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A comment on For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail?.

Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by honkhonkpants on Saturday August 13, 2016 @05:21PM (#12283159)
What a blessing of a problem to have a double-track high speed rail system passing through an underutilized station. For comparison to the Bay Area, the distance from Providence to Boston is about the same as the distance from Berkeley to San Jose. That route is also served by Amtrak, but on a neglected single-track, wooden-tie, local-stop service that's scheduled to take 1h33m, but almost always takes longer. Amtrak from Providence to Boston only takes 40 minutes and is generally reliable. Regional transportation in the northeast is so far beyond what we have in the Bay Area.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by om42 on Saturday August 13, 2016 @06:03PM (#12283292)
I was talking to a friend about this. Why does California not have a better public transportation system build? Especially in the Bay Area? I know cities like LA were designed for cars but I've gotten used to public transportation in the Northeast (DC/Philly/NYC/Boston) and its surprising how much west coast cities lack in that department.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by PLenz on Saturday August 13, 2016 @07:27PM (#12283576)
LA was designed for mass transit - Pacific Electric was the largest trolley/interurban system in the U.S. It was dismantled in the 1950's in favor of the car-centric design that exists today (largely at the behest of the automobile industry - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...).
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by bsder on Saturday August 13, 2016 @06:24PM (#12283357)
> Why does California not have a better public transportation system build? Especially in the Bay Area?

NIMBY.

The rich folks on the west side of the bay don't want extra train traffic through their enclaves. They like it gridlocked, thank you very much, so that the plebians have to stay out. And they have enough money to fight it.

East bay, on the other hand, has been working on it. BART is apparently almost to Milpitas.

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[dead]
Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by throwaway_exer on Saturday August 13, 2016 @10:12PM (#12284008)
Actually, bsder is correct. The reason BART was never extended from Millbrae to San Jose was that the intermediate towns, mainly Atherton, refused.

Today, meaning right now, Atherton's city attorney is engaged in a battle with High Speed Rail (HSR.)

He informed the transit planning commission that Atherton would not accept planning funds if it meant losing the legal right to sue to stop HSR.)

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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by niftich on Saturday August 13, 2016 @06:16PM (#12283335)
Intuitively and practically, I agree that public transport is worse on in the Bay Area than it is along the Northeast Corridor, but qualifying and quantifying how it's actually different is a challenge. For one, the Bay Area's primary transit backbones are BART and Caltrain [1]; there is a missing link between East Bay and San Jose; there's not enough Transbay options; Oakland is the true hub of the system but not the primary activity center.

Also, most of the activity nodes of the Bay Area are actually close to transit, which paradoxically hurts the efficiently of the system. Traditionally, you'd want each station to be its own hub from a larger catchment area that you'd serve with, say, buses or other transit. But in the Bay Area, because of the Bay and mountains hemming in the built-up areas, every interesting node is already on the One True Circum-Bay String of Pearls, and have minimal catchment areas beyond them.

This also means there is no express option to get from one end to the other, without having to traverse through all intermediate points first, regardless whether that's accomplished with an 'express service' that skips stops, or a transversal direct line.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/SF_Bay_R...

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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by buzzybee on Saturday August 13, 2016 @07:10PM (#12283534)
Governance and land use decisions definitely play a big role in how the Bay Area has become messy. The Bay Area doesn't have a regional transit authority empowered with the final word on routes and infrastructure, it has at least one agency per county, plus additional ones for each railway - dozens of services that have difficulty coordinating.

The anti-development climate also played a big role in how things played out. Regional planning in the midcentury wanted something more like LA - lots of freeways, cheap land and cheap development. Public backlash prevented the bay from being filled, and stopped most new freeway construction. [0] BART planning started in the same era, and it was also more ambitious than what ultimately came to pass. [1] Yet despite that, or maybe in part because of it, the jobs, and subsequently new population, continued to stream in. As a result, there's a lot of "development debt" that has been kicked down the road until now.

The governance issue and the land use issue are correlated; since authority is heavily localized across many departments, even on basics like water(SF enjoys a direct line to the good Hetch Hetchy water), every city and county tries to avoid "taking one for the team" and focuses on its immediate self-interest instead, favoring NIMBY policies, unbalanced commercial development, and services and infrastructure favoring the wealthiest demographics. Governance is also generally inefficient; SF's spending is far beyond other cities of its size. The new Bay Bridge span is an embarrassment on many levels. Politicians regularly play the liberal base for fools by using a framing of concern to avoid useful analysis, decision, or action; at the same time, they are willing to bend over backwards for the VC-backed tech club, cutting special deals and ignoring or downplaying misbehavior.

It's a highly dysfunctional place, albeit not yet melting down.

[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/In-1959-the-vision-for...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/zprpe/the_actual_o...

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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by BurningFrog on Saturday August 13, 2016 @06:38PM (#12283414)
California informally decided to not build anything for the last 30-40 years.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by InclinedPlane on Saturday August 13, 2016 @09:03PM (#12283832)
This exists at several levels. For one they were at the forefront of the "tax rebellion", depriving the state and local governments of funds to do anything of substance. For another they've been very anti-development overall. Many of the municipalities along silicon valley are staunchly anti-development, and decided to remain low density bedroom/retirement communities. And LA has been a car-centric city for a while, which is difficult to overcome in a city that size.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by honkhonkpants on Saturday August 13, 2016 @06:10PM (#12283313)
California until quite recently was a giant real estate scam. The entire place was settled with the intent to exploit it and then dump it on the next more gullible person. Only in the last few decades has planning for long-term sustainability been widely practiced.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by michaelvoz on Saturday August 13, 2016 @09:52PM (#12283963)
Source? Seems like drivel.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by madgar on Sunday August 14, 2016 @01:32AM (#12284389)
Yeah, not sure who can swallow that "planning for long-term sustainability [has] been widely practiced" for "the last few decades."
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by dredmorbius on Saturday August 13, 2016 @08:11PM (#12283706)
Citation requested.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by melling on Saturday August 13, 2016 @05:28PM (#12283184)
The US doesn't really have a high-speed rail. Boston to Providence is only 50 miles.

Ok, technically we do have 18 miles of high-speed rail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...

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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by honkhonkpants on Saturday August 13, 2016 @05:31PM (#12283193)
Hey, it's electric! That's radical and exotic to us in California.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by djcapelis on Saturday August 13, 2016 @11:16PM (#12284135)
Not for long! In a decade or so Caltrain and CA HSR will both be electric.

Also we have several existing electric rail systems. BART and Muni Metro, for instance. LA Metro too.

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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by ZanyProgrammer on Saturday August 13, 2016 @07:10PM (#12283528)
I used to commute from Great America to Oakland Coliseum on the Capitol Corridor, and it took much less than 93 minutes. Anyways BART to San Jose will help with that, but considering the tiny Warm Springs Extension is a year late don't get your hopes up for that Berryessa Bart commute.
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by honkhonkpants on Saturday August 13, 2016 @07:23PM (#12283569)
It's an hour and 3 minutes from Richmond BART to Fremont BART, and Capitol Corridor takes an hour and 4 minutes to make the same trip. Why would BART to San Jose be any faster than Amtrak to San Jose?
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Re:For a Better Economy, Add Commuter Rail? by ZanyProgrammer on Saturday August 13, 2016 @08:50PM (#12283799)
Unfortunately upgrading the Capitol corridor to have regular commute service is practically impossible.
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