Monday, May 4, 2009

More on Transit

I’m back from holidaying along the west coast of the US and back to the routine of life. I got some great pictures that I will be sharing shortly, but I wanted to expand on my earlier post about Dublin/Pleasanton area in the San Francisco Bay Area. But first, transit agencies all over North America are dealing with a funding crises; from our TransLink to Portland’s TriMet to San Francisco’s Muni. Muni is facing a $129 million deficit this year, so on April 20th they decided to cut service and raise fares. Their adult fare is going from $1.50 to $2.00 which is a pretty big jump. As Joe blogged about earlier, Portland’s TriMet system is going to have to make some hard choices too. What is truly amazing is that in a period of record transit usage, systems are having to cut service. Something is very broken with the funding model for transit in North America.

Anyway, back to the Dublin/Pleasanton area in the East Bay. The communities have a combined population of about 110,588 and are about 52km from San Francisco. (Sounds a lot like Langley and Vancouver, eh?) It’s even separated by about 10 minutes of green space and mountain. Anyway, they are currently served by one BART metro rapid transit station (pictures below) that opened in 1997.







They are in the process of building another BART station that will open later this year and is funded by a property deal/transit-oriented development (TOD) project on adjacent BART-owned property. Again, all this is to point out that lack of density is a lame excuses for not building rail transit. Even our worst sprawl in Metro Vancouver is nothing compared to the sprawl in the Bay Area. So, let’s get building light rail to Langley.

No comments: