You can't blame Silicon Valley for what is the idiocy of various levels of governments.
When I first came to the Bay Area, it took me an inordinately amount of time to realize that the BART didn't go all the way around the Bay. I just assumed that it did because it's what made the most sense.
In fact, the county of San Mateo voted against BART because they didn't want people from other counties to come and take their jobs. So, because of this, you have a ridiculous patchwork and mishmash of transit "solutions" from various levels of government, none of them really working well. If you had a BART that went around the Bay, you could eliminate Caltrain completely, and move that money into making BART even better. Of course, those are at different levels of government, which means that you couldn't really do that.
It's at the point now where, except for people that take Caltrain during rush hour, and MUNI in SF, most public transit around the Bay is for poor people. Most people with higher paying jobs can't afford how slow public transit is, and it creates this negative feedback loop where they don't get enough funding to justify a better schedule, etc.
Yes, Google has a great bus system that is a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring people. But this is private transit, and it doesn't directly translate to public transit. If you have to service an area like the South Bay, you have to not only service the areas that people need, but then you have to deal with unions, costs, etc.
It was not the county that voted against a BART system that would go around the Bay, it were the interests of a real estate devloper and Caltrain that fucked this up for the rest of us. It never even got to be voted on.
Seeing the pathetic state of public transit in the Bay Area, and thinking how much better it could have been, it incenses me to see how darwinistic capitalism rides roughshot over the common interest.
Here the story from our local paper, lest we don't forget history:
Electric trains could have been here long ago. In the late 1950s, San Mateo County was one of five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area Transit District. The district could assess taxes and issue bonds and had a round-the-Bay light-rail system planned, according to a history at the website of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).
The plan derailed, according to the BART account, because San Mateo County supervisors were "cool to the plan." They chose to exit the district in December 1961, citing the proposed system's "high costs" and the "adequate service" from Southern Pacific commuter trains, now Caltrain.
George Mader, who retired in 2010 after 45 years as Portola Valley's town planner, has another angle. The "cool to the plan" characters were two men of influence, he said in a March 11 letter to Portola Valley Mayor Ted Driscoll.
The "major problems," Mr. Mader said, were T. Louis Chess, who chaired the county Board of Supervisors and worked for Southern Pacific Railway, and David D. Bohannon, a "major player" in the county and the developer of the then-new Hillsdale Shopping Center.
Mr. Bohannon claimed that BART would take shoppers away from Hillsdale and into San Francisco, Mr. Mader said, adding that "shopping was rather good (in San Francisco) at the time." For his part, Mr. Chess was protecting Southern Pacific, Mr. Mader said. And the county voters would have had to decide on whether to join BART.
"These short-sighted and selfish people did not let the residents vote," Mr. Mader said. "A travesty!"
> it incenses me to see how darwinistic capitalism rides roughshot over the common interest.
Under actual "darwinistic capitalism" anybody who wanted to would be able to start a competing transit service, even if it stole all the customers of a current one. At a minimum, you'd see a thriving private jitney industry - private bus services outcompeting the public ones and private part-time cabs underpricing the metered ones. No, to get mass transit this bad requires active interference with the workings of "darwinistic capitalism". In particular, laws making it illegal to compete with the established quasi-monopoly firms. The government at various levels doesn't just do a bad job of providing transit, they also make it illegal to compete with the crappy transit they provide. Fix either half of that equation and things are a lot better.
>>>even if it stole all the customers of a current one
Many taxi companies are required to serve anyone at any time(24/7/365) for fixed prices, regardless of the cost of the trip. It is unlikely that the new transit service will steal all the unprofitable customers.
Many of the regulations around transportation are very utilitarian. There are people who can not drive and are unserved by public transportation, but will die if they do not have access to transportation. We the people(you too) have decided to contract out their transportation to cab companies. In exchange for this incredibly unprofitable mandate, cab companies get price fixing which is essentially a monopoly on many routes.
Regulators want to make sure, above all, that the drivers are paying taxes and paying for the use of their vastly (and artificially) expensive taxi medallions. So the regulations tend to require the use of an expensive and finicky and limiting piece of equipment - a taxi meter. Private jitneys don't need a meter, so they're immediately less expensive. The private alternative to a meter that works as well or better for a nearly zero cost is a "zone card". Draw a stylized map of the area divided into "zones"; there's a fare for within-zone travel or a higher fare to cross some number of zones to get to another area. The zone map and price schedule can be printed on a card handed to the passenger or (where jitneys are legal) put on a sticker on the door of the car, so the passenger knows the charges before they get in.
Now the cab driver has no incentive to avoid passengers who want to cross a bridge to a less profitable area (ever try to get a cab to Brooklyn from downtown manhattan?) and no incentive to take the long way around to bump up the meter charge in slow periods - the driver's interests and the passenger's are aligned. Better yet, drivers have the flexibility that they can negotiate other fares when that's appropriate - for instance, charging more in a hurricane.
