
San Francisco Wants You to Design Its Future Transit System - treigerm
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/08/san-francisco-wants-you-to-design-its-future-transit-system/496583/
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cpitman
Do municipalities collect and release any data on how people move around the
area? For example, start and end points, with usual times for leaving or
arriving. A large enough sampling of something like this seems important for
planning, and I assume the real planners have it.

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chrischen
I feel like Ggogle should be altruistic and donate Maps usage data for this
purpose.

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seanp2k2
I'd be totally onboard to have Google share aggregate data about my trips
planned using GMaps both for driving and public transit if it would help
causes like this. Extra points if it was made available open-source for non-
commercial uses.

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karma_vaccum123
The peninsula routes drawn are not fantasy at all, the stations in San Jose
are already determined and are being worked on

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seanp2k2
True, but the plan (and by plan I mean it's already happening) is to run it
down East Bay because of all the peninsula NINBYs:
[http://www.vta.org/bart/berryessa](http://www.vta.org/bart/berryessa)

This will likely take 90 minutes or so to get from SJ to SF, which is a
<60-minute drive (when traffic is clear). The current time from Fremont to
Embarcadero is 58 minutes, so it will definitely take longer than driving.
Going to anywhere south of SF, e.g. The current southern-most stop Millbrae
(BART stop close to SFO, actually requires taking a separate train from there
into SFO) from Fremont currently takes 1 hour 35 minutes, so from Berryessa
that'll be closer to 2 hours.

Had they ran BART up the peninsula, which takes Caltrain 1 hour 10 mins to get
from Diridon in downtown SJ to the Millbrae station, which again doesn't get
you into but only close to the airport, the BART could have likely made it in
less than 1 hour, making it somewhat useful if you wanted to get from SJ to
SFO without taking a $150 cab ride or taking 2 hours and 3 separate fares
door-to-door going Uber -> Diridon - Caltrain -> Millbrae -> BART SFO
connector.

By running BART down the east bay, they're also limiting the options for going
useful places on the peninsula. Only Caltrain could get you from e.g. SJ to
Palo Alto. If you want to go to Stanford and you start at the SJ Caltrain stop
(so, best-case) you're looking at 60 minutes of travel to cover 15 miles and a
30 minute walk from Caltrain to Stanford once you get off.

For as many people as the Bay Area has, and for as much money as the Bay Area
has, our public transit really doesn't work for many use-cases, and we pay for
that with our time spent in traffic, along with all the accidents, pollution,
and stress that brings. Drunk driving deaths are also caused because people
have no good way to get home after BART and Caltrain stop running at midnight.

Elect me and I'll declare eminent domain on the NIMBYs in the peninsula and
build 4 tracks of BART so it can run 24x7 all around the bay, from Santa Cruz
up to Tiburon, from Santa Rosa down to Gilroy, with a Sacramento connector.
And I'll make the billionaires and local corporations who currently off-shore
corporate and capital gains taxes pay for it.

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erentz
The Bay Area should make more use of existing ROW for a true regional rail
system. Electrify and incrementally upgrade lines like Caltrain, lines to
places like Monterey. Fix the cluster f--- that is the surface railway through
Oakland and introduce a new transfer hub there. So on.

Even with the new transbay transit center they are under building it with only
6 platforms, they should build 8. And the circuitous route they are digging
for access from the existing Caltrain station makes no sense: there should be
a station at 7th at instead which will provide a better transfer point for
future metro lines.

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raldi
The Bay Area _is_ electrifying Caltrain: [http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-
approves-agreement-caltrain-ele...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-approves-
agreement-caltrain-electrification/)

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corysama
If the interface had an estimate of population density at night (homes) and
day (activity) and an estimate of cost for each line, then we could at least
play a pseudo-informed minmaxing game.

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Houshalter
Here's something I've been thinking about recently. Why can't we replace
public transit with automatically routed busses? You could order a bus like
you would an Uber, and the bus would automatically come up with the most
efficient route to meet everyone's demand.

Then tax cars on the road to reduce congestion as the busses use the road more
efficiently.

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Veratyr
The first part doesn't work so well without the second part (buses are
terrible on congested roads) and the second part is unlikely to work well
without the first (who'd accept that tax?).

Really, you'd need to do these both at once and getting support for such a
thing would be extraordinarily difficult without it being proven first.

