It’s no surprise. High gas prices in the last half of 2007 discouraged some from driving as much. With the recession throwing more people out of work, we can expect the trend to continue for a while longer.

The new report comes from the Texas Transportation Institute, an agency of  Texas A&M University 

Following is a link to that report: http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/ 

Earlier this year, I wrote a story about a Metropolitan Transportation Commission study finding that congestion in the Bay Area eased during 2008 because of the recession.

In both reports, authors cautioned that when the economic recovers, we can expect traffic congestion to get worse again.

When BART buys new cars, it’s got some 360,000 daily riders to think about – a mobile village of varying tastes, needs and politics. 

Are you tired of conservative blue seat colors? Are there too few seats for long rides? Not enough space to get in trains in rush hour? Is more space needed for bicycles and wheelchairs? How about televisions on trains? Do the floors and seats smell like overused sleeping bags because they soak up grime and odors? 

The rapid transit system is trying to find out what BART riders really want in the design of the train car of the future. BART is preparing to order up to 700 cars to replace its aging fleet of cars. 

The BART Board gave and got samples of the design concerns Thursday in a special workshop to unveil some alternative conceptual models for the $3.4 billion car order.

Under some options, BART cars would have a third door, fewer seats and more standing room to carry more passengers and unload them faster. This is a big plus for increasing BART’s people-carrying capacity in a growing region, but a potential bummer for travelers who get stuck standing on a long ride from the suburbs.

“We can’t make them stand that long,” said Gail Murray, a BART board member from Walnut Creek. “That’s my bottom line.”

The long distance riders, she said, supply most of BART’s fare revenue money under a fare structure that charges more for longer trips. 

Despite the recession that has cut into BART’s passenger growth this year, some trains still are very crowded during rush hour. The crowding will only worsen in the decades to come as the region’s population increases, BART planners say.

Positioning of seats is another design concern. Most BART seats face forward or back, but positioning more seats to face sideways would open up more standing room to handle more passengers.

To improve comfort for standing passengers, BART proposes to look at installing poles in the center of cars with cushioned pads for people to lean against. This concept is borrowed from London’s subway.

In other thoughts from board members, Murray said she wants to do replace the “staid” blue seat colors for ”21st century” colors. Lynette Sweet of San Francisco wants stain resistant, easily cleaned seat and floor material to preserve her dream that BART cars some day may permit drinking beverages from leak-resistant containers.

BART has posted drawings of alternative models at www.bart.gov.cars/, as well as offering viewers a chance to submit comments.

One BART rider from San Ramon who read my story about the train design called me up to express his priorities.

Quieter cars, clearer public address announcements, and easier to clean seats and floors are on Moises  

Ostrovsky’s list.

“You can hear the public address announcements, but you can’t understand them,” Ostrovsky told me earlier today.

His ideas reflect what many BART riders say in surveys.  In the new trains, train arrival announcements will be automated for the most part, BART officials say, and there may be lighted maps on walls to show train locations and stops. 

So what are your ideas for the train car design? Let us know below, and visit  www.bart.gov.cars/ to submit your ideas to the transit agency.

I have a pen-pal, if I may use an anachronism, who ran an airport security consulting business in the Midwest and previously worked as a manager at both SFO and OAK airports. He did an excellent blog on that and other airport management matters.

He still does, even though he’s now working in Afghanistan.

Alas, the Capricious Commuter doesn’t have that choice. Even if this wasn’t a newspaper-based blog, my next home (hint: My pen-pal and I will finally get to meet face-to-face) would be a silly place from which to stir up discussion about transportation in the Bay Area.

As many of you may have heard, the newspaper business is doing a little better than Afghanistan. Nobody’s getting blown up and I’m confident that most of my 29 colleagues who got layoff notices last week will get jobs in some facet of the modern information industry.

At my request, over the last several days, union and management reps worked out a deal for me to leave our newspaper group and one of the 29 could keep her job. No one on either side asked me to do this nor hinted that I should. I merely concluded that it was a good reason to head for the door sooner than I might have otherwise.

