TOD stands for Transit-Oriented Development, a building strategy that promotes compact, mixed-use and urban developments that are walkable, bikeable, and trainable.
This channel analyzes different transit systems across the world and rates them based on how close their stations are to TOD communities. Join me in learning more about why TOD is necessary for the future of global cities in the midst of climate change caused by an increase of carbon emissions from single occupancy vehicles.
Could you do a video on the initial connections between BART and California High Speed Rail at Merced? The plans I've seen include a combination of San Joaquins to Richmond, ACE to Union City and perhaps Tri-Rail. None of them seem particularly fast, consistent or attractive. The San Joaquins connection could be speeded up by connecting with BART at North Concord, because the BART route is faster and more direct than the San Joaquins route to Richmond. This would require upgrading some existing but unused connecting tracks.
Overall, I really appreciate your series on BART. I grew up in Castro Valley and remember a 6th grade field trip to the as yet unopened Lake Merritt station and “command center” in 1972. I also feel it is appropriate to point out that Castro Valley is not a city, it has no local government. It is part of unincorporated Alameda county. 13:49
Why not complete the loop of the bay with BART between Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, to free-up capacity on the Caltrain tracks for HSR and regional rail services?
Is there something going on with the framerate of your videos or the stabilization of the footage or something? The picture seems to slightly jitter and it gives me a headache if I watch for too long. It's especially noticeable when you pan the camera across a landscape. Maybe it's just me though. Excellent video apart from that!
One thing I noticed you missed about the Ashby Bart station and the push back against TOD dev. There is the Ashby flea market on Saturday and Sunday mornings that is a moderate income source for resellers. The development could end the Ashby flea.
Totally fair. There should be a flea market in San Jose type of compromise where there’s still space for a flea market to take place with apartments surrounding it! Would make for a great environment
One of my former Cisco coworkers lived in Vallejo. Her husband dropped her off at a BART stop in the east bay, she rode it to milpitas, and took the light rail to Cisco 🤷🏽♂️
Dude, thank you for this series. I’m excited to go through all this, and watch and learn about the other transit options in the Bay Area. Seriously giving me so much knowledge 😭😭
Please, if and when a station comes to Alameda, DON'T have it right on Webster. That street has great character but no more capacity than a small town commercial street. Have it out NW where new developments are coming but there's no bridge to cross into Oakland!
California has a bad habit of making things more expensive than they ought to be. They have been talking about bringing Bart into Santa Clara County since the mid 90's. It was just as recent as the 2010's that extensions were made past the Fremont station. Given this trend, I don't see Bart going into Downtown San Jose for another twenty years. Additionally the ebart diesel units beyond the Pittsburg Baypoint station are a complete joke. They decided to go with these because it costed less than building a traditional fully electrified Bart line to Antioch. If I could have it my way, Caltrain would be completely replaced by Bart all the way down to Gilroy. Dublin/Pleasanton would be extended not only to Livermore but all the way to Tracy. Many people commute to the greater bay area from Tracy so that would make a lot of sense to me. It all may sound crazy, but it sure will never happen with way the State and local governments manage public works projects.
If you have the time and are interested, I recommend making a video about the city of Antioch losing their Amtrak station!! I think more people need to hear about this!! I don't live in California, so I'm over here feeling like i can't help, but I'd honestly be so sad if this happened to my city.
I’ve read an article, it’s honestly really sad and I wish there was a compromise to keep both Antioch and the Brentwood stations but sadly I don’t think it’s gonna happen :(
The Martinez station is so far away from the Amtrak I tried taking that route to go to Oakland and wound up being on a smelly bus for an hour beyond my original planned travel time. It's embarassing that the Martinez station exists. They fucked up.
I didn't know those units in Oakland were affordable. That's my old neighborhood. Passed them every day. And the city doesn't care. The Mayor just got done for corruption...third one in a row.
Why on god's green earth would you get hyped about the old A/B cars? I for one am glad they're gone. They stank, they were always dark, and they were stuffy if you were going from the East Bay to SF. The new cars are really good for health reasons. I have bad lungs I much prefer the new ones. They don't stink.
