A new 1,547-space parking garage opened in Pleasant Hill June 30, next to the existing garage and ostensibly a substitute for surface parking that will be developed into a “transit village.”

Parking is free there, but that may soon be remedied.

I’ve always straddled the fence on the issue of parking at BART stations. On the one hand, hardcore transit advocates don’t want any parking at all at them. One reason is that they’d like everyone to get rid of their cars, stop polluting and stop fueling “oil wars.”

Another reason is that when transit agencies build parking, people who pay for the system, both riders who pay fares and taxpayers to pick up the remaining cost, end up paying for that parking.

I was at a meeting of the AC Transit Board of Directors recently where the board’s president, Chris Peeples, said a park-and-ride lot that the agency had built was going to cost nearly $20 a day per space. He wasn’t happy about that, and wanted to know why the agency staff couldn’t even charge drivers $3 a day to use it.

On the other side of the hill, so to speak, are those who believe that the only way you can get many drivers out of their cars is to provide convenient parking at mass transit stations.

I sort of agree with that, but I’ve discovered that there’s a much more effective way to get people out of their cars.

All you have to do is charge people $5 a gallon for gasoline.

The bottom line in this world turned upside down is that people want to ride BART. People need to ride BART. Soon people will be pushing and shoving to get onto BART.

The old paradigm of begging people to change their ways is no more. Now all we need to do is provide alternatives beyond what’s available, and for that you need money.
And raising money isn’t the only reason.

Consider the commuting patterns of the average American family. Take Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition. He tells me his wife could never find parking at the North Berkeley BART station between 8:30 and 9 a.m.
Then they started charging for parking. It’s only a dollar, but now she can find parking.

“At many parking lots, they were filling up very early in the morning and forcing anybody who wasn’t able to get there often to keep on driving and drive all the way to work,” Cohen told me, explaining why his coalition lobbied BART to begin slapping a charge on their lots.
I can relate to that, because I have tried to park at Pleasant Hill, burned a bunch of gas trolling the lots and garage and ended up driving to Oakland.

One thing that Cohen noticed in his own neighborhood, the early risers drove to BART and the later commuters were forced to come up with other ways to get to work and perhaps even to the BART station. Since pay parking was instituted, some of those early risers have taken alternate ways of getting to BART, such as biking or taking a local bus.

The reality check I like to bring up is that there are lots of people who have no other way of getting to BART but driving. Most of them would be happy to pay a reasonable fee to do that.

Gail Murray, president of the BART board and the Pleasant Hill area’s rep, noted that the price of parking at transit stations has a much smaller affect on commuting choices than the price of parking in San Francisco, at Bishop Ranch and other employment centers.

Lucky for us, $5 a gallon gas will soon make those choices much easier.

Time and time again, public transportation advocates, who are fighting for nickles and dimes in Sacramento in these days of $15 billion budget holes, tell me that driving isn’t free. Roads and highways aren’t free.

Yes, even freeways aren’t free.

Every year, state and local governments pay billions of dollars for the upkeep of our roads and highways. You know that guy in the orange vest you almost hit while sending text messages last week? He fills your potholes and he gets a much-deserved salary.

It’s a sad fact, however, is that there isn’t nearly enough money to maintain our bridges and highways properly. Some people have even suggested that this could help us understand why bridges fall down sometimes, but I don’t want to jump to hasty conclusions.

We Americans can’t seem to get our arms around the idea that such government expenditures require us citizens to contribute a larger chunk of our incomes, just as citizens in the rest of the developed world do.

But there’s no point in arguing about that. I don’t see that changing any time soon. Not to mention, I, too, like the idea of keeping more of my money and I’m starting to get anxious about my stimulus payment.

Over the last year, I’ve discovered that where transportation is concerned, both our government in Washington and I have come up with viable solutions. What’s really exciting about this is that the D.C. solution has both Republican and Democratic backers.

It’s probably no great surprise to faithful readers of this blog that I’m talking about tolls. It will start with what we in the Bay Area like to call HOT lanes, or high-occupancy toll lanes.

While making the rounds in Sacramento with transit lobbyists for the Transportation and Land Use Coalition on Tuesday, Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, called them “Lexus Lanes” with a chuckle.

I once called them that, too. But they may be our only hope when it comes to raising money for transportation, followed by tolls to enter urban areas, which London is already doing with great effect, and then tolls for just entering any interstate.