Perhaps someone here, or a group of people concerned about transportation and gas prices and the like, will keep the blog going. That would make me happy indeed, knowing that I’d started something that didn’t stop when I left the room.

Whatever happens, I’ve really enjoyed doing the blog and I’ve really enjoyed reading your comments and sparring with some of you on the great issues of transportation around here.

As I’ve said before, transportation is more than just wheels and heels. It’s what links us and makes our civilization possible (along with, say, food and water, which are also important).

Those issues cross a lot of boundaries, as my recent stories on a federal rule proposal that threatens to cut off public transit that takes kids to school in both Oakland and Minot, North Dakota.

The issues of poverty and race come up whenever I hear people talking about whether our society should invest billions in steel-wheeled mass transit systems such as BART or save our millions to bring better bus service to the poorer and largely black and Hispanic populations that don’t have cars.

And of course there’s business, economics and government, which play into discussions on how we ended up so car-and-SUV-dependent in the first place. Developers want to build sprawl because it sells, they exert huge pressures on local governments that control land use. And the state government, which might in some parallel universe be inclined to control sprawl, can’t tell the local governments what to do with the land they control.

And ever since coal-fired steam train passengers had to hold their breath while chuffing through tunnels, environmental and transportation issues have gone hand-in-hand.

And of course some may conclude that all of these things are a function of people like me.

I, after all, wanted a house with a yard but not in unaffordable Orinda or crime-plagued Oakland. Plus, in a two-income family, I ended up living closer to my wife’s work in Sacramento. Thus I ended up with a 74-mile commute from my quiet enclave in the Central Valley. I try to take the train as much as possible, but it’s quicker to drive.

But my wife no longer works in Sacramento, chasing after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with a skinny notebook and a pen. She’s instead scrambling over the rocks and dust of Afghanistan with a long furry microphone interviewing those who live with war and those who are sworn to prosecute it.

As a result of these recent newspaper troubles, and the fact that our son is now old enough to fend for himself, I’ve decided to join my wife overseas. I may freelance or get a full-time job; it’s unclear at this point.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll start a blog.

For those of you patient enough to wonder what’s become of me, I was on vacation last week, digging up my yard and rearranging my house to meet my wife’s exacting domestic standards. As for this week, I blame the elections and their abject lack of transportation issues, unless you count Props 98 and 99 and the importance of eminent domain land takings in the construction of new infrastracture projects.

There isn’t, however, much call for taking land for infrastructure projects. In spite of the $20 billion transportation bond measure (Prop 1B) passed in 2006, this state and nation continue to suffer from a lack of enough freeway lanes, airport runways and other things that could help us get around.

I spotted an interesting AP story today talking about one of the most neglected forms of transportation infrastructure, even though we seem to want it more than ever as we anticipate $7-a-gallon gas:

While the nation’s attention is focused on air travel congestion and the high cost of fuel for highway driving, a crisis is developing under the radar for another form of transportation — the freight trains used to deliver many of the goods that keep the U.S. economy humming.

The nation’s 140,000-mile network of rails devoted to carrying everything from cars to grain by freight is already groaning under the strain of congestion, with trains forced to stand aside for hours because of one-track rail lines.

It was no accident that I found this, because was already working on a story about how one and reportedly two of America’s big railroads have indicated that they aren’t about to give up any of their rights-of-way under such circumstances.

Union Pacific has said in no uncertain terms that it won’t give up its land for California’s high-speed rail enterprise, and anyone reading the AP story can see why that might be. It’s been suggested that the railroad might just be playing hardball in anticipation of future real estate negotiations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case.

But it’s also true that we need to move a lot of freight, and now it seems we need to move more people along the rails as well.

Coincidentally, I took the Capitol Corridor with my wife on Sunday, and she told me what a nice ride it was couldn’t see why I complain so much about my long commute. (Hint: I’m driving home tonight so I can spend an extra 40 minutes at home with my beloved).

