Bay Area Diaries — Epilogue

Whew! What a trip it has been. A four-day vacation in the Bay Area led to a bumper crop of material for MetroRiderLA, allowing for a 10-part miniseries. It was a joy to write; hopefully MetroReaders enjoyed reading the series.

Exploring San Francisco and Santa Rosa was tremendous fun. Four days was not enough to see and experience all of what just these two cities had to offer. Even an extended vacation would still show a mere fraction of all what the Bay Area has to offer.

With dozens of bus systems, three urban rail services, several commuter and tourist ferries and three busy train services, the Bay Area shows Elhay where Southern California what we are supposed to need. Right?

Well, no. The Bay Area has a broad selection in its transportation cafeteria, but what it has is built around its own needs, challenges and population. Everything the Bay Area accomplished does not always apply to L.A., nor should it. If Angelenos want everything the Bay Area got, well it’s up there in Northern California to use. We need Southern California solutions to Southern California problems.

For instance, ferries are not a practical form of transportation in Southern California, at least not something for commuting. While we do have miles of Pacific coast, our major population centers are inland and would not easily be accessible. In the Bay Area, ferries were one of the earliest means of connecting the regions, and the cities first began to develop near the moorings and developed outward. San Francisco’s, Oakland’s and Vallejo’s central business districts and civic centers are close to their ferry terminals, and the use of waterborne transportation infrastructure allowed a parallel tourist market to flourish. Southern California’s most well known ferries to Catalina, serve a tourist destination with a very small resident population.

Metro and Muni are similar agencies, being the most prominent urban bus and rail carriers in their respective regions. They both are responsible for transporting very high volumes of passengers. Both agencies have also earned deserved and undue contempt from their riders and the general public as well. This is neither new nor unusual. The answer to which city has the worst transit service in the world is always the one you live in.

The ridership in both cities is also heavily bus-based. San Francisco’s rail service gets too much credit. It receives the most BART service, but the trains are confined to Market and Mission streets, a small sliver of The City. The bus grid is comprehensive enough to not have to feed into a station for a fast ride. The 6 Muni Metro lines duplicate BART in the central business district, but in the south and west of the city behave indentical to buses.

Muni has several more options available to it, but they might not be applicable in L.A. despite similarities with Muni. For instance, it has trolleybuses. L.A. was ready to build an ETB network in the early 1990s but shelved it. The pluses for ETBs are no emissions, no bus noise and very good performance on hills and fast speeds on flat land. The minuses are webs of unsightly power lines, higher capital and operating expenses and overall impracticality if the electricity comes from a fossil fuel source. Muni has a legacy streetcar system repurposed to become a 3-in-1 rail line, but the novelty of it proves to be operationally chaotic. The F Market & Wharves line was a “toy” system for a streetcar museum that grew a life of its own. The cable cars, San Francisco’s signature transportation vehicles, were rendered obsolete when ETBs became viable and are run for cultural rather than practical purposes — hence the $5 fare.

These modes serve various components of Sanfran’s transit services, and exist for various reasons. Muni must pay for this service diversity; it’s more expensive to keep all of these components in working order.

Sanfran and Elhay take the same foundational approach to transit service: blanket the service area with high-frequency schedules and run lines along the grid. Riders hate this system because most of them will have to transfer to complete a trip, and service is more unreliable at higher frequencies. Ultimately, though, this system is the most efficient arrangement in big cities and ends up working despite passengers having to endure the inconvenience.

San Francisco is the highest end of Bay Area transportation, not its baseline example. It’s not a world unto itself, as much as certain people there like to arrogate. (L.A. has asshats like this, too — the ones on the Westside who think South Central is everything east of I-405 and don’t go beyond the freeway.) The “average” Bay Area system would be AC Transit or the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. These are larger systems that don’t have Muni’s saturated coverage but see good ridership with decent-to-mediocre levels of service. Bringing up the rear are the suburban territories with almost rural levels of service and/or ridership: the various agencies in the coounties of Contra Costa, Sonoma and Napa, and samTrans, which descended to this status so San Mateo County could have BART. Marin County gets the dishonorable mention as not only having the worst public transit service in the Bay Area, but also one of the worst in California. Virtually everything it has is oriented toward commuters and provided by an agency with a San Francisco focus: the Golden Gate Bridge District. Granted, the county is largely a bedroom exurb, but it is an otherwise important access point to four counties: San Francisco, Contra Costa, Napa and Sonoma.

BART, though, is the beast described in a Part IX as a “squid-gorilla” that ties most of the Bay Area together. BART is a paradox: a space-age high-speed system whose design and engineering concept is now seen as foolish and archaic; it makes regional travel fast enough for public transit to be attractive, yet outside of San Francisco counties must fret over running bus systems after BART takes its share of funding; most communities pride themselves in having a BART station, yet BART’s most successful lines are also where it has the biggest parking lots; BART is the most expensive and problematic transit system to expand, but expanding more affordable conventional rail or bus solutions means lower ridership due to mode incompatibility. BART has become the Bay Area’s catastrophic success: the more it grows, the better it must be doing.

If anyone from Southern California points to BART as to what the Bay Area got done and what we need to be doing here, we don’t see what the Bay Area had to pay and what other sacrifices besides money they had to make. BART’s success often comes at the expense of other goals of public transit, such as an improved alternatives to automobility (BART depends on suburban park & ride commuters for heavy ridership and supresses both supply and demand of connecting local transit services) and human-scale development (smart growth fermented into anti-development and anti-urbanism because BART was going to turn every suburb into San Francisco).

Successful transportation comes in its use, not its construction. Santa Clara County found out the hard way. Elhay has limited rail coverage that cannot or will not serve everybody who wants it. Sanfran’s rail service is just as limited, yet it’s considered an unqualified success. Though both cities have this in common: give us a good transit service and we’ll use the hell out of it. We have used it, we do use it, we will use it.

That’s the most compelling case to make for public transit in Elhay.

There was a tremendous amount of work that went in to the Bay Area Diaries series, but it was rewarding. A few entries have piqued Angelenos’ interests, predictably the items focused on rail. Others, such as Sonoma County and the ferry, apparently inspired apathy. Consider giving the “0″ comment entries another look, as the roads less traveled may offer the most splendid journeys. Also, please note that the comments for entries are set to close 30 days after the post or 30 days after the last comment, so if you have any ya-yas, get them out as soon as you can.

I would also like to once again thank Nick Kibre of the 295bus blog, an occasional MetroReader well before this series, for giving some helpful advice to this Bay Area noob. I’d also like to thank the Transbay Blog and SF Cityscape for the MetroRiderLA links and appearances by the respective blogs’ contributors for commenting on the site as well. Peter Ehrlich, a former Muni streetcar operator, also visited here and may use what was read here for a book he’s writing on the F line.

A big thanks goes to the citizens of San Francisco and Sonoma counties for making this mid-January vacation a ful- and memory-filled journey.