Rigidly fixed prices are NOT a good thing for customers if you want there to be service at any time to/from any region. Fixed prices mean many areas get little or no service - the cabs stick to the more popular routes and people who live in poor neighborhoods get shafted.
The regulations on cabs are not at all utilitarian - they are pure rent-seeking. Concentrated benefits accrue to the few who own medallions; distributed costs are paid by drivers and passengers everwhere.
Taxi laws are different in different places. Many places you have the option of calling a taxi company, and they are legally required to send you a cab. Obviously not NY.
Your "zone" idea is logical. So logical that it is the law in some places, like the Bay Area which is the subject of the comment you replied to.
>>>Rigidly fixed prices are NOT a good thing for customers if you want there to be service at any time to/from any region.
This holds true for NY, where you can't call a cab with a phone. Other places you can call, and the cab is legally required to come and pick you up.
>>>The regulations on cabs are not at all utilitarian - they are pure rent-seeking
I agree that some are, but I think that I have listed some laws do service the public good. Am I wrong? NY tip: you can implement the zone system yourself on an ad-hoc basis - give them enough money and they will take you to Brooklyn. I hope you have a lot of money though :) .
Irony of ironies, the son (grandson?) of the developer is now complaining about too much traffic in his hometown.
"I think developers represent change, and change is difficult," he says. "A lot of people in Menlo Park don't want change, so they don't want development. ... But now here we are — a very wealthy community that has turned its back on development for many, many years."
He recognizes that a lot of the anti-development sentiment comes down to a key issue: the fear that developing the city will lead to more traffic.
"Like it or not, Menlo Park, like every other city on the Peninsula, is growing," he says. "What was going on here in the 1950s is not going on now — this is a major urban center. ... I don't like the traffic either — every time I go home in the afternoon, I can't stand driving by Hillview School."
How San Mateo supervisors burying the government plan qualifies as "darwinistic capitalism"? The only other entity mentioned is Southern Pacific which is now Caltrain which seems also to be not a private entity at all. Where capitalism even starts in this whole story?
Unless I misunderstand what Silicon Valley is, I would argue that I can blame a region for its government. Your argument sounds like "You can't blame Oklahoma for their low education standards.".
Oklahoma is a defined area with one state government. Silicon Valley is made up of parts of a bunch of different counties and cities, all with the power to make their own rules.
In your example, it would be like saying 'the midwest' or something general like that.
That said: Europe was able to solve this and it's even more of a giant clusterfuck of governments. One region of one state of one country should be able to figure it out.
Alamo/Danville voted against BART for a similar preposterous reason, "thugs" from Oakland coming out to the suburbs and causing trouble. This is why BART does not run along the 680 freeway
Most of the benefits of bringing BART down the peninsula could be achieved by grade separating and electrifying Caltrain. What's more it could be done at a fraction of the cost and you'd end up with a better, faster system than BART.
<sarcasm>
But why would you replace the huge, powerful Diesel engines that blow large billowing clouds of exhaust fumes with wimpy electric trains? And would we still have the crazy searchlights and blaring horns that scare the cattle off the tracks in the middle of the night?
</sarcasm>
San Mateo County opted out of the initial BART system in 1961 though, and is still not a member of the BART district, which is why trips to/from San Mateo county are charged more. http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5427069831/in/photost... has plans around that include a line going down what is approximately the current Caltrain route to Palo Alto. (along with an unbuilt line to the Richmond District and Marin county, since Marin County also opted out)
They're likely speaking of the west bay area where only Caltrain service exists. If you're somewhere along El Camino Real, there's no BART train service -- just Caltrain, and then VTA farther south.
Actually, I think you can. These people have votes. If they regularly vote in people that can't fix what they are elected to govern, even while collecting substantial sum in taxes, I think at some point people are to blame if they keep electing somebody that is doing crappy job.
Good public transit helps everyone, even those who don't use it. The more people who do use it, the better traffic is for people who still drive, the less dangerous the roads are for people who walk or bike, and the less polluted the air is for everyone.
I am so pleased to see attention focused on this sad state of affairs.
The San Jose light rail line referenced in the article is literally right outside my front door. Yet I have never ridden it, despite living in San Jose for over a decade. Why? Because it simply doesn't take me anywhere useful in a useful amount of time. It can't even take me to the airport well, and that airport is only a couple miles away. That's sad.
There is plenty of money in Silicon Valley, and plenty of need for relief from traffic congestion. It's true that San Jose is low-density. But I know we could do a lot better than we're doing. There's not even a fast, frequent train between San Jose (10th largest city in the US) and San Francisco (14th largest city in the US), for chrissakes. That's pathetic.
Low density is a reason to invest in public transportation, not a reason to divest from public transportation. To wit: most of Queens was farmland when the subway transit was built.
Good public transportation, along with solid city centers, begets population density (and economies of scale).
Poorly planned public transportation lingers as an afterthought; a mistake; a rallying cry that public transportation does not work in low-density areas.