But that same comfy train can sit idle for long stretches while waiting for the 20 or so freight trains that run along the same tracks every day. Both freight and passenger traffic are growing, and yet there aren’t enough tracks to accommodate that growth.

This is not about high-speed rail. This is about rail of all kinds. Despite what some of you good folks believe about buses, they can’t move people the way a railway can. Or if they can, they’re just a railway without rails, on a dedicated right-of-way much like the San Fernando Valley’s Orange Line.

We really haven’t done much with our rail network since Dewey “defeated” Truman, and it would seem that if we’re going to move millions of commuters without the aid of gasoline, we’re going to need to anticipate the future a little more effectively and lay some new track.

Sure, it’s expensive, just like rebuilding all the infrastructure we’ve let rot over the last few decades. We seem to have a consensus about how to raise money for transportation, the question is, how do we spend that money?

In November, voters may or may not approve a big fat $10 billion loan for a few hundred miles of high-speed rail. By 2020, we may or may not have service between LA and San Francisco. Regardless, it seems that during that waiting period we’ll also need to lay some more pedestrian, 1860s-style track that can carry lots of people from lots of point As to lots of point Bs.

BART, Caltrain, the Capitol Corridor, ACE and the San Joaquins are all hauling lots of people with little room to expand. For every one of them, there’s a corridor that needs another set of tracks, be it SMART, e-BART or the I-680 corridor. One day, I predict that all of them will be well-tracked.

The question is, will any of us be around to see that day?

Photo from www.owensvalleyhistory.com

A week ago, I prompted people to wax nostalgic about the Key System on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its death. I still find it curious in this day of controversial transit subsidies that a private urban transit system could survive for the first half the last century. Maybe it’s because it was built and operated by a developer and, as transit and smart-growth devotees now preach, housing, business and transit need to be compatible.

Some of you wanted to talk about just that: The kind of housing density that helps transit work, starting with apartments and condominiums. Looking back at development pre-World War II, when the Key System was thriving, it tended to be much denser. Then the GIs came home with spending money, bought cars and the era of the white-picket-fence American Dream began.

It brings to mind classic re-runs of “I Love Lucy” when Lucy and Ricky moved out to “the country.” I think it was Connecticut. Ricky could drive his eight-cylinder Pontiac into the city to continue performing at the club, and Lucy stayed home and raised the kids. Parking and traffic being what they are in New York, however, meant that commuter railroads actually benefited, eventually, from that urban exodus.

Here it was another story. Sure, the tire, gas and car companies speeded the demise of the streetcar by buying up the Key System and its cousins across the nation, then ripping up tracks and running buses instead.

But let me blaspheme for a minute and say that it made sense at the time. You can’t run rails to every suburban cul-de-sac, but you can send a bus tomorrow to a place you’ve just discovered a bunch of commuters wanting or needing a ride to work.

Today we have the Key System’s successor, AC Transit, and its many passionate supporters who decry the billions of dollars spent on fixed-line urban rail projects while more versatile bus systems are allowed to waste away.

To be sure, there are some exciting things going on with what can often seem a lumbering old East Bay institution. The global trend of running express buses with their own lanes is coming to the East Bay if the agency realizes its plan for bus rapid transit. Three buses are humming around with electric motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells. It may not be the wave of the future, but street-testing here will tell the rest of the nation if fuel cells are worth the bother and energy needed to produce the mother of all elements.

And if that weren’t enough, I swiped my TransLink card the other day and got a 50-cent discount on my normally $1.75 bus fare. It reminded me that all users of the data-chip-equipped card will get the discounts until June, which I have to say is well worth the cost of signing up. Monthly pass users can get $10 discounts as well for trying out TransLink.

The odd thing about this is that at 4 p.m. May 21 in Oakland City Council Chambers, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland, the agency’s governing board will hold a public hearing on its plans to add to that fare price.