Also, I doubt it could work as well or better than trams/streetcars in dense
areas. I mean the model used by trams/light rail in European cities (the one
that comes to my mind is Zurich) rather than that used by Muni. In Zurich
there's a stop every 2-3 blocks and it'll usually have a tram coming within a
few minutes. I've seen cities were a wait longer than 3 minutes during the day
is rare.

A bus like you describe would certainly be more convenient (it can turn and go
down streets without rails, as well as come to pick me up) but I'm not sure it
would be better overall (the pickup costs time that's lost by the current
passengers of the bus for example).

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Houshalter
What's the difference between a tram and a bus? Rails? Dedicated stops? Having
to share the route with other vehicles?

Well we could solve the second two problems, and not needing rails seems like
an advantage.

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jackfoxy
The issue at hand can be abstracted to flow in a network, and so maximizing
utility is all about maximizing and exploiting bandwidth in the network. In an
area with a complex geography like the Bay Area (and also in many if not most
urban areas) rail-based systems will not get us to the sweet spot. Throughout
my lifetime I have heard lots of _rail good / automobiles bad_ moralising
without any real thought behind it. (Below I am not going to argue any _green_
issues. I think they are eventually solved and so irrelevant.) Almost all rail
systems are direct descendants of 19th century technology when roads were too
primitive and the mechanical motive systems bulky and most efficient at a
relatively large scale. Autonomous vehicles (automobiles) became practical and
ubiquitous with better roads.

Fixed systems never get you from where you are to where you want to be. Have
you ever just happened to be at a BART station and decided _I want to go to
this other BART station?_ I doubt it. (OK, in high-density urban situations
this can happen.) Changing transportation modes is a real joy killer.

The problem to solve with autonomous vehicles is a packing problem. Better
packing while in motion (driving) and storage (parking). I submit this is a
much easier set of problems to deal with given the technology we have and that
which is on the horizon than getting fixed systems to transport you between
arbitrary points A and B.

I'm a life long Bay Arean, and I'm familiar with all the major corridors and
transportation modes. Here is my boiled down list of the some of the bigger
issues:

1) BART is maxed-out. The bandwidth on the stretch from Millbrae to West
Oakland effectively constrains the capacity of the entire system. The cars are
too small and uncomfortable when overcrowded. The station size limits the
number of cars to 10. Tunnel overhead prevents double-decker cars.

2) Bandwidth utilization on the Caltrain line is laughably small. There are
still many grade crossings which snarl surface traffic at commute time when
the occasional train does pass through.

3) The tie-ins of the east-west corridors to the north-south corridors are
inefficient and cause some of the biggest back-ups. (237, 238, Dumbarton
Bridge, San Mateo Bridge, Bay Bridge. The tie-in of the San Rafael Bridge is
the happy exception, backups on 101 and 80 having more to do with maxing-out
the local bandwidth. The Bay Bridge bandwidth itself is pretty much maxed-out.

So how do we solve the autonomous vehicle packing problems?

1) Self-driving (truly autonomous) cars will eventually allow platooning and
so better packing while in motion. This should also lead to fewer fender-
benders at commute time.

2) Self-driving should also lead to better packing in storage (parking).

3) Better monitoring of vehicle systems to prevent breakdowns from stalling
traffic.

4) More capacity at critical network connection points (intersections). There
is still room for auxillary lanes in many cases around the east-west
connections I mentioned above and elsewhere. Caltrans has in some cases
intentionally created choke points to meter traffic.

5) Can we hurry up with the current construction? I think it is a cost saving
move to stretch out improvement projects, but is the savings worth the delay?

6) With self-driving and better monitoring of vehicle systems it is possible
to make the rail corridors dual-purpose. In other words pack autonomous
vehicles into the space between trains. That will require a sophisticated
traffic control system and access ramps at stations (expensive to build at
underground stations). Think of packing vehicles with the form factor of a
Smart Car on a road surface build around the tracks. How much would that
increase bandwidth? The Caltrain corridor alone could contain the equivalent
of 2 lanes of traffic in each direction, possibly 3 if you really packed it.
There are also underutilized Union Pacific / Amtrak lines in the East Bay, not
to mention increasing the bandwidth of BART.

7) There is also room for better separation of vehicles and pedestrians and
bicycles. This problem is still expensive, but solvable.

