Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
I don't. Why do people from New Zealand quote people from Japan about a transit system in San Francisco Bay area that they have never seen or ridden? From what I can reason, the guy from Japan recommends skipping stations because they had less than 10,000 daily riders, to provide express services. That's being exclusively a bean counter, there's no consideration at all about the politics why those stations were included into the system at all. It's entirely possible everyone getting on at those smaller ridership stations are heading for San Francisco, and everyone getting on at the higher ridership stations aren't, although I'll admit that probability is very small. But I strongly suggest some sort of ridership study should be finished discovering what the ridership history and patterns are for every station before committing to bypassing it for express services - something better than some bean point based on daily ridership boardings and a lightings.
|
I ride BART everyday of the week, so I'm fairly familiar with the travel patterns, thank you. The dominant travel pattern is commute traffic between the minor stations and Downtown Oakland / Downtown SF, although there are "blips" in the network, like Downtown Berkeley, Walnut Creek, Balboa Park, etc. that exhibit reverse commute or other patterns. I'm not from Japan... I'm actually born and raised SF, and I do transportation planning as a profession.
Anyways, your argument about "politics" is probably one of the reasons BART hasn't capitalized on its full potential... Concerns about "equity" to people in farflung communities who have been paying taxes into the BART district for decades but have not yet seen BART service have helped drive the continued expansion of the system into the suburbs, all in the name of a utopian vision for a regionwide transit system that was developed ages ago and is no longer in touch with the reality of today. SF, the ridership core of the system, is still vastly underserved, and any line built in the city would virtually guarantee far better returns than further extensions into the boondocks (Livermore, Antioch, et al.).
Anyways, I do agree that a full analysis would need to be done for express or skip-stop service... My post was never meant to be a comprehensive study on the merits of express service and a potential implementation plan, only to introduce simple, low-cost ideas that can make transit work better.