There are four proposals, but all would raise the base local fare to $2, while hiking monthly passes from $70 to $80 locally and $116 to $132 for transbay riders. Although one proposal would hike youth passes from $15 to $28, the board seems pretty hostile to that idea.

The fare hike just points up the sad reality of where our transit system has come since the Key System was dismantled. We get less for more. Local service has been reduced to add main line service as buses _ not just AC Transit _ attempt to emulate the old trolley lines.

And all this coming at a time when gas prices are driving more commuters toward transit. At the same time, diesel prices are making it more and more difficult for the agency to respond to that increased demand.

For years, transit people and enviros have told us to switch to transit. Now we’re doing it and the system probably can’t handle it.

So sign up for FasTrak, and enjoy it while it lasts.

And it’s all Jerry Brown’s fault.

Yes, it was our newly minted attorney general who gave the California High-Speed Rail Authority the legal opinion that they didn’t need to actually vote to deep-six the idea of running their 200 mph (recently downgraded by 20 mph) trains past Tracy, Livermore, Dublin, Pleasanton and those other communities that suffer from a gross lack of transportation alternatives.

It’s not really Jerry Brown, or even the attorney on his staff who actually figured out the legal niceties that dictated the HSRA board’s lack of action. This decade-in-the-making battle was over three years ago, when the board made its initial decision to go with the Pacheco Pass.

It was the East Bay against San Francisco and San Jose, and that’s a tough battle to win. But since then, it’s become clear that the Tri-Valley didn’t want high speed rail in their backyards anyway, owing to the aerial structures and land-taking that we’re told would be involved.

When I arrived at the HSRA meeting Wednesday, anyone who had been following this for any amount of time (I was a relative newbie, having just arrived in 2006) knew that this thing had been decided long ago.

Whether it was decided on its merits or not, I’ll let the political types fight over that. I’m just a dispassionate observer, after all.

The one thing that was clearly lacking was anyone representing Oakland, unless they snuck in while I was listening to Mayor Gavin Newsom wax poetical about how now was the time for high-speed rail, even if there’s never really a good time to hit up the state for $40 billion, minus whatever can be dragged out of the feds and private partners.

Other countries, he said, were leap-frogging over America with their cool HSR programs. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma was there as chair of her house’s High-Speed Rail Caucus, bragging about being the only person the room to have been on the recent speed-record-breaking Train à Grande Vitesse trip in France. Oddly, I didn’t notice her mentioning whether she preferred Altamont or Pacheco.

In the end, the Altamont Army was down to a rag-tag collection of train people, who see the advantage of Sacramento-Stockton-San Francisco over Sacramento-Merced-San Francisco, the San Joaquin Valley people who see that Modesto won’t get a stop on the first leg of this plan and environmentalists who don’t like the fact that the Pacheco route cuts through what they’re calling the state’s biggest contiguous set of wetlands and the issue of making it easier for people to live in what are now undeveloped areas in the South Bay when the aternative would have served already developed areas near the Altamont Pass.

Alan Miller, the honorary general of that army and executive director of the Train Riders Association of California, expressed some disgust with the repeated refrain from Pacheco backers.

Over and over, we were reminded that the point of HSR is to get from the Bay Area to Southern California fast enough and cheap enough to attract people away from the airlines and freeways. What it isn’t they said, was an improvement plan for commuters, such as those who would clearly benefit from an Altamont alignment and those who could commute from Gilroy under the board’s chosen route.

“Why,” he asked, “are they adding something that’s going to add 42 miles to the trip if they don’t care about commuters?”

He’s referring, of course, to the Palmdale diversion, which I’ve always thought could be for no other reason than make the Antelope Valley into a viable bedroom community for LA.

A well-versed colleague of mine said he believed it was for the stated reason of avoiding tunneling through the Tehachapi Mountains and saving a bundle of money.