It's not farmland low-density, it's just not manhattan. And I don't know that they want it to become more dense than it already is. Northern California likes its trees, low-rise buildings and greenbelts. I don't think anybody wants to see a concrete jungle from Santa Rosa to Gilroy, like happened in LA.
Take VTA to the Metro/Airport station. Get off and take the synchronized free shuttle to the airport. Congratulations, you are now at the airport. It doesn't take very long, and costs you a grand total of $2.
There also is a fairly fast, frequent train between San Jose and San Francisco. CalTrain. One of the baby bullet trains will get you into SF faster than you can drive there, and when the new transbay terminal is completed, it will drop you off right in the middle of the city (the current station at 4th and King isn't the most convenient location, but even if you walk from there to market st. I bet you would get there faster than you could drive).
This isn't really true. The baby bullet takes 59 minutes to get to a single SF location. One would then have to get through the city to one's real destination. I can reliably drive to northern neighborhoods in SF in about 50 minutes in light traffic.
In addition, there are only a total of eleven of those baby bullet trains, per day. At many hours of the day, you can't get one at all.
On average, given the average wait time til the next train and other factors, I can drive to SF about 2.5 times faster, round-trip, than I can reach various common destinations using CalTrain plus whatever else is available.
It's true that if you are commuting in rush hour only, versus heavy traffic, and your destination happens to be very close to a CalTrain station, and you live close to the CalTrain station to begin with, the train will win. But not under most other conditions.
Even taking that into account, I usually take the train when I'm going to SF on business. Even though the schedules are such that one time I had to freeze my butt of on a platform for 50 mins because there were no trains at all during this time to my direction. But at least the option is there, and at least in SF you can get somewhere with public transit. Somewhere in Santa Clara county, usually you don't have any imaginable option to use public transit unless you are ready to spend 2.5 hours on a trip that is 20-minute car ride otherwise.
This is the interchange at Highway 85 and Winchester Blvd. (The red roofs are Netflix and the Aventino apartment complex.) It's a half-interchange, only connecting with traffic on 85 to or from the north (west). But note the unusual configuration of the interchange: why all that empty space between the ramps and the freeway?
It's because the interchange was designed as a folded diamond:
But the Town of Los Gatos didn't want extra traffic on Winchester, so they only allowed half the interchange to be built. The result is unsurprising: traffic to or from 85 on the south (east) has to get to Winchester via Highway 17 and Lark Avenue a half-mile to the south.
Lark would be a busy street without this, but with the extra Winchester/85 traffic it gets some real traffic jams. So instead of the bit of extra traffic on Winchester, there's a big mess on Lark.
Ok guys, I'm going to help us all stop pussyfooting around the issue. Maybe you people in Europe have a hard time understanding this, but I think a lot of the nervousness about mass transit has to do with the possibility of too many of what suburban neighborhoods consider "the wrong people" (e.g poor) showing up because they can now easily get there via cheap mass transit.
The happy rich people live in the suburbs because they don't like the people in the inner cities and the only way they can limit their interaction is with distance. Why do you think the shiftiest neighborhoods are always around the greyhound station? For example of this extreme anti-poor paranoia: Palo Alto recently threw a huge fit because they wanted to put in a 7-eleven saying that it would attract an undesirable element. (http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2199808...)
My friend who came from Tokyo says the transit here (bay area) is horrible. She states that you can't get anywhere you like and the scheduling system isn't always on time. In Japan, people rarely drive because the public system is everywhere and very efficient. You get a train every 5 minutes so you don't have to wait 30 minutes just for your ride.
If VTA (being in the center of the valley) implements some sort of GPS tracker on their trains, I think it give people a better idea when to head for the train station.
Haha, I'd be happy if VTA paid more attention to the time their platforms display. The time on at least half the platforms is off by 3 to 4 minutes from my phone's time (which is set on automatic).
Forget that, when DST stopped in November, the large VTA digital clocks were displaying PDT instead of PST for ONE WHOLE WEEK, and I'm talking about a major station in downtown San Jose.
So yeah, catching the train is basically a guessing game.
Tokyo is certainly more dense than SV for the most part, but it isn't really fantastically dense. It's very large, and has locations ranging from dense urban centers to mountains, but for the most part is rather less dense than you might think based on its reputation. E.g. a lot of Tokyo housing stock is 1-2 story single-family dwellings (high-rise dwellings were pretty rare until fairly recently, in part due to the earthquake risk).
It has absolutely fantastic public transit everywhere, even outside the denser urban cores.
AFAICT, this comes from the way the city is structured: dwellings and businesses tend to cluster around rail lines and stations, increasing their efficiency, which makes it easier to support a large number of rail lines (rail transit is a profitable business in Tokyo), and that in turn increases the effectiveness of the network (the well-known "network effect"). Even though most rail transit is private and run by a huge number of different companies, they well-recognize the importance of the network effect, and so tend to cooperate, trying to make transfers easy and liberally using interlining.