Transportation officials from U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters on down recognize the sorry state we’ve descended to when it comes to funding our network. They’ve been joined by environmentalists, who want motorists to feel what transit users have always felt: The financial pinch of deciding to go anywhere.

There is one thing that might stave off this trend in California, and that’s the likelihood of $7-a-gallon gas within the next few years. That will mean a huge surplus of gasoline sales tax, which is supposed to pay for transportation. Unfortunately, those much-needed funds are being tapped by our state government for lack of the electorate’s will to raise money for other programs.

So look for our national obsession with driving to become something of a luxury, like belonging to a country club or plying the Bay in a sailboat. If it’s any consolation, remember that “freeways,” will always be free. Free of intersections, free of stop signs and lights, except the one that says “ETC OK.”

Today’s yawner e-mail comes from the Capitol Corridor:

OAKLAND, CALIF., March 17, 2008 — The Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA) has announced the highest annual ridership in the history of the Capitol Corridor service. “The February statistics from Amtrak show that our 12-month ridership total hit 1,523,630 passengers last month,” said CCJPA Managing Director Eugene Skoropowski. “This ridership beat our previous threshold that we broke in January when 1,503,210 riders boarded our trains.”

My point is not to belittle the fine work of Luna Salaver, the Corridor’s new spokesperson. It’s just that setting records on public transit systems these days seems to happen every time a new set of stats comes out. That’s especially true of the Corridor.

If you’ve read the blog  before, you probably know that it’s how I sometimes get to work from my quiet Central Valley enclave. I’m like so many other commuters, agonizing over the fact that driving is nearly always faster and hands-down more convenient when it comes to mobility at work.

But this is a different world we’re commuting in these days. I dread driving these days, knowing full well that gas alone will cost me about $17.50 even in my fuel-efficient compact Toyota. Tolls bring the tab about even with train fare, again without counting all the other costs of operating a car. I have trouble including those costs because I know I’m not going to get rid of my car just because I’m riding the train to work.

But it’s getting darned hard to find two unoccupied seats on the train these days.  Corridor riders used to have the luxury of spreading out or laying across two seats and napping. That’s become nearly impossible at peak times.

As I’ve said before, what are we going to do when gas hits $4.50 a gallon? Then they’ll be standing on the train, and there won’t be any new cars to add to the trains, especially in this tight budget year.

Suddenly, the new emergency water transit agency is starting to make sense. At least there’s an area on its way toward a major expansion. When the Bay Bridge closed on Labor Day weekend, ferry riders were left waving at the dock for want of deck space.

BART can expand a little, but its ancient cars are in bad need of replacement and the agency is in court with the company that failed to come up with a system to make trains run more frequently through the Transbay Tube without compromising safety.

Yes, it was a lovely sentiment to think that people would regularly ride transit because they wanted to save the world, but this is about money, which, as they say, makes the planet go ’round.

Perhaps it was my punishment for doubting that high-speed rail would ever be built in my lifetime. Perhaps it was what I deserve for not believing that people will all switch to public transit if only it were more convenient.

Or perhaps it was ignoring the sign in front of the Sacramento parking garage that said it closed at 7 p.m.

So I was in a hurry to get to the High-Speed Rail Authority board meeting where the board decided not to decide, thus deciding on a South Bay route for high-speed rail, which will improve the lives of millions of Californians and will be coming to a stop near you very soon, geologically speaking. Unless you live in Oakland, from which the 200+ mph service will be a short BART ride away.

The lot I normally use was full, and I assure you that lot is open until the bars close. So I’d gotten a ride to the garage in question last night, got dropped off and found my car was on the wrong side of steel gates.

Of course, this was no major setback, especially considering that I live in a peaceful Central Valley enclave not 20 minutes from the center of state government.

That’s 20 minutes by car, of course.

Luckily, the light rail tracks are only a half-block from the garage, and I was soon buying a $2 ticket, planning to go to the Amtrak Station and take the very familiar Capitol Corridor home.

Now here’s where you AC Transit devotees need to pay attention: I called Amtrak’s automated train information line, told it I wanted to leave sometime after 8 p.m.

Ahh. That’s better. Now I’m on the train heading home at 7:03 p.m. today.

Back to last night: I’m on the phone asking Julie, the automated Amtrak information voice, when the next train leaves Sacramento.

“I found two possible buses,’’ she tells me, the first of which leaves at 9:05 p.m., nearly an hour later.

BUSES? Knowing the Capitol Corridor, I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I’m used to there being a 9:20 p.m. train leaving Oakland (nearly always with less than a busload of passengers) to go the other direction.