Even if that’s so, looking at the HSR map of SoCal, I see a lot of commuting possibilities, especially on the Inland Empire-to-San Diego leg.

The theme that plays in my head about this whole thing is that California generally needs something radical in the transportation arena. Maybe this is the thing, although it seems you could improve the existing rail system a whole lot more with a quarter of the money.

What’s also amazing is that no one comes to these things to speak against the idea of high-speed rail. I know they’re out there, but I guess they figure the thing will expire under its own weight, like the Soviet Union.

I think Newsom was charitable when he said he wouldn’t give the program a 50-50 chance of survival. I don’t think it was theatrics when the authority board chairman, former San Mateo judge Quentin Kopp, said delaying the ballot measure set for next November a third time would amount to the last nail in the coffin.

Meanwhile, I’m watching to see how those Moroccans do with their HSR project.

In the piece by Anrica Deb, one of our student correspondents from the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, I found my doppleganger of sorts in an ironworker named Elvis, a.k.a. John Saenz:

“There’s no one north of Santa Rosa,” said the new father, who keeps a picture of his 7-month-old daughter on the inside of his hard hat. Saenz owns a house outside Healdsburg, 70 miles north of the city, and gets up at 4:00 a.m. to commute to San Francisco daily. He lives five minutes from the Russian River and would happily work near his home if there were any jobs there.

I identify with him because his commute is as long as mine, and while I’m really glad I found my job in Oakland and love it to death, I didn’t find it until I had exhausted all possibilities of working within 20, 30 or 40 miles of home.

On the other hand, I can sometimes telecommute and don’t have to leave the house at 4 a.m. to get to a construction job. That has to be great for avoiding traffic. I avoid much of it by starting an hour later than most commuters and leaving work two hours later. Then there’s the train, which Elvis can’t do until they build SMART, and even then, why bother with train and ferry when you’re commuting at 4 a.m. and U.S. 101 is your own private driveway?

Elvis also gets $16 an hour more than I do. But then I’m not Elvis, am I?

Photo from www.car-nection.com.

Now it’s not a major departure for one who represents long-suffering Tracy commuters who must slog daily down I-580 or endure the twists, turns and delays of the ACE commuter choo-choo.

But then Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, is not your average Congressman. He defied the odds and beat powerful incumbent Republican Richard Pombo and he seems to be cultivating a centrist image in a world where the middle of the road is where you get run over by SUVs or hybrids.

But a high percentage of McNerney’s constituents might lose a road race with a spry old Raccoon on I-580 on a Friday evening, and that may help explain why he’s defying his hometown’s municipal government in supporting the Altamont Pass alignment for the mythical California High-Speed Rail project:

It is critical that this new transportation option be built along a route that fits the needs of our communities, respects the environmental effects the system will have, and serves existing population clusters and areas of large predicted growth. I believe the long-standing transportation planning principal of building sidewalks where pedestrians wear paths into the grass applies here, Of the two Bay Area to Central Valley alignment alternatives under consideration, the Altamont route is the option that makes greater sense…

That’s from McNerney’s Nov. 7 letter to Quentin Kopp, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which has a history of backing Pacheco, a stand it has stepped back from as it has been compelled to study both alignments in a environmental impact study, now being reviewed.

This is the kind of stand that I could appreciate when McNerney first jumped into the Livermore Valley mass transportation fray shortly after being elected last year, at a local forum where he got to speak after Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty, who represents the county on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Haggerty, who rarely shies away from controversy, made a comment about running BART to Tracy, and McNerney took the cue and ran with it. He said something cheering the idea of BART to Tracy, setting off a round of sniggering among those in the room who knew that running BART to Livermore was already a longshot.

But hey, we can all dream, right? I know I’d like to have BART running to Fairfield, but why stop there? High-speed rail to Sacramento would give me time to learn another language and wash the dishes on weeknights.