There are also well-developed secondary transit networks (bus and bicycling) that increase the effective coverage of the rail lines.
I suppose the idea of this article is supposed to be that since there is a lot of smart people and technology there it is ironic they can't get transit right.
However, Bay transit is very good compared to most of the rest of the US.
And it's not necessarily correct to assume that the great intellectuals in the area are drawn to working for public administration as bureaucrats.
I think people may be overlooking developments in the last 20 years. Bart does a reasonably good job getting people from the suburbs and exurbs into dense work areas, which I think is what it was meant to do. People drive cars from spacious places to a centralized parking lot, then get on bart and go to downtown San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland.
Perhaps the reversal of the standard commute is a relatively new and somewhat unusual phenomenon? I'm not trying to say it is, just posing the question... is this happening to the same extent in New York, London, Paris, or Chigaco (ie., people flipping the old commute pattern on its head by living in dense areas and commuting to work in spread out areas)? It could be that SiliValley is dealing with a relatively new and unique problem here.
In New York, I get the feeling that they commuters go from high density housing to high density job areas. In LA, they go from low density housing to low density job areas (though I gather this is changing and that LA is building much higher density areas now). In Chicago... I'm speculating, but I get the impression it's still commute from low density housing to high density work areas... in this case, it just might not make sense to compare the bay area to these other areas.
Compared to LA, Houston, perhaps. Compared to New York or Chicago? No. It's remarkably poor. The fact that BART didn't reach SFO until 2006? or so is more or less all you have to say.
EDIT: Although, to be fair, the Valley and San Jose are way too low density to support a decent transit infrastructure. San Francisco's MUNI disaster is a problem of a different order.
Keep in mind that NYC and Chicago have the unfair advantage of having most of their rail infrastructure already built during the private rail transportation boom from the 1800's to WWII. Most of the subways and rail transit in these regions are still running on lines that were built between 70 and 120 years ago. The west coast has to rely on clumsy governments and public financing to move anything forward for all of its transit infrastructure, which is why it takes so painfully long to get it right
SF also had leading edge rail transport during those times as well, which was later abandoned for the most part.
There is a significantly different topography in the bay that greatly complexifies rail projects. Effective rail coverage on a large grid is not possible due to water and hill issues.
With regards to density, San Jose has a density of 5,256 people per square mile. In contrast, Denver (which has an awesome train/bus system) has a density of 3,698 people per square mile.
If low density is why San Jose can't support a decent transit infrastructure, then how can Denver do it with even less density?
Just my guess, as a Denver-area resident... Metro Denver has several areas with very high concentrations of office space and jobs (Downtown, DTC, Broomfield/Interlocken, Boulder, etc.). Also, the residential density (even within Denver proper) varies a great deal. The lower-density areas probably don't have great bus service. (The residential density also seems to be increasing, with a lot of infill development projects.) It helps that the Denver area is known for having strong regional cooperation with a single transit authority, instead of the crazy mix of poorly connected services in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley office space seems to be a little more spread out. When I was visiting a client in Santa Clara last year, I had to walk almost two miles to get to a light rail station to go have a nice dinner in downtown Mountain View. (And there were no buses available to cover that distance -- at least not that Google Transit knew about.)
(Disclaimer: My experience with San Jose is mostly limited to the airport area, and the Silicon Valley suburbs to the north.)
I live in Denver and second that the light rail / bus system is pretty awesome. It should be even better with light rail expansions coming in the next year or so.
I live in Denver too and I haven't driven to work in 6 years. Instead of driving myself, I read, listen to music and chill out. I also don't worry about traffic, weather, or really much at all. It's great for drinking after work too.
I share your enthusiasm for the upcoming expansions, in particular the line to the Airport. The train is one of the big perks of living in Denver. It's awesome and only getting better.
Silicon Valley might be too low density to support transit inside the city, but is it too low density to support good commuter rail back and forth with SF? I don't think Silicon Valley is less dense than say Westchester County, NY, yet the latter manages to support a pretty great commuter rail network with three lines and 300,000 daily riders within a commuting region of maybe two million people.
Commuter rail cannot exist in a vacuum without local transit. Metro North gets you into Grand Central, but most people don't work right on top of Grand Central - a supplementary transit system is necessary to get people to their actual endpoints.
The CalTrain, which is the closest SF Bay equivalent to MTA commuter trains, stops in San Francisco, but far from local mass transit connections (either MUNI light rail or BART), to the point where there is an industry for private shuttles. This is a significant barrier to the adoption of commuter rail for people who work in the city but want to live further out.
Similarly, once in the Peninsula or South Bay, the CalTrain is often not near a mass transportation connection. Some of the major tech firms are located "near" CalTrain stops, but nearness is often at automobile-scale, as opposed to walking or cycling scale.
You need a pretty-damn-good local transit solution to support commuter networks.
