11 ms·

And one day, there will be 24 hour BART looping around the entire bay. Nope. :(

by wickedchicken 14y ago

theatrus2 14y ago
The bay is sufficiently less population dense, making lots of projects "bang for the buck" seem off.
- rayiner 14y ago
  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.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    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.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      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 http://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html Metra map: http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_metra.gif http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_m...
      - dredmorbius 14y ago
        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 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.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    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.
- wickedchicken 14y ago
  Hella less traffic on 101 though.
encoderer 14y ago
BART running 24 hours is not an option. It would be epically expensive for what -- 6-7 additional hours of sparsely-used trains?
- wickedchicken 14y ago
  I'm not going to argue on how expensive it is, but consider this: a 24 hour subway means many fewer people would have to drive. If you don't have to drive, you don't have the choice between not drinking that night or leaving before midnight. If drunk driving is reduced by eliminating cars, then 'last call' can be extended to, say, 4am. Less traffic, less drunk driving accidents, more booze, more late-night coffee shops.
  - encoderer 14y ago
    I hear ya, but it would require laying a second track along the entirety of the BART system. This is a woulda/shouda thing going back 60 years to the original construction of the system. Even if we gave BART billions in funding, there are certainly better uses for that money (Build a rail line into OAK, extend service on all the currently-approved-but-unfunded routes, extend to San Mateo, and deal with some expensive, lingering issues with the transbay tunnel.)
    - thrownaway2424 14y ago
      Did you mean a third track? BART is already double-tracked or more along its entire length. The reason they close the system at night is because they can barely keep up with car and track maintenance.
- _delirium 14y ago
  If the trains were automated, the cost of running some short trains in the middle of the night would be (at least more) reasonable. The Copenhagen Metro runs 24/7, for example. I believe BART trains are actually capable of fully automatic operation, but haven't gotten regulatory permission to run without an operator.

And one day, there will be 24 hour BART looping around the entire bay. Nope. :(

theatrus2 14y ago

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

rayiner 14y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  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.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    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 http://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html Metra map: http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_metra.gif http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~yopopov/rrt/us/chicago/rr_chicago_m...
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      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 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.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  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.
wickedchicken 14y ago
Hella less traffic on 101 though.

encoderer 14y ago

BART running 24 hours is not an option. It would be epically expensive for what -- 6-7 additional hours of sparsely-used trains?

wickedchicken 14y ago
I'm not going to argue on how expensive it is, but consider this: a 24 hour subway means many fewer people would have to drive. If you don't have to drive, you don't have the choice between not drinking that night or leaving before midnight. If drunk driving is reduced by eliminating cars, then 'last call' can be extended to, say, 4am. Less traffic, less drunk driving accidents, more booze, more late-night coffee shops.
- encoderer 14y ago
  I hear ya, but it would require laying a second track along the entirety of the BART system. This is a woulda/shouda thing going back 60 years to the original construction of the system. Even if we gave BART billions in funding, there are certainly better uses for that money (Build a rail line into OAK, extend service on all the currently-approved-but-unfunded routes, extend to San Mateo, and deal with some expensive, lingering issues with the transbay tunnel.)
  - thrownaway2424 14y ago
    Did you mean a third track? BART is already double-tracked or more along its entire length. The reason they close the system at night is because they can barely keep up with car and track maintenance.
_delirium 14y ago
If the trains were automated, the cost of running some short trains in the middle of the night would be (at least more) reasonable. The Copenhagen Metro runs 24/7, for example. I believe BART trains are actually capable of fully automatic operation, but haven't gotten regulatory permission to run without an operator.