Yours Truly muses on transit while riding the BART near Hayward, CA

Santa Clara VTA express buses await commuters hot off the BART.

Advertisement for BART on ... BART.

[This is Part 1 in a three part series examining alternative transit in the Bay and what can be applied to Louisville]

Transit just works better in the Bay Area than it does here. No Duh. But why? Click through the jump.

Density

San Francisco is a city the population of Louisville, crammed into a 100-square-mile rectangle with no possibility of sprawl. Other Bay area communities have prominent mountain ranges and bodies of water, keeping them from expanding indefinately. Louisville has no such natural boundaries.

Commitment

The state of California has traditionally supported transit more than Kentucky has, though of late California has decided to suck as badly as us.  Still, they got a head start, and now have tons of easy-to-maintain rail systems on the ground.

Integration

Lastly, they have recently conquored a hurdle to mass transit ridership. Whereas Jefferson County has only one Transit Authority, California has a metric bzongaload of transit authorities. Off the top of the head there's: the VTA, SamTrans, Muni, AC Transit, and  TAM. Add to this a messload of rail systems that span the counties: BART, CalTrain, and AMTRAK. Unless you're a transit buff, you'll have no idea which system to use when, and the combinatorial explosion of possiblilities for connecting any two points can take more time to evaluate than the actual transit trip itself.

Fortunately, this problem is getting licked by Google Transit. Google Transit knows all the transit boundaries so that you don't have to. Transit is integrated into their mapping software, so it also knows how to walk and (soon) bike. Google Transit has a full-featured mapping system with fast zoom and pan, satellite views (can I walk across those RR tracks?), and streetview.

Paired with internet-capable smartphones, Google Transit is the all-singing, all-dancing intelligent bus schedule.

Finally, Google Transit makes things easier for the out-of-towner. When visiting, I don't have to figure out the acronymn of the local transit authority, and learn their idiosyncratic route finding software. Its the same user-interface I use in my home city for planning non-transit trips.

Google Transit isn't such an obvious win in Louisville, where there is just one 800lb gorrilla of a transit agency, but I still find Google Transit to be more useful than the system TARC is currently using.

Frequency

In the Bay, after dinking around with route planning, eventually I realized that every line seemed to have 15 minute headways, and in many cases it was even better. In two cases it was ~30m, but we rode a lot of transit. It wasn't London, but it was still impressive.

Trolley School

Strolling San Francisco, a native took me aside and quietly told me not to refer to any of the equipment there as a "trolley". It turns out, they want to distinguish between the cable cars (which have cables recessed into the ground, look like the TARC Toonerville Trolleys, and are primarily a tourist draw) and the streetcars (larger, longer, streamlined, and using overhead wires). "Trolley" is halfway between and might confuse us tourists. Schooled.

Bikes Not On Board

Every bus we saw was bike-rack equipped. They all went unused. That seemed odd until we realized that most people were using Rail/Bus the way Louisvillians are using Bus/Bike - the little guy is the feeder, the big guy does big, coarse hops. People riding the bus there were getting close enough to their destinations that they didn't need bikes for the last mile. Guess it was that frequency thing again.

Bikes were common as dirt on the rail systems. We saw tons on BART and several on VTA light rail (above).

I was also startled to see cyclists using the Light Rail ROW as a cycletrack. That asphalt was prohibited to cars, and usable by peds, but I don't really relish the idea of riding down the middle of a pair of tire-trapping traps, with the penalty of error a headbutt with a locomotive! I'll take my chances among the SUVs any day. In their defense, these crazies all had mountain bikes with 40mm tires, and the light rail traps were only going to trap 30mm road bike tires. So maybe they knew what they were doing - but I doubt it.

Light Rail and Class Conciousness

The only seedyness in the light rail corridor seemed ... so self-concious about that fact that they named the business after it!

Santa Clara VTA light rail photograph from Flickr user "sharksfan"
 

CART routinely makes the argument that Light Rail is a higher quality service, that can lure people out of their cars and onto transit for the first time. This was my first time living or working near a light rail line.

Was light rail service seductive enough to lure middle class tourists out of their cars? Absolutely.

Our conference-goers were middle-to-upper class folks from around the country. They were overhwelmingly white and mostly male. Many drove in. Many took airplanes in. Many had folding bikes - the most popular brand by far was Bike Friday, a botique folding bike that can fit in your lap.

How did these folks get into the entertainment district at night? Ride their botique folding bikes? No. Drive their cars? Oh Hell No. They hopped on the light rail, fare $1.75.

There were also a gazillion buses going up and down the same corridor. Nobody bothered to figure out the bus routes. Buses were considered too confusing. They could go anywhere. But those light rail tracks were a wayfinding device that even the dumbest tourist could figure out.

The ride was smooth and quiet. The whole system seemed so new and clean that it felt like it went in last week. In reality it is 22 years old. A very well maintained system.

Conclusions

The Bay has excellent transit. Between the SF Airport BART expansion and the advent of Google Transit, the system's quality has increased. 

Louisville and Google Transit should get on with it already.