Along with the voters of Santa Cruz County, BATWG hopes that a passenger rail system operating along the Santa Cruz Beach line, initially between the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and Watsonville, would constitute the best use of the existing rail right-of-way.
The Bay Area has hundreds of independent auto repair and body shops. Walk into any one of them and you will almost always see individuals hard at work on various vehicle repair and restoration tasks. People actually doing things, getting their hands dirty and getting the job done.
But apparently not in the SFMTA’s repair shops. Some of them are enormous. And the official line is that they are so incredibly busy that they must be operated for three shifts a day…with appropriate extra pay for swing and graveyard work of course.
During its August 26, 2022 presentation to the BART Board, VTA spokesperson Takus Salpeas put the width of the center-loading platform in the downtown San Jose station at 22 feet, about the same width as BART’s existing platforms in places like Castro Valley and Orinda. Under SF’s Market Street the platforms are 35 feet wide.
If a 22-foot platform requires a just-announced 53-foot diameter tunnel (up from the recently established 48-foot diameter tunnel), then a 35-foot platform would presumably require a 65-foot tunnel. Recently the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) put the cost of BART Phase II assuming a 48-foot tunnel at $9.15 billion. So the question becomes, how much would a 53-foot tunnel increase the cost of the project? Or a 65-foot tunnel?
The Pandemic has hit. Travel habits have changed. Advances in technology have made it easier to do more with less commuting and other travel. Transit has been dramatically affected by all this. Yet so far there is little evidence that the large Bay Area transit agencies and MTC are adequately heeding the warning signs. Based upon the broadly based surveys of the Bay Area Council, the meticulous economic research of Stanford Professor of Economics Nicholas Bloom, the conclusions of acclaimed transportation consultant Alan Pisarski, and other findings, the handwriting is on the wall. We now have a better idea of how the changes brought on by the pandemic are affecting and will continue to affect transportation, housing and societal norms.
AB455 seeks to improve bus connections across the Bay Bridge between the East Bay and the Salesforce Transit Center.
BATWG has followed AB455 ever since the bill came to our attention last January and on June 21, 2022 sent Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks and Senator Scott Wiener a letter on the subject. From the outset we have been supportive of its general objective but felt and still feel that the entire East Bay bus service needs work, not just the Bridge. Here are highlights:
There is no doubt that BART provides a highly popular transportation service and is therefore a key element in providing mobility without people having to drive everywhere they go. For this, BART is of inestimable value to the Bay Area.
But at what cost?
Building BART was an extremely costly undertaking. Expanding it continues to be vastly more costly than it should be, as evidenced by the Federal Transportation Administration’s estimated cost of $9.15 billion for the BART Phase II subway through downtown San Jose. Operating BART is similarly over-priced and the Link 21 project is proceeding as if the sky’s the limit. Here are three separate windows through which a reader can see what’s going on at BART:
Bay Area Transportation Working Group 