Quote:
Originally Posted by ChargerCarl
I mean San Diego is one of the biggest cities in Southern California, but it doesn't make sense to extend LA's metro system all the way to it. It's not cost effective given the low density areas between SJ and SF that are unlikely to be up zoned any time soon. This is what commuter rail is for.
BART's untenable scope is is why it loses so much money and it's core services suffer for it.
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I question how many people live in either LA or San Diego and work in the other or have business interests that involve both such as the Silicon Valley companies who use San Francisco law firms and/or Silican Valley executives who either have second homes in San Francisco or use San Francisco dining and cultural facilities and so on. SF and SJ are functionally one metro much more so, I think, than LA and San Diego--SF's football team plays much nearer to SJ after all--and needs public transit options that connect the two city centers.
And you call BART's "scope" untenable without even much of an explanation much less evidence to support such a judgement. BART was initially conceived as circumnavigating the Bay and uniting the cities surrounding the Bay, which it is now coming close to doing for the first time, and many people use segments of it to go from one suburb to another as well as to a city center. Basically, it runs full. If it loses money, it's not for lack of ridership but I also question whether it loses more money than most rail transit systems. I believe they all require subsidies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wakamesalad
I agree that BART and even CalTrain stops are located in some of the most silly places surrounded by single family homes, or in the case of the South SF CalTrain station, underneath a freeway overpass with a Lowe's store as the nearest building about ¼ mile away. If SF and the Bay Area are going to take away freeways, I wouldn't have a problem with that if they replace it with some sort of mass transit options, but right now, they are not building any new freeways nor any new mass transit stations or rail lines to handle the density. Every time I think of going to SF now I think "traffic" and I end up changing my plans. If I could drive to a BART station and take that into SF and get around the city reasonably by light rail or subway then I wouldn't care. But it's just not efficient to take public transit in the Bay Area.
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I live in SF without a car but I am a member of Zipcar as well as using BART/Muni regularly. Even those of us who choose not to keep cars in the city still need to drive on freeways if we want to head to the wine country, for example, or Santa Cruz or skiing in the Sierra or anywhere outside the city. And the traffic has gotten so bad, I feel inhibited even from doing that and I don't like it. Public transit will never allow us to escape the city but the beautiful surrounding countryside and coast is one of the main attractions of the Bay Area . . . if you could get there without sitting in traffic for hours. With fewer routes in and out of town, it would be even less feasible to do the enjoyable things outside the city so I am opposed to removing the residual freeway system we have now even though I would oppose building any new freeways in SF neighborhoods.