The problem is that the Valley is a host of municipalities of differing sizes, with San Jose at the bottom end. It doesn't really go as far north as San Francisco (yet). Westchester works as it does because it's largely feeding into New York's superb infrastructure -- there's no comparable network (or city of comparable size) on the Peninsula. There are a lot of people commuting from e.g. Belmont to Cupertino or Mountain View to Palo Alto.
Despite the limited life experience of some Chicagoans and New Yorkers who have not left their enclaves and thus have come to think they are the center of the world, these cities are not actually "most of the rest of the country", as I said.
Perhaps their citizens can not emerge from their bubbles far enough to believe it, but it's true.
The bay has regular bus service, sidewalks and bike lanes. Also trains. If you drive, you can do so from one place to another and find a parking place.
As someone who doesn't like to deal with cars, when I lived there it was very nice compared to the rest of the country, at least the 30 or so cities and towns I have lived in and the few hundred that I have stayed in for more than a few days, most of which it was extremely troublesome to get about without a car, and unlike San Francisco.
This is a discussion about public transit, why was the ad hominem attack necessary, or the blatant straw-man stereotyping? Has anyone here indicated that they live in NYC/Chicago and haven't been elsewhere?
FWIW, I've lived in 9 cities in 3 countries across 2 continents. This includes San Francisco, and I can tell you, I've lived in metro areas substantially smaller than the SFBay and had better transit. There are many places in the US substantially worse, but there are also many others with a similar density profile or population size that are substantially better.
Unless they made significant changes to BART after 2007, L.A.'s Metro is better than BART--it has better coverage of most locations that people actually want to go or come from (except for the airports, as litigation has held up those extensions), and in combination with the MetroLink system extends as far as the San Fernando Valley, the desert, and Riverside.
Autonomous vehicle networks are the best hope for changing this.
It would be ironic if the US is able to leapfrog other countries in autonomous vehicle networks because it lags so badly in transit, but I bet that's what's going to happen.
On another note, this is a solution that Silicon Valley is uniquely qualified to implement for itself. Get on it.
It takes an hour to go from Mountain View to Downtown SJ. The same drive takes ~15 min with no traffic or about an hour in awful traffic.
The route from MV to SJ goes through no where. It parallels the sparsely populated Tasman for much of it, though it will go near the upcoming 49ers stadium.
It doesn't go to Valley Fair Mall or Santana Row, just about the only two places worth going in SJ.
It doesn't go to Santa Clara University or the Airport.
In total, it's the world's slowest train to nowhere for nobody.
In total, it's the world's slowest train to nowhere for nobody.
I largely agree with this, it does go to the Santa Clara convention center which is nice. And some of the San Jose government facilities. But generally it does not go to places that a steady stream of people would want to go to.
A critical issue not mentioned here: is that Palo Alto, the heart of the Silicon Valley, is unfortunately at the edge of two transit zones/counties: SamTrans and ValleyTransit.
This means buses in Palo Alto coming from the north, terminate there. It means buses coming from the south also terminate there!
And it means Palo Alto is not even reached by ValleyTransit's light rail, while SamTrans has no light rail.
In other words the increasingly central node between San Jose and San Francisco, is also one of the least centrally connected.
With SamTrans focused on how to bring commuters to San Francisco from San Mateo county suburbia, and ValleyTransit focused on how to bring suburban Santa Clara county residents to downtown San Jose: both systems lack an overall peninsular focus that ought to recognize the increasing prominence the peninsula has in terms of the job market! Too bad.
I live right off of El Camino Real, otherwise known as CA State RT 82. For those that don't know, this road is Silicon Valley's equivalent to the Main Line of Philadelphia or 57th street in NYC. The only way to travel it via transit is either taking CalTrain or the VTA 22 bus. Caltrain could definitely use work being it only runs every half hour at the best. VTA is an unmitigated disaster. If the bus even shows up at all it certainly won't be on time, and when they get to a stop early they absolutely won't wait for the scheduled time to depart.
If you want to be green out here you have two options, learn to LOVE biking or be prepared to leave hours ahead of when you need to in order to get anywhere at all.
I think ECR equates better to Northern Boulevard (rt 25?) the E. Queens part and all of Nassau much better than 57th st. Not sure which one is more depressing.
They're both arteries which connect disparate towns and villages and are interspersed with strip malls, gas stations and supermarkets and they both could make use of better transit systems. Altho, to be fair Nother Blvd has LIRR running kind of parallel for most of it.
Claiming that there's only one caltrain every half hour is a bit misleading.
The frequency of trains depends on the time of day and the station you depart from / want to arrive at.
For example, Mountain View and Palo Alto both have trains as many as four times an hour in the mornings (7-9am) and afternoon/early evening (4-7pm).
Just looking at the MV -> PA schedule; during off-peak hours there may only be one an hour (4-5am, 10am-2pm, 8-11pm) or one every half-hour. If I was to complain about anything, it's the times they only have one every hour.
I think this is the first time anyone has tried to equate ECR to 57th St. There are more points of interest on one block of 57th then there are on 30 miles of ECR. Unless you think drive-thru Arbys are points of interest.