If I’m going to take a bus, I might as well use one run by an actual bus service and costs $6 less. I called my county bus agency, and they said the next bus was leaving at 8:35.

So my $2 light rail ride, which had already commenced by the time I found out about the bus, took me about six blocks, so I could backtrack two blocks to the bus stop.

And although the bus was to arrive much earlier, there was still time to pop in at the hacks’ and flaks’ favorite watering hole and have a beer and rest stop beforehand.

The bus stop was right in front of an office building awning, so I could escape the rain, especially nice when your ski jacket is locked in a car that’s locked in a garage.

Forty-five minutes later, I was catching a cab for the remainder of my soggy ride home.

So I’m home, but my car’s in the garage.

“Remember, you can’t drive the other car to get it,” my wife volunteered.

I admit I’m stupid, but…

No, I’d ride my bike to the local park ‘n’ ride, catch the first bus back to Sacramento (5:57 a.m. with bike rack), ride the eight blocks from the bus stop and drive back.

The rain, however, wouldn’t cooperate, so in a way, I did exactly what my wife said not to do. I drove our second car to the park ‘n’ ride, caught the bus with not a second to spare (why does this always happen to me?).

As of this writing, I’m heading back to the Valley with my bike, which I’m going to finally pedal to the park ‘n’ ride to retrieve car No. 1 and drive home.

Equipped with a rain slicker this morning, I walked to the garage, aroused the attendant and asked if there was an extra overnight charge. He told me there was, but he’d let me slide.

“Just pay the $20,” which was yesterday’s fee, and I’d be on my way.

Walking up the stairs to the car, I wondered if I had $20.

“There’s a coffee shop around the corner, and right past it, an ATM,” the attendant told me after affirming my assumption that cash would be required.

On my way back, I thought I’d need a latte to get me to work in Oakland, and picked up a second for the attendant.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said, as I handed him the cup. “Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas,” I replied and set off to work just as the rain tapered off.

Hmm. Maybe. Sounds good. How?

You can take BART to work.

Not me. Don’t live near a BART station and the BART lots are always full when I drive to one.

You can take the bus to BART.

No. The bus stop is too far from my house. I’d spend 20 minutes just walking there. Then I have to wait for the bus. By that time, I could be at work already.

You could ride your bike to BART.

It’s hilly where I live. I’d get all sweaty. And besides, BART doesn’t allow me to take my bike during rush hour. Any other ideas?

Yes. Keep driving and pay a carbon tax of 23 cents a gallon, pay a rush-hour toll to get into the city and a peak-hour parking surcharge when you get to work.

But I’d be paying, what, five times a mile what I do now to drive?
Yep. But you’d be helping to improve the transportation network so other people can carpool or ride BART, commuter trains, buses and their bikes to work more easily.

And thus I’d be fighting global warming?
Exactly.

That’s a fine plan you’ve got there, but I’ve got friends who drive solo, too.
How many?

Oh, like, 70 percent of Bay Area commuters.

But don’t they want to fight global warming?

Yes, but they also want to get to work in 20 minutes instead of waiting for the bus.

So they’ll just pay more.

They don’t want to pay more.

Isn’t that selfish?

Hello? This is Ah-MER-ih-ca?

This could be the tenor of the conversation that started today at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission/Association of Bay Area Governments conferene conference on transportation.

Hundreds of area transportation officials, transit advocates and environmentalists gathered to hear a bold new plan to fight global warming in a way that would put the Bay Area way out in front of the rest of the state, to say nothing of the rest of the nation.

It’s not just about charging drivers. It’s also about high-occupancy toll lanes, which you don’t have to use or pay the extra toll if you don’t want to or can’t afford it.

The concept also envisions freeways that operate much more efficiently, using more and better metering lights and other state-of-the-art traffic management methods. That’s supposed to cut way back on emissions from cars, trucks and SUVs that now inch along during rush hour.

And it’s about land use: The MTC is going to dole out $10 million, for starters, to selected communities where it wants to focus more compact, transit-friendly growth. It’s not much, but it will help those communities do their urban planning. After that, more money might help realize those plans.

But the political reality here is that the overwhelming majority of Bay Area residents drive to work, alone.

The idea will be especially unpopular in outlying counties that start with S. I mean, Solano County voters wouldn’t even pass a sales tax to fix their freeways. Imagine how they’d feel about something aimed at improving public transit they could never see themselves riding.

