There has been much recent discussion about how to improve rail and bus connections in the Southeast Bay. The list below summarizes how things could be put together in a productive way. Absent some semblance of coordination and unity, the “solutions” to complicated networking problems tend to come one by one, often pursuant to ill-considered “bright ideas”, often promoted parochially by inexperienced people with no understanding or interest in the need for regional connections, or by developers and real estate speculators looking for financial gain. Piecemeal approaches to transportation infrastructure improvements are seldom of transportation benefit to anyone. With their “BART-above-all-else” approach, the original BART planners tried it that way, thereby forcing the connecting transit services to do the adapting and leaving the Region with some unnecessary gaps in service that persist to this day. The Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Board on the other hand in its Capitol Corridor upgrade programs has done an unusually thorough job of taking connection opportunities into account. The following proposals are intended to illustrate part of what a carefully coordinated rail and bus network in the Southeast Bay might look like.
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