It got me thinking, what would BART look like if they had made the decision to build like Metro in DC and run the line through main corridors instead of down the center of the freeway. Here is what I came up with. The dotted lines and black dots I drew and the regular line and existing stations are shown by the little BART symbols.
If I were to speculate that these stations would have the ridership of 24th and 16th street mission, we would be seeing an additional 110,000 riders.
Since BART didn't learn anything from Arlington either, the BART to San Jose line will make the same mistakes, running on existing ROW instead of down the main corridors where its needed. The same exists with the BART to Livermore extension which we discussed earlier.
9 comments:
BART didn't seem to learn anything from the Key System either, and that was both local and quite recent when BART was being planned. But BART wasn't designed for people, it was designed for cars. It was the system that everyone wanted to take other people's cars off the road.
You're right Arcady, it was built for cars, which is why it turned out the way it did. I still wish they would have had some foresight, but as you say, it was built not for people, but for "those people" who would take transit.
What, you think the Washington DC area learned anything from Arlington? Right!
I wouldn't say that BART was designed for "those people", because it doesn't serve them well at all, given that they mostly live in places like Oakland. No, BART was designed by suburbanites to serve other suburbanites. And that's the sad thing about the whole affair: it doesn't end up serving anyone particularly well at all.
I guess by those people I meant the people you discussed as the ones the drivers wanted off the road (other suburbanites). These days those people has a different connotation and I probably didn't use it correctly in the sentence.
Yeah, BART's often pretty useless for getting around, especially if you don't have a car to get you to a station. You might have already seen it, but Eric at Transbay Blog did some great fantasy transit maps, including a BART map, a while back.
Yeah Eric and I had a good back and forth on those maps. I created some as well that I think he linked to.
Yes, I did link to them :)
P.S. Thanks for adding the extra options for comments!
One of the few good examples. This same thing was done in Toronto around the subway, specifically Yonge in North York, and Yonge & Eglinton (which itself was the original terminus of the Yonge Subway when it first opened). I wish others had followed this example. :)
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