4 ms·

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 ma

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.

yodon 5y ago
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.

yodon 5y ago

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.