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

134 points by mcyc 5y ago

sydthrowaway 5y ago
SF needs a Robert Moses type figure
dehrmann 5y ago
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.
- thematrixturtle 5y ago
  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.
  - treis 5y ago
    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.
    - finnh 5y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_light_rail
    - zamfi 5y ago
      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.
      - quantumwannabe 5y ago
        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."
        zamfi 5y ago
        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!
- throwaway4711 5y ago
  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.
- ninth_ant 5y ago
  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.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > 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.
- awiesenhofer 5y ago
  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.
  - ac29 5y ago
    Its a entire county. Wikipedia lists 11 cities and towns in the county, the largest of which has a population of 57k.
google234123 5y ago
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.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  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.
georgeecollins 5y ago
The really dumb thing was San Mateo county backed out initially, so that for a long time BART didn't go to SFO.
- throwaway4711 5y ago
  Yeah, see my comment explaining why. Basically corrupt f*ks did it.
throwaway4711 5y ago
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-alternative-future-for-bay-area-rail-travel https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2011/03/29/planner-has-alte... [1]http://www.ddbo.com/mengat-office http://www.ddbo.com/mengat-office
- wsh 5y ago
  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.
Moosdijk 5y ago
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.
- epaulson 5y ago
  It's a newsletter about transit, for transit nerds. If you're subscribing to that newsletter, you know what BART stands for.
- jedberg 5y ago
  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.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Yep, perfect time to use a hyperlink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit
rsync 5y ago
"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.
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  I mentally applied the 5 Whys to each of these explanations. I suggest others do the same.
- pvg 5y ago
  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.
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    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.
    - bryananderson 5y ago
ethbr0 5y ago
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.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  > 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~8~1~258982~5522256 https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... Great for the automobile, tire, and petroleum industries though.
  - varenc 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
sodality2 5y ago
Marcus Yallow in shambles.
BrianHenryIE 5y ago
I learned recently, there used to be trains on the Bay Bridge! https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/50-years-since-trains-crossed-Bay-Bridge-3217302.php 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.
- anamax 5y ago
  > 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.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
    What, does hub-and-spoke not work?
    - anamax 5y ago
      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.
- bryananderson 5y ago
  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.
martinald 5y ago
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.
- lqet 5y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bridge_Company [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_...
  - schoen 5y ago
    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!
    - WWLink 5y ago
      i guess it kinda sorta does. but not really.
yodon 5y ago
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).
- ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
  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.
- thethethethe 5y ago
  > 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
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- space_fountain 5y ago
  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
russellbeattie 5y ago
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.
- Lammy 5y ago
  And on top of that, the rebound is not evenly distributed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-african-american-exodus-from-san-francisco/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...
deleted 5y ago
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Lammy 5y ago
> 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 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 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-snake.png 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 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.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  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.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    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_1913 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...
- 5y ago
phase5 5y ago
So well written and you're working for BART? What's going on with this world? Promote this guy.
sha_burn 5y ago
When was the last time anyone in this thread saw an SF BART terminal of late?
drno123 5y ago
For us stupid Europeans - what is BART? First two paragraphs don’t explain it.
- bsagdiyev 5y ago
  Bay Area Rapid Transit (?)
- sva_ 5y ago
  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.
- ransom1538 5y ago
  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-Train-Map-SVBX.png https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/BART-...
- bregma 5y ago
  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.
  - andbberger 5y ago
    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

134 points by mcyc 5y ago

SF needs a Robert Moses type figure

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.

thematrixturtle 5y ago
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.
- treis 5y ago
  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.
  - finnh 5y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_light_rail
  - zamfi 5y ago
    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.
    - quantumwannabe 5y ago
      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."
      - zamfi 5y ago
        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!
throwaway4711 5y ago
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.
ninth_ant 5y ago
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.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > 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.
awiesenhofer 5y ago
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.
- ac29 5y ago
  Its a entire county. Wikipedia lists 11 cities and towns in the county, the largest of which has a population of 57k.

google234123 5y ago

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.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
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.

georgeecollins 5y ago

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

throwaway4711 5y ago
Yeah, see my comment explaining why. Basically corrupt f*ks did it.

throwaway4711 5y ago

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-alternative-future-for-bay-area-rail-travel https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2011/03/29/planner-has-alte... [1]http://www.ddbo.com/mengat-office http://www.ddbo.com/mengat-office

wsh 5y ago
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.

Moosdijk 5y ago

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.

epaulson 5y ago
It's a newsletter about transit, for transit nerds. If you're subscribing to that newsletter, you know what BART stands for.
jedberg 5y ago
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.
Tempest1981 5y ago
Yep, perfect time to use a hyperlink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

rsync 5y ago

"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.

jimmygrapes 5y ago
I mentally applied the 5 Whys to each of these explanations. I suggest others do the same.
pvg 5y ago
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.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  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.
  - bryananderson 5y ago

ethbr0 5y ago

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.

jacobolus 5y ago
> 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~8~1~258982~5522256 https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... Great for the automobile, tire, and petroleum industries though.
- varenc 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

sodality2 5y ago

Marcus Yallow in shambles.

BrianHenryIE 5y ago

I learned recently, there used to be trains on the Bay Bridge! https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/50-years-since-trains-crossed-Bay-Bridge-3217302.php 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.

anamax 5y ago
> 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  What, does hub-and-spoke not work?
  - anamax 5y ago
    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.
bryananderson 5y ago
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.

martinald 5y ago

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.

lqet 5y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bridge_Company [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_...
- schoen 5y ago
  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!
  - WWLink 5y ago
    i guess it kinda sorta does. but not really.

yodon 5y ago

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).

ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
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.
thethethethe 5y ago
> 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
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space_fountain 5y ago
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

russellbeattie 5y ago

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.

Lammy 5y ago
And on top of that, the rebound is not evenly distributed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-african-american-exodus-from-san-francisco/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...

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Lammy 5y ago

> 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 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 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-snake.png 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 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.

teakettle42 5y ago
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.
- Lammy 5y ago
  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_1913 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...
5y ago

phase5 5y ago

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

sha_burn 5y ago

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

drno123 5y ago

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

bsagdiyev 5y ago
Bay Area Rapid Transit (?)
sva_ 5y ago
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.
ransom1538 5y ago
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-Train-Map-SVBX.png https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/BART-...
bregma 5y ago
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.
- andbberger 5y ago
  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