I lived in New York for most of my life, I know nothing is comparable to it directly. Assuming we aren't considering San Francisco as part of the valley, what other road comes even close to being such a vital thoroughfare in the bay? And back to the topic of conversation, wouldn't it be more important for a road spread over 30 miles to have public transportation than a New York City block that spans only 2? Last time I checked there's an east-west bus on 57th every 4 minutes.
Downtown Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford University, and Stanford Shopping Center along El Camino Real aren't points of interest? What about Redwood City, San Carlos, or Hillsdale?
[I stayed there for a week or so once, and as best I could tell, it consisted entirely of office parks and strip malls connected to housing developments by enormous roads, everything well lathered with parking lots. We walked around as best we could, but there seemed nothing beautiful or nice there... just endless vistas of office parks and pavement...]
This area had a great many rail options 70+ years ago. You used to be able to ride from downtown Santa Clara (when it actually had a downtown) all the way down The Alameda into downtown San Jose on a trolley. That "dip" under the tracks by the HP Pavilion had trolley tracks on it all the way into the 1930s. I figured this out by looking at old pictures.
The big kerfuffle now is whether they should close down a lane of El Camino Real to make it "bus rapid transit". Some cities say yes, others say no, so you wind up with this odd patchwork of half-implemented systems.
The El Camino Real BRT proposal seems really interesting but VTA has such a terrible track record of implementing transit options that I'm skeptical when and if it will ever proceed.
As someone who rides the VTA LRT and Buses daily since I don't have a car, I'd also like to point out how filthy the vehicles are. The back of most buses and the centers of most train cars smells like urine. Sometimes, your shoe gets stuck to sticky residue on the seat floors and many seats routinely have stains on them.
Speed of transit is one thing, but maintaining a standard of hygiene across all vehicles seems like a much lower hanging fruit for the VTA.
I was in NYC last week for the first time in a good number of years and noticed how the seats in the subway lines were all made of plastic. Caltrain and BART have cloth covered padded seats. While padded seats are in theory more comfortable, the plastic seats probably makes keeping a sanitary riding environment much more simple and attainable.
The worst is the carpeted BART cars. Yes, 1960s BART people, in the Mysterious Future we will all take nutrition pills and ride THX-1138 style Electric Trains to our jobs at the jetpack factories.
God Almighty, it makes my feet itch just thinking about it.
Most of the US has terrible public transit. The reason is simple: America is not densely populated. NYC is one of the few cities where public transit works, because it is so dense. Manhattan has ~70k people / sq mile. Compare this to SF: a measly ~17k people / sq mile [1] [2]. That's more than 4x as dense! The Valley is even worse, with sprawling suburbia.
Honestly, Caltrain is not that terrible. It compares fairly well to Metro-North in NYC when you consider the population density. There's a train every hour to take you up to the city (or back) in an hour. Most cities don't have a direct train you can feasibly take in from the suburbs to the city. Yeah, it sucks that it stops at midnight, but public transit generally doesn't run late anywhere. Even in NYC, transit out to the suburbs stops at ~2:30a.
It's a little annoying to see people commenting here that this is entirely due to politicians and bureaucracy. It isn't. It's just not economically feasible to offer public transit comparable to NYC to the bay area.
I checked the same figures for the two largest cities in my country.
Stockholm and Göteborg have between 7000-12000 / sq mile. That is less than SF, appearently. But the public transit is just like the rest of Europe - much better than the US. I think population density is not the real explanation, it just appears so when you compare between US cities.
CalTrain at the weekend is the stuff of nightmares, stopping at every single stop. Then, because the Highway 17 bus to Santa Cruz is part-funded by Amtrak and not CalTrain, you get to see the bus at the stand as the CalTrain pulls in, then depart before you can get to the stop, and wait an hour for the next one to appear.
The bus will apparently wait for Amtrak trains.
The transit would be passable if they could just find some political will to force the different systems to work together in some reasonable fashion. Instead, a bus driver sees people running off the train in order to get on his bus, and then leaves anyway.
The situation with mass transit in the Valley really sucks. I would gladly use any public transit available to commute to work - this way I also could use transit time for reading or doing something instead of staring into the sea of taillights for an hour every day. But instead my family has 3 cars - because this is the only way one can get anywhere. Local governments change quite hefty taxes - both state tax and sales tax and property taxes are AFAIK among the highest everywhere - but I don't see any return for this money, the service that I would gladly want to use every day is just not available for me. Most routes either don't go to proper locations or are too rare to to use, or require 3 hour commute with 2 transfers for the route that I do in 20 minutes by car. Maybe my case is unique, but it looks like everybody I talked to about it here feels pretty much the same - would be glad to use public transit but you can't get anywhere with it, at least not if when you get there has any importance for you.
Coming from NYC, the Valley is the suburbs, and suburbs with public transportation don't go together well. People are so spread out, which means the public transport is spread out, which means the utilization rate is lower and not very cost effective like it is in dense urban areas. The valley would have to re-designed.. but yea that isn't happening.
