complain about anything, it's the times they only have one every hour.
I think you're exaggerating just a bit.
[I stayed there for a week or so once, and as best I could tell, it consisted entirely of office parks and strip malls connected to housing developments by enormous roads, everything well lathered with parking lots. We walked around as best we could, but there seemed nothing beautiful or nice there... just endless vistas of office parks and pavement...]
...among a downtown movie theater, several great restaurants, a college and more.
They're both arteries which connect disparate towns and villages and are interspersed with strip malls, gas stations and supermarkets and they both could make use of better transit systems. Altho, to be fair Nother Blvd has LIRR running kind of parallel for most of it.
The big kerfuffle now is whether they should close down a lane of El Camino Real to make it "bus rapid transit". Some cities say yes, others say no, so you wind up with this odd patchwork of half-implemented systems.
God Almighty, it makes my feet itch just thinking about it.
Carpeting works fine on "higher end" lower-volume rail, such as commuter Amtrak lines.
Honestly, Caltrain is not that terrible. It compares fairly well to Metro-North in NYC when you consider the population density. There's a train every hour to take you up to the city (or back) in an hour. Most cities don't have a direct train you can feasibly take in from the suburbs to the city. Yeah, it sucks that it stops at midnight, but public transit generally doesn't run late anywhere. Even in NYC, transit out to the suburbs stops at ~2:30a.
It's a little annoying to see people commenting here that this is entirely due to politicians and bureaucracy. It isn't. It's just not economically feasible to offer public transit comparable to NYC to the bay area.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
The bus will apparently wait for Amtrak trains.
The transit would be passable if they could just find some political will to force the different systems to work together in some reasonable fashion. Instead, a bus driver sees people running off the train in order to get on his bus, and then leaves anyway.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6teborg
The problem entirely lies in the subdivision format of suburbs in much of the US - full of twists, turns, cul de sacs, and in general trying as hard as they can to inhibit movement. Getting to the nearest arterial road becomes an exercise in futility where you'd find yourself walking along un-sidewalked road for a whole mile before doubling back onto another street just to end up at a bus stop.
Low-density cities that are laid in a (saner, and less classist) grid are on the other hand generally well served by transit. This is no coincidence.
Mass transit and density need not be at odds with each other, though it's a sad fact that most suburbs will never be adaptable to sane transit.
Light rail sucks, no argue about that. Buses are pretty good. Caltrain is decent. But in such a low density area it's hard to expect something good out of public transportation.
While Google Maps' colors don't make it easy to visualize, perhaps you can get a sense of it: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Perth,+Australia&hl=en...
But Perth appears to have at least one district worth visiting. The thing you have to understand about SV is most of the "cities" there have exactly zero districts worth visiting. Mountain View has a little bit of a business district. You can walk across it in about 90 seconds. Palo Alto has University Ave. But that's about the extent of things. Here's the center of Cupertino, which appears to be a kilometer-wide intersection of two massive, pointless roads: http://goo.gl/maps/EYLq9. Here's the middle of Sunnyvale: http://goo.gl/maps/51LLL. Beautiful downtown Santa Clara: http://goo.gl/maps/q8WpU
These places are not places, they are irredeemable ruins of the 20th century. No transit system will ever work there.
[A real question; I've no idea about Palo Alto or Mountain View, but have vague memories of hearing they're "desirable" (and expensive) locations in SV...]
Here is the area around a Palo Alto Cal Train station: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=palo+alto+cal+train+station...
Here is the area around a Westchester Metro North station: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Station+Plaza+N,+New+Rochelle,...
If you introduce light rail without changing the zoning surrounding the stations, you end up with poorly utilized transportation that does not promote the growth of urbanized areas.
I personally don't see any problem with Caltrain. It's relatively reliable and goes often enough. The only thing that's missing is free wi-fi, but I think they plan to put it in there eventually.
Last year I started commuting into SF again from the East Bay after a 4 year break and am still surprised at how full the trains are. As recently as 2007/early 2008 it was much easier for me to get a seat.
(This is partly down to the fact that BART is funded out of so many different pots of money, including federal, that it can't just expand and contract in perfect sync with the local economy.)
More coverage of this topic, dating back a few years:
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=289 http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=475
I'm native to the Bay Area but am studying my Masters in Computer Science outside of California and come back every so often to interview, visit friends, and help out my family. Both of my parents work so I don't have access to their cars. I've never had a car (only driven my parents cars on weekends in high school) and because I'll be finishing up my education soon I haven't felt the need to buy one of my own. For reference, I live with my parents currently in the San Jose / Morgan Hill beyond the commonly serviced Caltrains zones (but still in their extra commute-serviced zones).
Visiting friends, attending interviews, or just taking in the sights somewhere is something I've gotten used to doing on public transit since I've never had a car. The VTA is awful. Most of their schedules use timepoints rather than actual stops for scheduling (is this the case to allow busses slack time in between timepoints?), even on the Light Rail which is not as traffic sensitive as the bus. My nearby Light Rail station isn't even listed on the the schedules for most of the VTA schedules.
Google Maps is just awful at planning trips using VTA. It takes a definite know-how of how the system works to use it effectively. In contrast to what other posts have discussed, using Caltrains to get to San Francisco makes the trip from San Jose to San Francisco relatively painless; I take a 30 minute bus to a Caltrains stop and take a train directly into San Francisco. The main San Jose transit hub (and the best serviced Caltrains stop in the area), the San Jose Diridon, is inaccessible on my Light Rail route, the Blue Line (or the 901). To reach Diridon I can either take a bus from another nearby transit station or take the Blue Line North to the SJ Convention Center, transfer to the Green line, and then go South. Using the Light Rail exclusively is a death sentence however. Using the Light Rail to move from my Light Rail station to Mountain View takes 2 hours. Making the detour at the Convention Center to switch Lines and then using Caltrains is still faster.
Trying to visit Santana Row is awful. I take the Light Rail to a stop from where I can take a bus (the 323) which takes me to Santana Row, all in all a 15-20 minute drive from my home under normal conditions. To visit a friend in Union City I have to take the Light Rail then transfer to a bus (the 181), then transfer to BART Fremont and ride BART to BART Union City. We live, ostensibly, 25 min. away in normal traffic, but actually live 3-4 transfers of public transit away. Awful.
Safety is another huge issue on the VTA but a smaller issue on BART and mostly nonexistent on Caltrains. I rarely feel safe enough to take out my expensive smartphone on VTA. If I can get onto the Caltrains quickly the increase in fare is worth the safety I have to now use my electronics. BART is a mixed bag, but is definitely safe enough.
That said, VTA is cheap. An 8 hour Light Rail pass is $4, and a single bus ride is $2. I can take a single bus to downtown Palo Alto and back and spend $4 on the round trip. I can ride into downtown San Jose and pay $2 - $4 depending on how long I stay, pay nothing for parking, and not have to worry about my car at all. A trip into San Francisco is expensive ($22 round trip, $18 for two Caltrains trips, and $4 for two VTA bus rides), but is still cheaper than gas and parking isn't an issue.
I really wish the various local governments in the Valley took charge of things and created a safe, unified transit system. The Clipper Card has gone a long way in making it much more painless to endure the many transfers needed to get from my home to any location of interest. It's hard though. The suburbs of the Bay Area is very much dominated by cars.
It works this way in Amsterdam. Bicycles, pedestrians (many of them stoned tourists), cars and trains all mixing together peacefully and efficiently. Europe in general makes the US look like a complete joke where trains are concerned.