Comments on: they threw away the Key

By: david vartanoff

david vartanoff — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:08:31 +0000

indeed BART the “we are not the subway, we are the Long Island RR” (Mike Healy BART PR guy personal interview) IS the subway and needs to amp up headways and consists. Concurrently, Bay Area commuters will need to accomodate to “mass” transit–it isn’t a comfy couch to yourself in a half empty car. BART’s current policy of deliberately too short trains is not appropriate.

By: Reedman

Reedman — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:28:20 +0000

Todays Chronicle mentions a capacity-enhancing idea that
BART is implementing. They are taking some of the seats out of some of the cars to make more standing room. They are also planning to add hanging straps to allow for easier standing.

By: david vartanoff

david vartanoff — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:22:55 +0000

my time comments were based on querying the 511 site for a station to station EMB to W Oak circa 5 P. repeating that exercise eturns departures @ 4:55, 4:56, 5:01, 5:04, 5:06. repeating the query circa 5:30 returns 5″25, 5:26, 5:32, 5:36, 5:38.

So current headway varies from 60 seconds (which I don’t believe is sustainable) to 6 minutes which I interpret as covering the slot for a Richmond to Fremont train. that said, I believe a few more trains could be slipped in, but not many.
As to skip stop, that was used for many decades in Chicago where most branches of the ‘L’ like BART are two tracks. Having lived there summers as a kid and then a couple years post college I found it worked well. Occasionally I needed to change from a “B” (from my ‘hood” to an “A” to reach a destination, but generally trips were faster than the late night all stop services. Sadly AB service was a casualty of early nineties cutbacks. The L is significantly slower than in the 50s/60s. SEPTA in Philly has operated AB skip Stop on the Market Frankford “el” which is underground in Center City.

By: Doug Faunt

Doug Faunt — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:11:34 +0000

re: David Vartanoff 14- I’m seeing 3, 4 and 5 minutes gaps when I look at the peak train schedules through West Oakland. It looks as if twice as many trains could go through, using your 90 second figure. That’s a substantial increase.

But I can’t get my head to come up with the reality or not of the usefulness of skipping some stations.
Any thoughts?

By: david vartanoff

david vartanoff — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:50:06 +0000

Max TPH cannot overrun station dwell. Assume all 10 car trains w/ 3 door sets each. (The 12 car overhang idea will SLOW service) Realistic 90 sec headway is achievable. Tighter cannot be maintained. Without a shortcut skipping downtown Oakland (which I do not support) there will always be a gap in EB trains to acommodate Richmond-Fremont runs. So, with 90 sec headways, around that gap some throughput increase above current is possible BUT NOT MUCH. The question then, is not if but how soon a capacity expansion need be made.

By: Reedman

Reedman — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:51:44 +0000

The Transbay Tube will reach capacity at rush hour in a number of years. Some creative thinking might allow better utilization at significantly lower cost than a second tube:1)longer trains. The stations can only handle 10 cars, but requiring people to enter/exit from the from the front 10 cars of a 12 car train shouldn’t be a horrible burden (example: in theory, the back door of MUNI buses are ‘exit only’), 2) add a third door per car to speedup getting on/off, 3) build a ‘passing lane’ somewhere in the East Bay so there can be express trains, more trains, and less distance between trains.

By: Doug Faunt

Doug Faunt — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:49:29 +0000

Two things, very different:
Are we actually at “Max Trains Per Hour” in the BART Transbay tube, or is the current limitation at Embarcadero/West Oakland, which could be addressed by having some trains skip that stop?

And at the end of WWII, there was, suddenly, a lot of unused manufacturing capacity, which could be used to provide motor cars. I’m sure there was a lot of pressure to use that capacity.

By: Eric Schatmeier

Eric Schatmeier — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:16:35 +0000

CC,
Yes, I think people started driving cars because transit was taken away AND because, after the war, virtually every publicly expended transportation dollar was spent on roads and auto related infrastructure. No, I don’t think people started buying homes in Lafayette because none were available in Oakland. I think they did so, because the infrastructure in Lafayette was new and modern, while the infrastructure in Oakland was allowed to crumble. Do you think anyone (other than hermits) would live in Lafayette if the government hadn’t built Highway 24 and BART? Don’t you think more folks would have remained in Oakland if the government had maintained decent schools and a decent transit system to get people back and forth to work? The thing that bothers me about claims of a “car culture” is that it assumes that we had this spontaneous love for autos and government just responded. Instead, just as in the early days of streetcar lines, government policies, which built new and modern infrastructure wherever developers bought cheap land to build suburban homes, created places like Lafayette, Concord and Walnut Creek (and San Jose and Livermore and Antioch and soon, Brentwood and Byron.) These places would still be cowtowns without 100% government-financed automobile-related infrastructure. What if, as happened in Europe after the war, the US had used government infrastructure dollars to build around rail lines and trains? What if inner city schools were funded to the same degree as schools in the burbs? My contention is that American cities would be very different and better places to live.
I grew up in one of those houses with yards you mention and my father, a returning World War II veteran, drove back and forth to work every day until he retired. I lived in San Jose from 1956 until I went away to college in 1968. My dad may have preferred this lifestyle, but it’s not as if he had a choice. When we first moved to the Valley, which had several large industrial plants served by giant parking lots on the premises, there were 50,000 people who lived in the city and virtually no transit. Government policy could have limited sprawl and provided efficient transportation alternatives. Instead, the city and county grew the way they did because they had two major freeways, supplemented by a locally funded network of “expressways” and later by more freeways. By the time the county built rail, the auto infrastructure had already ensured that it couldn’t be successful or efficient.
The notion that people “prefer” this kind of life seems empty to me when we have no alternatives. Autos didn’t replace transit the way CDs replaced records. The government took trains off the Bay Bridge in order to make way for cars. The government forbids us from putting them back on the bridge (even though the people-carrying capacity would be greater) because it would make life inconvenient for cars. The whole structure of transportation finance in this country favors cars and we take it all for granted. We only get a direct voice in this when a transit measure is on the ballot. Soon we’ll vote on High Speed Rail. When did we ever vote on Interstate 5? When transportation policy at every level of government favors cars and penalizes transit, one explanation is that we prefer cars and live in a car culture. Another is that we were sold a bill of goods. The fact that so many people in the Bay Area choose transit even though transit is so bad, is an indicator to me that, given a viable alternative, like fully developed, customer-oriented Key Systems, ubiquitous in cities all over the country, we’d discover that our “preference” for automobiles is as transitory as it was for phonograph records. I dream of the day.

By: miked

miked — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:59:41 +0000

Taking lanes away from bay bridge traffic would never actually happen. A new tube or rails as a third level on the bridge would be nice tho (maybe above the traffic- if the bridge can support that). It’s nice to dream about these wonderful things that could have been built.

By: david vartanoff

david vartanoff — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:04:15 +0000

CC, I dissent on the bridge issue. Failing to restore rails on the bridge was a major mistake. The transbay BART tube is close to Trains Per Hour maximum. We seriously need a second transbay rail line particularly one that is standard guage thus linkable to existing and future routes. It is interesting BTW to look back at an early 70s proposal for a second tube to link SFO and OAK directly so that passengers could seamlessly change planes.