Really enjoyable though crazy that it’s over a decade away. Question: When you talk about the new stations and development, you use an acronym? Is it POV or POD? And what does it stand for?
I moved to Burlingame because of 😅proximity to Caltrain and Bart, and use both often. While I love Caltrain, it has one notable downside: because it crosses many roads at grade, It is very dangerous for cars and pedestrians crossing the track.
Perhaps you covered this in another video: When will BART figure out a way to significantly increase the speed of their trains and I don't mean reduce delays? Is this even possible or will it take new tracks and cars? Also, how can BART significantly reduce the noise of their trains?
As far as I understand it, it's definitely possible for BART to go a lot faster. In fact before the Feds stepped in, BART trains would routinely accelerate to 100 mph in the Berkeley hills tunnels (going downhill). But the Feds stepped in and limited BART's speed to 80 mph for safety reasons. Theoretically, BART could push to review those limitations and find a few stretches where the trains could go faster than the current 80 mph speed limit. They would definitely need new trains and probably extensive trackside upgrades. But the main problem is that BART has very high stop density even for 80 mph, and there really aren't that many stretches where a higher speed is needed. There are the tunnels under the bay and under the Berkeley Hills. But everywhere else the long stretches are interrupted by stations. I'm guessing that this will have to wait until BART decides that it needs express tracks for express service. And likely after they install platform screen doors to safely run express trains through stations at speed. So not soon and it won't be cheap.
Been catching up on the videos. This one really hit home since I used to ride this part of BART into San Francisco from Antioch (or bay point if I didn't want to deal with eBART that day) so much the last few years to go to college in the city. You can just tell eBART was done on the cheap. Most people don't realize that eBART was supposed to not be in the median and use the existing track that is next to the highway but the the negotiations to use the tracks fell through. But another thing is if you look at some of the plans a little later the Antioch station was originally not supposed to be the terminus station. They planned to continue it down the highway even more but that was a phase 2 that never happened. It was supposed to connect some shopping centers down the highway. I got used to eBART but always wish it was just normal BART.
Same here, wish there was regular BART service in former rail rights of way instead of highway medians. Private freight rail companies can definitely be greedy!
As a european it sounds insane to wait so long for a quite small expension (BART extension phase 2) In my city (500k people) we're building an entire new 27 miles subway line in just 6 years with a planned ridership of 200k people per day
That's extremely unusual for Europe. Cities below 1 million population almost never have subway systems there. At best they have a Stadtbahn, but most have only trams. Where do you live?
@@TohaBgood2 I mean the metro area of my city has about 1 million. I'm in France, Toulouse, soon to be 3rd largest french city, we already have a tram line and 2 subways
@@peyoprat Gotcha. BART isn't really a metro system. It's more of an RER/S-bahn type of system. Each BART station is about half a kilometer long with just the platform being over 300 meters long. In other words, BART is very large in terms of footprint. It's very expensive to build out. That's why the costs so much higher than a regular metro tunnel. It's very "monumental infrastructure". And of course, California wages are pretty crazy. The median salary is about $9k vs about $2.5 in France. So construction here will always be a lot more expensive than anywhere in Europe pretty much by definition.
Mmmm, my recollection is BART was blocked at the South Fremont / Milpitas area. Santa Clara County had voted an additional sales tax that was funding BART construction, just it didn't happen. You might notice too that they will avoid connecting to the San Jose Airport just as the did with Cal Train and the VTA light rail. You know that circular layout of San Francisco International was designed with the future direct connection with BART in mind. Bart was to run at the bottom level between the central parking area and the airport proper. With BART blocked, San Jose decided to redirect funds a bit. The city had voted themselves a Paris vacation and fell in love with the look of a downtown shopping area. The wanted that look, so they dug up downtown and ran a light rail north to south down the middle. They killed downtown shopping and most of the businesses were closed, but they had that open walkway and rail transit look, just nothing else for quite some time and no reason for people to go downtown to look into the empty storefronts. You could not park anywhere to ride it anyway. It's gotten better and they did connect to Cal Train and more of the city... eventually. Currently San Jose wants to make their city the endpoint for BART and block any further construction towards Santa Clara. We have systems of political levers more than providing the public with a working Bay Area transit system. In San Jose a few people who live in a few blocks between 12th and 15th street will decide what San Jose and basically what Santa Clara County will do. -- On a side note you might look at a German elevator company that's helping repurpose office towers. They have doors on two sides and are programed so that the street level can have two entrances and that determines what floors you can get off. This allows mixed use without adding new elevator shafts and losing the rentable floor space of additional lifts. An office building might have a few floors of hotel or residential and can repurpose floors over time and at need.