There’s no way I could say it better than Jerry:

The existing methods of transportation along the Altamont Corridor have outgrown their capacity. 1-580, 1-205, and 1-5 in the region are traffic-choked and intercity public transit along major commuter routes is insufficient. Additionally, the population in the region, from the northern portion of the San Joaquin Valley through the TriValley, continues to grow, The California Department of Finance recently predicted that San Joaquin County will grow 2] 4 percent by 2050. Furthermore, despite simply offering more ready access to the Bay Area for San Joaquin Valley residents, the Altamont alignment also provides a more logical link to Sacramento and California’s Capital Region.

Of course, there’s the whole where-are-we-gonna-come-up-with-40-to-whatever-billion-dollars issue, which voters may or may not be asked to help decide with a $10 billion HSR bond measure scheduled to go on the Novemeber 2008 ballot.

But we who commute long distances in slow traffic or on slow trains or buses have a lot of time to dream.

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.

Behind every successful public service, there was an idea. That idea led to a proposal and that proposal led to a big bureaucracy that, whatever its faults, got the job accomplished.

Such is the case with the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, which was born by an act of the California legislature and governor on June 4, 1957.

BART, the entity, is now 50.

With the help of our librarian, I was able to find several fat envelopes of brittle, tannin-colored slips of newsprint from the year BART was born, hoping to find some nugget of wisdom or prediction that might sound laughable today.

I didn’t find a clipping from the day after the legislation passed. Maybe that envelope was destroyed in a recent basement flood in the vacated Trib Tower or maybe someone years ago borrowed that clipping and never put it back.

I found this, however: “Bay Area Mass Transit Need Held Urgent” atop a Dec. 29, 1957, story about the dissolution of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission and the release of its final report.

The story began with a long quote; something we avoid as a matter of style nowadays:

There is an urgent need to proceed without delay on a program directed at providing the Bay Area an adequate unified system of interurban rapid mass transit.

A satisfactory solution to the Bay Area’s traffic problem cannot be reached by building freeways alone. The solution can be reached only through a system of mass rapid transit developed on the premise of moving people — not moving automobiles.

The solution to our traffic woes cannot be solved by building freeways. A group of officials actually agreed to say this in 1957.

Wow.

That was the year after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill creating the Interstate Highway System, the transport system that shapes our society today.

Still, Chairman Alan K. Browne of San Francisco and vice-chairman A.H. Moffitt Jr. of Alameda put their signatures to that statement.

Meanwhile, down south in the recently watered upstart metropolis of Los Angeles, plans were being drawn up for freeways through Topanga Canyon and along the beach in Malibu that were never built.

Today the Bay Area struggles with what by some measures is the nation’s second-worst traffic. But Thanks to Mssrs. Browne and Moffitt, and some consulting by the engineering firm of Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Hall and MacDonald, we have something that LA doesn’t.

We got BART’s real birthday, the start of service on Sept. 11, 1972.

So we now have a well-developed rapid transit system that provides 360,000 rides a day, and in a pinch can substitute for a major breakdown in the freeway system.

When that MacArthur Maze ramp collapsed April 29, we didn’t just get by. We thrived. One guy I talked to on the Bay Bridge even said traffic was better when the ramp collapsed. Why? Because some very smart guys back in 1957 decided the Bay Area couldn’t do without a major fast rail system.

There were some doubters, to be sure. San Mateo and Santa Clara counties opted out of the district, and have spent decades buying themselves back in (and in the case of San Mateo, back out again).

The other counties have realized all that time that they’ll be hard-pressed to develop the way that Pleasanton or Walnut Creek have. The path of Fairfield and Santa Rosa is paved with sprawl and ever-increasing traffic nightmares until their counties get bailed out by some future financial windfall that connects them with the rest of the area. 

What happens in LA when a freeway goes down? People take two-hour bus rides and three-hour detours, because there are few alternatives except for a very limited rail system that was built at great cost through highly built-up areas.

So here’s to you, Chairman Browne and all those other people who decided to take the road less traveled a half-century ago.