But San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the event’s lunchtime keynoter, may have hinted at the magic bullet that could bring a lot of this about:

“We don’t need to ask permission from our federal representatives to do this _ or even from our regional representatives.”

As it happens, the federal government and the Bush Administration couldn’t be happier with the congestion and parking charges San Francisco is planning. Federal transportation funds have nearly dried up, and somebody’s got to pay for future maintenance and improvements.

But most critical is that the people in the urban core, in Oakland, in San Jose, in Berkeley and other commuter destinations, will be far more likely to make the painful changes unilaterally.

Commuters from Fairfield, Gilroy and Tracy would then have the involuntary honor of sacrificing for the sake of the polar bears and Maldive islanders.

When I got invited to share my wisdom about Bay Area transportation this morning on KQED radio’s “Forum” program, I though maybe I’d hear from listeners about my aligning San Francisco with the Bush Administration.

The outrage, I imagined, at the thought that the epicenter of all things progressive could be the running dog for U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters’ crusade to make drivers pay through the nose for causing congestion. I mean, really.

But no, no one wanted to pillory me for such a suggestion, not even Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, who told me Tuesday that not everything happens because of politics.

He was, by the way, the only Bay Area transportation official I’ve ever seen hug a member of the Bush cabinet on the streets of San Francisco. Come to think of it, she’s the first member of the Bush cabinet I’ve ever seen receive a hug on the streets of San Francisco. Maybe that’s because he and she serve together on a panel that’s trying to figure out how this nation is going to pay for transportation now that the highway trust fund is broke. Or maybe it’s an acknowledgment that once that Golden Gate Bridge toll goes up to $7, they could be the only friends they have left.

No, that’s not what provoked ire on the part of listeners, nor was my suggestion that you can’t run efficient public transit out in our sprawling suburbs, where a bus ride often involves just you, a bus and a driver.

No, the raw nerve that I touched was about bicycling.

To start with, there was an e-mail sent to the show that complained that for all our blather about trains, buses and automobiles, we were neglecting bikes as a viable mode of transportation.

As a frequent bike-train-bike commuter, I jumped in, saying that it’s great for the young, healthy and fearless, but for most commuters, it’s somewhat impractical, not to mention scary in places where 18-wheelers are blowing by.

As soon as I got back to my desk, I was greeted with a note from concycliere John Rogers of the human-powered Cosa Nostra:

I could barely believe what I was hearing. How upsetting that someone who actually rides a bike on part of his commute can be so dismissive about the potential of bicycle commuting. Although I suppose if all you have to go on is how “scary” your ride is from the Coliseum BART station, I shouldn’t be surprised.

I guess first off I need to ask if you are aware of the significant role that bicycle commuting plays in cities outside the US. Have you been to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or any other city in Europe?

Is yours a “it can’t happen here” attitude, or just plain lack of knowledge?

If you have never seen it working, I can more easily excuse your attitude.
Otherwise why would you be so disparaging? Why would you not even mention the benefits that can come from an extensive, safe, multi-modal bicycling infrastructure? Why no mention of the percentage of bicycle commuters in European cities?

Why no mention of bike lanes, bike parking, bike access to public transportation, or any of the amenities that make cycling a viable way to and from work for millions of people around the world?

Sure it’s “scary.” The point, obviously, is to make it not scary. That’s why they other cities have things like colored bike lanes, protected bike lanes, traffic calming, bike parking, bike signals, etc. That’s why in European cities it is not the “young and fit” that bike to work; it’s everybody … working people of all kinds, business people, school kids, seniors, you see them all on the street. They feel so safe they don’t even wear helmets…

“If you build it they will come,” would be a much more reasonable and informed stance. Don’t you think?

That’ll teach me to mouth off about bicycle commuting. Maybe I’m just bitter that the East Bay Bicycle Coalition won’t link my “for profit” blog to their site. Trust me, if it made a profit, I’d have heard about it.

Yes, there are places where people ride bikes in huge numbers. In most of those places, it is a lot easier to get around by bike. It’s also a lot harder to get around by car. Gas costs $5 a gallon and/or people can’t afford to buy cars.

I also pointed out to Forum host Michael Krazny that in places like China where everybody rides bikes and takes public transit, more and more people are driving cars once they accumulate enough wealth.

And I have been to Europe, more than once. I lived there. Germany, which has fantastic public transit and more car-free downtowns than anywhere I’ve seen, also has some world-class staue, or traffic jams. Listen to the radio there in the morning and all you’re going to hear is “stau,” “stau,” “stau,” preceded by the number of kilometers traffic has backed up.