SV is suburbs by any standards. It's completely unservable for mass transit, so it's no surprise that there is little of that. Only SF, Oakland, Berkeley, and SJ have the urban density and mix of housing, commerce, and industry that makes mass transit work. Cupertino is never, ever going to have effective mass transit unless they bulldoze the place and start over.
You're absolutely right, but it's not just about density or suburbs - it is perfectly possible to construct suburbs that can be serviced by transit.
The problem entirely lies in the subdivision format of suburbs in much of the US - full of twists, turns, cul de sacs, and in general trying as hard as they can to inhibit movement. Getting to the nearest arterial road becomes an exercise in futility where you'd find yourself walking along un-sidewalked road for a whole mile before doubling back onto another street just to end up at a bus stop.
Low-density cities that are laid in a (saner, and less classist) grid are on the other hand generally well served by transit. This is no coincidence.
Mass transit and density need not be at odds with each other, though it's a sad fact that most suburbs will never be adaptable to sane transit.
The topic is misleading. "Light rail" != "Transit".
Light rail sucks, no argue about that.
Buses are pretty good. Caltrain is decent. But in such a low density area it's hard to expect something good out of public transportation.
It seems to me to be a cop-out to suggest you can't have good public transport in a low density area. I come from the city of Perth in Australia which is very sparse and it has managed to create a very good intermodal system with light-rail corridors connected by an extensive bus system that feeds to the rail system. You can get pretty much from anywhere in the city to anywhere else with a bus service within half-a-mile, often involving trips of 50 miles or more.
Hrmm, I won't disagree since I've never been there, but the Street View images make it appear to be a quite urban, walkable type of place with narrow streets and wide sidewalks and lots of shops and food, with multistory buildings and all that. e.g. http://goo.gl/maps/HNcTA I see that it does appear to sprawl out a bit away from downtown, perhaps that's what you're talking about.
But Perth appears to have at least one district worth visiting. The thing you have to understand about SV is most of the "cities" there have exactly zero districts worth visiting. Mountain View has a little bit of a business district. You can walk across it in about 90 seconds. Palo Alto has University Ave. But that's about the extent of things. Here's the center of Cupertino, which appears to be a kilometer-wide intersection of two massive, pointless roads: http://goo.gl/maps/EYLq9. Here's the middle of Sunnyvale: http://goo.gl/maps/51LLL. Beautiful downtown Santa Clara: http://goo.gl/maps/q8WpU
These places are not places, they are irredeemable ruins of the 20th century. No transit system will ever work there.
At least use downtown Sunnyvale (the half-finished area surrounding the Caltrain station), not some random place in the center. Sure, the renovation went bust with the housing crunch, but they're trying to restart it and it would be (already is somewhat) a good transit hub.
[A real question; I've no idea about Palo Alto or Mountain View, but have vague memories of hearing they're "desirable" (and expensive) locations in SV...]
Many people prefer a sprawling car-dependent lifestyle. Others are compelled to live near their jobs, and there's lots of jobs in the suburban office parks of SV.
The density isn't the problem in the way you're thinking. There is definitely enough people per square mile in the Valley to at least support good commuter rail (I don't think it's any less dense than the suburban areas around Chicago or NYC). The problem is density around the train lines. In Westchester County, NY, every Metro North is the hub of a small urbanized area. I live 20+ miles from Manhattan, but in a 40-story high-rise from which I can walk to the train station in under 5 minutes. Have you seen what's around the Cal Train stations? Nothing!
Which came first; small urbanized areas that the metro north serviced, or small urbanized areas that sprang up because of the metro north stations?
If you introduce light rail without changing the zoning surrounding the stations, you end up with poorly utilized transportation that does not promote the growth of urbanized areas.
Keep in mind too that there's no huge, dense attractor anywhere in Northern California that could act as a hub to a bunch of disparate smaller communities.
I personally don't see any problem with Caltrain. It's relatively reliable and goes often enough. The only thing that's missing is free wi-fi, but I think they plan to put it in there eventually.
The problem is nobody uses it. Metro North serves a region with maybe 2-3 million people (depending on how many people in Connecticut you consider part of the service area), and has a ridership of 300,000 per day. Cal Train serves a region that's at least as large, but has 40,000 riders a day.
And since Silicon Valley is slowly moving up to San Francisco, it's worth noting that BART never runs enough trains to meet demand. It's pretty infuriating for those of us who live in Berkeley/Oakland.
This seems to be due to the sudden combination of 1. budget cuts and 2. a big tech boom. So there were suddenly significantly more riders just as service was taking a hit. Bad combo.
Last year I started commuting into SF again from the East Bay after a 4 year break and am still surprised at how full the trains are. As recently as 2007/early 2008 it was much easier for me to get a seat.
(This is partly down to the fact that BART is funded out of so many different pots of money, including federal, that it can't just expand and contract in perfect sync with the local economy.)
