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BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they ne

BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they need to profit from the currently underused directions (eg berkeley to Fremont).

manfredo 7y ago
Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun? As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.
- thedance 7y ago
  The people profit, not BART itself. BART is infrastructure. Like the fire department, it is not intended for it to be internally profitable. The way the people profit is you put homes in the places that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just walk around but also to benefit from people filling up the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you build both. It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has THREE subway stations and the same population it had in 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of infrastructure also adds lots of people.
- zamfi 7y ago
  > Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun? BART could encourage commercial development, instead of residential development, on land it owns near transit stations.

manfredo 7y ago

Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun? As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.

thedance 7y ago
The people profit, not BART itself. BART is infrastructure. Like the fire department, it is not intended for it to be internally profitable. The way the people profit is you put homes in the places that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just walk around but also to benefit from people filling up the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you build both. It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has THREE subway stations and the same population it had in 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of infrastructure also adds lots of people.
zamfi 7y ago
> Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun? BART could encourage commercial development, instead of residential development, on land it owns near transit stations.