1) Homeowners – fearful for their property values – have relegated noisy, smoky, high-occupancy transit to areas away from their residences. The result is that users must either drive or take other public transit to connect.

2) Systems do not really interconnect. Stations are built too far apart for convenience and often lack interconnecting transit, ticketing is by agency rather than universal, schedules are are not well coordinated. Part of this, I’m sure, comes from politicians who do not wat “their” users to clog up “our” transit system.

Finally, with regard to Caltrain fatalities, I produced several videos of rail systems of the Bay area and I can tell you that it is VERY difficult to hear a train approaching at 50-60 miles per hour, even if the horn is blowing. One simply may not be aware of the approaching train until it is right on top of them. And it is hard to judge the speed of a train when facing it headon.

I don’t really see much use for vehicles such as this. It is nearly always the case that you can accomplish the same thing just as well simply using buses. In California (and pretty much everywhere else), the minimum rail ROW is 17 feet wide except on bridges and tunnels where it can be as narrow as 16 feet and at station platforms where it could be only as little as 15 feet*. 17 feet is more than wide enough to allow a bus to operate at high speed (a typical freeway lane is 12 feet wide, although many in the bay area are only 11 feet due to squeezing the freeway to allow HOV lanes. In fact, a typical rail ROW is so wide that you can provide a lane plus a shoulder. Further, since it is typically more expensive to maintain a railroad than a road and because specialized convertible equipment drives up costs, it would almost certainly be cheaper to simply pave over the ROW and operate buses on it.

A busway would be an excellent use of the ROW in Marin, and for that matter for the Caltrain ROW. It would have been nice if as part of planning Caltrain’s ambitious upgrades (electrification, switching to EMUs) the powers that be would have considered replacing it with a busway, which might provide better capacity at a lower cost and would offer the possibility of running other kinds of service along the route, such as buses that run part of their routes on the busway and go off the busway at either end.

* low platform stations can be very close to the rails, but are limited to 8″ high, so they don’t pose much of an obstacle.

The place where this would be especially useful is reusing old railway right-of-ways, including tunnels, bridges and other constrictions, such as in Marin county. A mostly single lane could still be useful, as its capacity in the commute direction could match the return trips counter-commute capacity on ordinary roads.

I think that one of the biggest fundamental problems with BART is lack of capacity through the transbay tube. BART can only run 30 trains per hour per direction* through the tube, which limits the frequency of the entire system. Building hybrid road/rail buses would only make the problem worse because of long station dwell times. If you’re using lots of individual vehicles then buses do the job better because it is easier to load/unload them in parallel, which is very difficult with trains.

My suggestion for encouraging transit use between the inner east bay and SF is to improve AC transit’s service, perhaps including better access to the HOV lanes on the Oakland side of the bay. Also adding bus ramps to the SF side of the bay bridge would be helpful. The capacity is there. The exclusive bus lane in the Lincoln tunnel (in NYC) carries as many people during the peak commute hour as BART. As for improving BART, I think that the best thing you could do there is add an extra set (or two) of doors per car, which would reduce station dwell times and make improved signaling useful.

*actually, they don’t quite manage this capacity, but they’re close.

It seems to me that while there may be places this is a good idea — places where we already have a rail right of way and it’s cheaper to do this than to build a busway — nearly all the advantage of this would be had from building a busway, which can use any kind of bus and is cheaper to build and maintain.

People get confused. Rail transit does have a somewhat smoother ride than bus transit, and where it’s needed rail has a much higher capacity per operator, but the main advantage of rail isn’t really about tracks at all, but just about the dedicated lane that rails usually have to themselves. We can build those for buses too.