8-car (or even shorter, sometimes) trains at rush hour are also infuriating. But mainly what BART needs is better software so they can shorten the headway.
The VTA is one of the worst public transit agencies in the USA. They're continuing to push for more money for expanded routes, in spite of the projected low ridership.
More coverage of this topic, dating back a few years:
I hope, perhaps naively, that the positive focus this article gets on HackerNews seeds if not the beginning of change but at least the awareness of just how terrible Silicon Valley transit is.
I'm native to the Bay Area but am studying my Masters in Computer Science outside of California and come back every so often to interview, visit friends, and help out my family. Both of my parents work so I don't have access to their cars. I've never had a car (only driven my parents cars on weekends in high school) and because I'll be finishing up my education soon I haven't felt the need to buy one of my own. For reference, I live with my parents currently in the San Jose / Morgan Hill beyond the commonly serviced Caltrains zones (but still in their extra commute-serviced zones).
Visiting friends, attending interviews, or just taking in the sights somewhere is something I've gotten used to doing on public transit since I've never had a car. The VTA is awful. Most of their schedules use timepoints rather than actual stops for scheduling (is this the case to allow busses slack time in between timepoints?), even on the Light Rail which is not as traffic sensitive as the bus. My nearby Light Rail station isn't even listed on the the schedules for most of the VTA schedules.
Google Maps is just awful at planning trips using VTA. It takes a definite know-how of how the system works to use it effectively. In contrast to what other posts have discussed, using Caltrains to get to San Francisco makes the trip from San Jose to San Francisco relatively painless; I take a 30 minute bus to a Caltrains stop and take a train directly into San Francisco. The main San Jose transit hub (and the best serviced Caltrains stop in the area), the San Jose Diridon, is inaccessible on my Light Rail route, the Blue Line (or the 901). To reach Diridon I can either take a bus from another nearby transit station or take the Blue Line North to the SJ Convention Center, transfer to the Green line, and then go South. Using the Light Rail exclusively is a death sentence however. Using the Light Rail to move from my Light Rail station to Mountain View takes 2 hours. Making the detour at the Convention Center to switch Lines and then using Caltrains is still faster.
Trying to visit Santana Row is awful. I take the Light Rail to a stop from where I can take a bus (the 323) which takes me to Santana Row, all in all a 15-20 minute drive from my home under normal conditions. To visit a friend in Union City I have to take the Light Rail then transfer to a bus (the 181), then transfer to BART Fremont and ride BART to BART Union City. We live, ostensibly, 25 min. away in normal traffic, but actually live 3-4 transfers of public transit away. Awful.
Safety is another huge issue on the VTA but a smaller issue on BART and mostly nonexistent on Caltrains. I rarely feel safe enough to take out my expensive smartphone on VTA. If I can get onto the Caltrains quickly the increase in fare is worth the safety I have to now use my electronics. BART is a mixed bag, but is definitely safe enough.
That said, VTA is cheap. An 8 hour Light Rail pass is $4, and a single bus ride is $2. I can take a single bus to downtown Palo Alto and back and spend $4 on the round trip. I can ride into downtown San Jose and pay $2 - $4 depending on how long I stay, pay nothing for parking, and not have to worry about my car at all. A trip into San Francisco is expensive ($22 round trip, $18 for two Caltrains trips, and $4 for two VTA bus rides), but is still cheaper than gas and parking isn't an issue.
I really wish the various local governments in the Valley took charge of things and created a safe, unified transit system. The Clipper Card has gone a long way in making it much more painless to endure the many transfers needed to get from my home to any location of interest. It's hard though. The suburbs of the Bay Area is very much dominated by cars.
>>I thought it then to be weird at best for a city to run light rail on a sidewalk where pedestrians normally are
It works this way in Amsterdam. Bicycles, pedestrians (many of them stoned tourists), cars and trains all mixing together peacefully and efficiently. Europe in general makes the US look like a complete joke where trains are concerned.
When I first came to the Bay Area, it took me an inordinately amount of time to realize that the BART didn't go all the way around the Bay. I just assumed that it did because it's what made the most sense.
In fact, the county of San Mateo voted against BART because they didn't want people from other counties to come and take their jobs. So, because of this, you have a ridiculous patchwork and mishmash of transit "solutions" from various levels of government, none of them really working well. If you had a BART that went around the Bay, you could eliminate Caltrain completely, and move that money into making BART even better. Of course, those are at different levels of government, which means that you couldn't really do that.
It's at the point now where, except for people that take Caltrain during rush hour, and MUNI in SF, most public transit around the Bay is for poor people. Most people with higher paying jobs can't afford how slow public transit is, and it creates this negative feedback loop where they don't get enough funding to justify a better schedule, etc.
Yes, Google has a great bus system that is a competitive advantage when it comes to hiring people. But this is private transit, and it doesn't directly translate to public transit. If you have to service an area like the South Bay, you have to not only service the areas that people need, but then you have to deal with unions, costs, etc.