Can BART overcrowding be addressed in part by improving BART itself? It'd be one thing if it were already moving such large numbers of people that it'd be infeasible to expect higher capacity, but its current ridership isn't even all that high. The Chicago "L", for example, has a similar number of track-miles (though more stations), but moves twice as many people on an average day. How is BART moving half as many and yet overcrowded?

Wikipedia says that current headways fall short of the original plan, which seems like it could be part of the problem:

> In the 1970s, BART had envisioned frequent local service, with headways as short as two minutes between trains and six minutes intra-line on the (quadruple-interlined) section in San Francisco. However, headways have fallen short of the original plans, presently three minutes between trains, and 15 minutes intra-line in San Francisco.

Yeah, especially coming back from China where you don’t have to worry upon missing a train since the next one will be there in a couple minutes. BART trains come extremely infrequently, it’s especially annoying when you just missed the train and you’d almost rather get out of the station and walk/Uber but you’ve already paid.

What is the reason for this? Do they not have enough trains? Is it a safety issue? Do they not have enough conductors/drivers/personal? Is it an engineering problem, a money problem, something else? Seems like increasing train frequency would alleviate a lot of the stress on the system and be relatively inexpensive.

According to BART it's due to insufficient train cars and outdated control systems. They say they're working on it.[1]

Reading between the lines it sounds like there is a money problem constraining it, and then we get to the controversial issue of how they manage costs.

[1] https://www.bart.gov/guide/faq#frequent_trains

BART is run in a hilariously inefficient way and most of its budget is wasted.

Just want to point out that Detroit built itself this way through the 1950's and 1960's. At the time, urban planners thought it would be efficient and sensible design.

What ended up happening, though, is that as factories shuttered, the neighborhoods that were built around them started to collapse. The net result was pockets of localized decay, that eventually led to the entire urban area rotting as more people left. It's actually kind of stunning to see in person. (I live about 50 min South of Detroit). And oh, the riots of 1967 didn't help, either.

It's hard to imagine that happening the the metro-Bay area, but I remind myself that people once thought GM, Chrysler and Ford could never go under.

Detroit was built as low rise slum though, density was not on the list when urban planners designed Detroit. Thus how you end up with a highly dispersed population requiring infrastructure you can't maintain and could never afford to (were it not for federal grants up front).

Lafayette, Louisiana is in a similar state, all this suburban infrastructure investment that is ultimately a giant waste: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

Some other reasons why Detroit collapsed: - Imposing a city income tax whereas neighboring suburbs did not. - Corrupt and short sighted city management - Crippling bureaucracy and union jobs in city government (as of 2012, the water department employed a horseshoer even though the had no horses--I think this position has been done away with now though) "The city pays $29,245 in salary and about $27,000 in benefits for the horseshoer position." https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/17404 - Lack of density - Flight from the city -- caused by variety of factors that include taxes and racial reasons

if your entire economy rapidly contracts then you're going to have pockets of decay regardless. Detroit also is a massively sprawling city with 138 sq miles of land vs. SF's 49 square miles of land and oakland's 55 sq miles of land.

I had a similar thought seeing all the office/luxury condo construction going up in Redwood City. Their can't be more then a handful of "large" tech companies in the immediate vicinity and what will happen when they inevitably downsize (as almost all companies do over the course of decades...)?

RWC is a great place to commute as far as Hayward, SJ near 101, or SF near Caltrain. I wouldn’t be worried about living there at all.

Factories are not the same as office buildings.

If a factory closes down, you are stuck with a specialized building that can't really be used for anything else.

If a company in an office building closes down, you can pretty easily replace it with either a different company, OR with simply more residential housing stock.

The best way is to make work from home / remote default. If US does then devloping countries can follow. If Fortune 100 company makes rule for thier offshoring companies allow work from home then they pretty much can solve traffic issues all Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad in a month. And the country like India can also improve infrastruture other than road .

Remote-by-default will only work if the workday is profoundly transformed and telecommuter areas (generally more suburban or exurban) can be made more social.

Unless the idea is social isolation, anyway. Sometimes the gleeful description of "progress" makes it sound like there's cheering on of the cyberpunk dystopia going down.

> And the best way to fix Bart overcrowding is to build apartments near where people work so they don't HAVE to commute.

Why not build businesses where people live? Apple can spend 5 billion on its new campus in the middle of nowhere, but the public has to shoulder the cost for transit. 90 percent of Google's and Apple's domestic workforce could probably do at least 70 percent of their work from home. Apple prides itself on renewable energy usage, but it's perfectly OK for its employees to spend 3 hours idling in traffic?

If you want to build a big new campus it pretty much has to be in the middle of nowhere, because people tend not to like you bulldozing a chunk of city. They could build their own housing but people tend not to like the "company town", and for good reason. Fixed-line transit is pretty much impossible to build without eminent domain powers; I'm sure the tech companies would be happy to contribute to building a line but they would need cooperation from the government. Meanwhile they do run their own bus services because that's the only form of transit that a private company can realistically operate, and people complain about those too.

Planned development areas where you get a bunch of housing, businessplaces and transit built in the same place can work really well. But they need coordination and collaboration from the public side; there's only so much one business can do on its own.

If the city allowed Apple or whoever to build a whole bunch of skyscrapers in the middle of Soma SF, then I can assure you that the companies would Love to do that.

I agree. Density should be the focuses. And zoning laws should be changed so BOTH companies and residential apartment companies are allowed to build more densely.

Apple should have build a couple apartment towers next to it.

Cupertino didn't let them.

Apple has enormous influence, and Jobs was a very good salesman. Maybe Apple didn't try very hard.

Cupertino voted down the attempt to replace Vallco with mixed-use because it might increase traffic. They’d rather have the corpse of a mall than anything apparently.

Then you'd have a bunch of millionaires in a price war to live right next to work

Why is that a problem?

For every millionaire that is price waring over NEW Apartments is one less millionaire that is gentrifying and kicking out a family living in the mission.

Even simpler, let people work remote.