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> It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction. To be fair, the peninsula is basically a long hallway. I’m not really sure where els
by pfannkuchen 10mo ago
> It goes in one direction, turns around, and goes in the other direction.
To be fair, the peninsula is basically a long hallway. I’m not really sure where else it would go?
- jerlam 10mo agoI would expect a regional system to connect an entire regional area. Caltrain connects two parts of the Bay Area: San Francisco and the South Bay. BART connects the entire East Bay to San Francisco. In a functioning system, they would both just be legs and not two completely separate systems. The only place they connect appears to be in Millbrae and not near any large hubs.
- adastra22 10mo agoThey will soon connect in San Jose.
- jerlam 10mo agoI wouldn't consider "soon" to mean ten years. Six miles, 12 billion dollars, opening in 2036. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extension
- quotemstr 10mo agoWhat's the holdup? Do they need to source more 5.25 inch floppy drives?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- amluto 10mo agoDon’t forget the SF Downtown Rail Extension, planned since the 1990s supposedly. https://www.tjpa.org/portaldtx/about-portal https://www.tjpa.org/portaldtx/about-portal https://www.caltrain.com/media/17998/download https://www.caltrain.com/media/17998/download
- jasonfarnon 10mo agoIs the argument just that the MNR and NYC subway, or Boston's T and commuter rail, are better integrated than BART and the Caltrain? Seems pretty great now but then I remember before the renovations at 4th and King.
- jerlam 10mo agoMy argument is that Caltrain mainly connects the two most largest and richest cities in the SF Bay Area, which are both population and job centers. It would be like calling the Google private shuttles a model for public buses to follow.
- Polizeiposaune 10mo agoLong Island is even more of a long hallway than the peninsula. The LIRR manages to have multiple trunks and something like 10 different branch lines. One thing that made it possible is LI is much flatter terrain than the peninsula.
- adastra22 10mo agoYour last sentence was going to be my reply. The peninsula is really linear along 101 / the historic el Camino. There really isn’t anything to connect to.
- quotemstr 10mo agoLIRR still had to do plenty of tunneling to build the East Side Access station though. Still, it opened in 2023! NYC is also still building the second avenue subway --- slowly, haltingly, and at near-ruinous expense, but it's actually a real expansion to the network is actually happening. By US standards, that's a miracle.
- jcranmer 10mo agoThe main trunk lines are in Long Island are about 3-4 miles apart. Northwest of around Cupertino or so, the mountains edge too close to the bay shoreline for you to make a second trunk line viable. Your best bet would be plonking a line around about 85, but the right-of-way doesn't exist to actually hook that line up to the existing line in any useful way. And outside of that, basically everything you'd consider plonking another path already exists with some service: BART runs up the east shore of the bay, as it does west of San Bruno Mountain. You have two mountain crossings covered by BART and one by ACE. The main missing things are curving BART back into San Jose and reactivating the Dumbarton Bridge.
- Gibbon1 10mo agoI've wondered about running BART from Fremont to East Palo Alto and Redwood City via Dumbarton. Not sure what the ridership would be though. I looked at the Dumbarton bridge traffic and it's the least of the three bridges and pales in comparison to the bay bridge. Still if you built that the gap between Millbrae and Redwood city is 12 miles.
- stevenwoo 10mo agoThere used to be a rail line that went closer to the base of the mountains but they tore that down to build Foothill Expressway and other roads.