I love biking to work. I know other people are passionate about bicycle commuting, and as I said on the show, our local transportation agencies are doing numerous projects to make BART stations and other facilities more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly. Even in my own little world of risking my life on Hegenberger Road, there’s a path on the drawing board that will connect the Coliseum BART station with the other side of the freeway and the Bay Trail.

But most people I know wouldn’t dream of getting themselves all sweaty just as the arrive at work, to say nothing of give up the convenience of having a car handy. It’s a great alternative, but as long as we have cars and occasional free-flowing traffic, that’s what it will continue to be.

(If you have an hour to kill, you can listen to the program here.)

Photo from norisons2005 Flickr.com site.

What if high-speed rail went through the Altamont Pass a teeny bit, and then stopped?

Sounds silly at first blush, but you have to bear with me here.

I heard about this at Wednesday’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission meeting, when a speaker critical of the area’s first comprehensive regional rail plan noted that Scott Haggerty, an Alameda County Supervisor who represents the county on the commission, had his own high-speed rail plan.

One could say, and one would be very sensible to do so, that the time for proposing new bullet train routes has passed. The California High-Speed Rail Authority is in the throes of an environmental impact process pitting the 100-percent Altamont Pass option against the Pacheco Pass options. The routes have been debated for years, the authority is getting a fifth of what it asked for in the state budget and a lack of resolve at this point might be akin to being the lame wildebeest as the lions are closing in.

But sometimes a wildebeest has to zig when the lions expect it to zag.

The odds of California voters, their elected representatives and the private sector agreeing to come up with the initial estimate of around $40 billion seem somewhat slim. As the Sacramento Bee opined this week, bullet trains are a great idea, but there are more immediate infrastructure needs we already can’t pay for.

Why is it so expensive? I’m not a PhD, but it seems that high-speed rail is trying to be all things to all people.

At its core, it’s a viable way to get to Southern California that would be fast enough to compete with the airlines (2 1/2 hours from downtown San Francisco to downtown LA, with little of that waiting you do at the airport) and cheap and convenient enough to compete with the freeways.

But it would be oh, so much more, at least in the minds of the rag-tag coalition trying to promote it.

It couldn’t go straight to Los Angeles. The authority has it going though the Antelope Valley, promising to turn that remote locale into a bustling suburb of Los Angeles.

It would, if a coalition of Santa Clara County and San Francisco officials continues to hold sway, perform a similar conversion for the rural areas around the Pacheco Pass. If you don’t already own a patch of land down there, strike now while the bullet gravy train has nearly ground to a halt.

If the Altamont Pass backers in the East Bay and Central Valley get their way, high-speed rail will be more things to more people.

It will be a posh commuter train, allowing people who can’t afford private jets to fly to Oakland or San Francisco in the time it now takes to drive from one end of Pleasanton to the other in Interstate 580 during rush hour.

And if the Central Valley isn’t growing fast enough, the bullet train will be an engine of commerce like no other. At one end, it would enable people to commute to Los Angeles. At the other end, it would make it feasible for people to work in San Jose and live in Fresno.

But those people dancing around this golden cash calf have made the transportation gods angry. The project is so intimidating that fewer and fewer people are taking it seriously.

We don’t need to put a man on the moon here. We just need to get to LA.

Why not just build a line where it will do the most good — down the Central Valley and over the mountains into LA?

It doesn’t have to start in downtown San Francisco. It just has to cut the time it takes to get from the Bay Area to Southern California from the current 11 or 12 hours that Amtrak’s run-down Coast Starlight takes to, say, four hours.

Two hours by improved regular trains out to or near the Central Valley, then another two hours to LA. I know I’d use it if it meant it would be faster than driving and didn’t involve operating a vehicle for six hours.

Heck, you could even build a vast parking lot for people who’d rather not change trains. They, too, would benefit from cutting short the longest part of their trip.

The idea floated by Haggerty dovetails nicely with my simplistic vision. He proposes building a “Grand Central Station” in Livermore, where people could transfer to high-speed rail from BART, the Altamont Commter Express commuter rail line or an as-yet-to-be-figured-out rail connection to eastern Contra Costa County.

He sees it as complementing a Pacheco Pass-San Jose-San Francisco bullet line, but I say, build your station, make that the gateway to the Bay Area.

Photo from www.japaneselifestyle.com.au.