I was born in Pittsburgh, and even though we moved away when I was still young, every time I return I find it one of America’s best-kept secrets: full of spirit, charm, grit and some real beauty. You do a great job getting at this, at least along the light rail lines. Thanks for shining a light on my home city!
It takes over two hours to go 60-ish miles through nothing? This doesn't seem normal. Combined with the useless-by-design service, I have to say, this seems like another example of spending money as badly as possible to “prove” that an idea doesn't work. The derpy little 40 year old Sprinter DMUs that go to my Mum's village (population maybe 2000?) in England could do that in an hour.
Light rail? Isn't it just a tram system? Boston has, or had (I haven't been there for decades), tunnelled trams, too; there's nothing unheard of about trams using tunnels, even in North America. I'm overall completely mystified by Market Street. Is there any other major city in the world that has a single-branched-line transit architecture? And for two different systems?!? That is so weird, and so constraining!
I really don't understand why they decided to duplicate Caltrain and build a station in Santa Clara instead of extending the BART line to the San Jose Airport after the Diridon station.
They needed a lot of room for a yard and there just happen to be a vacant UP yard there. It's not like land in Silicon Valley is cheap. There really wasn't any other choice. Plus they needed soma place where the tunnel boring machine could be inserted that could be co-located with a manufacturing facility for the tunnel sections. In other words, the Santa Clara stretch of track was pretty unavoidable. It was just lot cheaper this way. But since they have to build the track all the way there, might as well have a station too!
I was on the citizen's committee for the BART extension in San Mateo County back in the 1970s. The Bohannon Corporation, owners of the Hillsdale Shopping Center, convinced the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors to withdraw from the BART district without a vote of the people. This left Santa Clara County as an island and they had to withdraw as well. At that time it was estimated that we could have had an arial BART line all the way down to Palo Alto for 400 million dollars. I'll bet CalTrain has spent more than that on grade separations and electrification alone.
Don't tell me: the bohannon's argument against BART was the BART would allow the "undesirables"(dark) to be able to travel down from San Francisco right?
@@archstanton5973 there are legitimate engineering/economic problems with BART, compared to Caltrain. Caltrain uses off the shelf parts and tech, so anything BART does, Caltrain can do much cheaper. As a Bay Area native, I'm tired of BART hogging up all the money and political good-will. I'm a big advocate for Caltrain to go to the East Bay, through Dumbarton Bridge, but that project fell by the wayside once covid crisis happened.
One (completely unrealistic) thing I would love to see is express trains. Bart is such a long system that it takes forever to get from one end to the other. If you want to improve ridership, cutting down the amount of time it takes to get downtown or to the airports would improve things. But the cost of construction (and difficulty of getting additional rights of way) makes this an impossible pipe dream.
That would be great but would indeed be extremely expensive. Frankly, it would cost the same as just building new BART lines, which is a much better use of the money in terms of increasing ridership. But if they were to do it... They'd need to build outside tracks for the slower trains and keep the current tracks as the express tracks. Expensive, but definitely not impossible. In fact, maybe if they only do it in some key areas they could still implement some kind of minimalistic express service. But what I dream about is an extension in the 101 median from Millbrae all the way down to Diridon. There is a tooooooon of office and new housing development hugging the 101 all the way down to SJC. Almost all the major Bay Area tech companies are clustered around the 101 (Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.) It would suck for it to be in a highway median, but boy is that a lot of office development around that highway!
So, wait, this is _another_ fail at connecting transit to a Bay Area airport? It's clearly deliberate, isn''t it. And it doesn't seem to connect to anything at the south end?
