I’m mystified by the reluctance of people here in the Bay Area to use Bart and other public transport. I just had an easy breakfast meeting across the Bay in San Francisco thanks to Bart.
Over the last few days, the local news media have warned everyone that lane reconfiguration on the Bay Bridge – which links the East Bay to San Francisco – would cause traffic chaos. The result? Bart had a magnificent 3.7% increase in usage yesterday.
A friend who is also a Bart fan reckons the system’s problem is that it shuts down late at night. That might deter a few people, but this area is so not a late-night place I don’t think that explanation is sufficient. It’s much more basic: people refuse to be torn away from their car, even when it’s irrational.
The extreme example of the car’s hold on the imagination out here? My wife is writing an article about recovering from disaster for the Financial Times and she has interviewed some people about the Oakland Hills fire of 1991. She spoke to someone who lost their home and all their possessions – pets, art, clothes, personal mementoes. But what horrified their friends? “Ohmigod… your car was reduced to ashes!”
I’m a resident of San Francisco, and I take BART whenever I can. I grew up in NYC, where I also used public transit a lot (and I mean a lot — I lived in south-east Queens and went to high school in the north central Bronx). I think that BART’s real problem is that it’s actually not very convenient. It’s fine if you are going to and from locations with a BART station nearby; the amount of the SF Bay Area which does not fit that definition is very large! Consider, for example, my commute to work: I can get in my car, get onto 280, drive down to Sand Hill Road exit, drive a few stoplights to Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and park a couple minutes’ walk from my office; or I can walk 20 minutes to BART, take BART for about 25 minutes to Millbrae, change to CalTrain (instantaneous if the gods of transit smile upon me, up to an hour wait otherwise), ride another 30 minutes or so to Palo Alto or Menlo Park, take a shuttle to Stanford and another shuttle to SLAC. And in the Bay Area, this is considered “convenient” for public transit because neither terminus is more than 20 minutes on foot from a transit stop, even though I have to make 3 connections!
Peter, you’re absolutely right. But the coverage in the East Bay is reasonably good and if people are going into downtown San Francisco, there’s no excuse.
The lack of interconnection between Bart and CalTrain is a complete mystery. There must have been some political issue, because in planning terms it’s a mess. My wife goes occasionally to Palo Alto and wants to go by public transport, but that Bart-CalTrain failure makes it very, very inefficient.