Making Connections: An Epic Bay Area Transit Tour
This is a Seamless Bay Area guest post by Ben Keller, sharing his perspective of our epic Nov 15 tour of the Bay Area’s fragmented transit system.
Did you know that the Bay Area has 27 distinct transit agencies? (Or maybe 29, but who’s counting?) Last Thursday, I joined two of the co-founders of Seamless Bay Area, an organization advocating for saner transit governance, in a transit tour around the Bay. We decided to hit up as many different agencies as we could so that we could better understand the challenges that transit users experience every day. Below are my notes on our our 13-hour trip, during which we experienced transit fragmentation firsthand and had some really interesting discussions about how to fix the governance. We began in the Dimond District of Oakland before sunrise, when many of the region’s longest commuters begin their days on transit.
Our Route
First a quick word on our route: we started in the East Bay, riding AC Transit from downtown Oakland to Fruitvale BART. From there, we headed out to Dublin/Pleasanton, switching to Wheels to connect us to the ACE train. This brought us down to the South Bay, where we hopped a couple of VTA connections to Caltrain (sounds easier than it was) for the journey north. Before arriving in San Francisco we took a short detour on Samtrans, and ended with a Caltrain-Muni-BART shuffle in downtown SF. Want to experience all this for yourself? We recommend you start early, plan ahead, bring cash (Clipper isn’t available on every leg), and be ready to adapt if connections are missed. Oh, and stay safe: some of the connections involve walking on streets very badly designed for that purpose.
Agency #1: AC Transit
20 to Downtown Oakland, 6:02 AM
Our first trip of the day — the schedule indicates a 5:59 departure, and the bus is waiting at the stop (the beginning of the route). This is fortunate, because it’s so early that it’s still pitch dark and there is no bus shelter or lighting, so the bus stop itself is barely visible.
Interagency Transfer: AC Transit to BART at Fruitvale
Grade: B
Signage is good, though superfluous (hard to miss Fruitvale BART station), and it’s just steps from the bus stop to the faregates. But there’s no transfer discount and no schedule coordination to speak of.
Agency #2: BART
Dublin/Pleasanton, 6:39 AM
Just missed a train, so we had to wait 15 minutes for the next one. Seamless!
Ian and Adina from Seamless Bay Area are super knowledgeable about transit! It puts me to shame a bit, but it’s fun listening to them and learning about alternative models for governance here.
Dawn is gradually advancing as we meander through the pass towards Pleasanton. Traffic still looks pretty light so far. The air seems a bit clearer today, but the smoke tends to worsen as the day goes on, so we’ll see.
Now we are debating whether MTC is salvageable as a central governing agency given its historic baggage. What a great morning!
Interagency Transfer: BART to Wheels at East Dublin-Pleasanton
Grade: B
Signage takes some time to decipher, but the bus bays are a short walk away. The bus departure is well-timed to the train arrival, and there’s a transfer discount to boot.
Agency #3: Wheels
8-Hopyard, 7:05 AM
I had never even heard of this agency before yesterday’s route review, and the name is hardly illuminating. Nonetheless, the bus looks pretty new and we get a $1 transfer fare. After a brief scramble we just make the connection — score one for successful agency cooperation, I guess.
We are rolling through all manner of office parks and 4-lane expressways. This is really a pretty absurd connection between two heavy-rail systems!
Ridership is… low. After a few minutes, we’re the only ones remaining on board.
Interagency Transfer: Wheels to ACE at Pleasanton ACE
Grade: F
Ten minutes of totally unsigned wayfinding through obscure Pleasanton suburbs. ACE fares are set in stone with no transfer discounts.
Agency #4: ACE
ACE 05, 8:10 AM
After a good wander through the Pleasanton suburbs we finally stumbled on the ACE station — not much more than a glorified parking lot. The ACE train is nice, but expensive ($9.50 for the 45 minute journey). And pretty crowded! Standing room only for us.
We’ve merged with the Capitol Corridor tracks after a beautiful (slow) run through Niles Canyon on our way to Fremont.
Nice bathrooms on board, too!
Interagency Transfer: ACE to VTA at Santa Clara Great America
Grade: D
The stairs and the overpass are quite forbidding, it’s a ten-minute walk between stations, and there’s no transfer fare (ACE doesn’t use Clipper). At least there’s a bit of signage.
Agency #5: VTA
330 — Tasman Drive, 9:02 AM
In theory, anyway. In reality, we are still waiting at this fairly obscure bus stop past the light rail station on Tasman Drive. It was a 10-minute walk to find the place, even though it’s “only a block” from Great American station. Welcome to Santa Clara!
We watch as a light-rail train politely waits at a stoplight, yielding to cross traffic. Gross.
Finally, the bus! There is one other person on it, so it’s not quite empty…
We’re joined for this leg by Ramses, who works for the City of San Jose. Lots of interesting stories, and some different perspectives on how to break the interagency logjam.
We briefly offboard to walk to a “regional employment center,” simulating a real commute. Then we turn around and run for the light rail (after an ungodly wait at an unresponsive pedestrian signal).
Light Rail — Santa Teresa
9:36 AM
On to Diridon! Debates about bus supremacy are raging. Why doesn’t VTA invest in rapid buses instead of light rail? Apparently VTA is working through a massive budget deficit right now, exacerbated by a big decline in average fleet speeds over the past few years. We watch out the windows at VTA buses pass by us on the adjacent street, exceeding our speed.
Agency #6: Caltrain
NB 143, 10:04 AM
We decide to detrain at the Santa Clara light rail stop rather than making yet another intra-VTA transfer. Shockingly, we are running a fair bit ahead of schedule, so we take refuge in a coffee shop to wait for the next northbound Caltrain. A discussion on regional planning continues apace.
Finally, we make our way to Diridon station. Finding the Caltrain farebox to tag our Clipper cards proved surprisingly (needlessly) difficult, so we have to jog up the ramp onto the train before the doors close.
Ian refers to the local trains as the “milk run.” We crawl up the Peninsula, stopping frequently. The train is surprisingly full for midday.
Interagency Transfer: Caltrain to SamTrans at Hillsdale Station
Grade: F
Zero signage, half a dozen slow street crossings, no discount, and poorly-timed, infrequent service on both ends — what’s not to hate?
Agency #7: SamTrans
256 to Foster City, 12:31 PM
After a truly bewildering transfer, a significant wait, and a couple of increasingly urgent 511 calls, we manage to successfully board the 256 bus to Foster City (next bus In 2 hours, 8 minutes). Idle speculation about why off-peak service is so terrible follows.
This bus has a surprisingly high ridership given its atrocious headways. Mostly older folks, but there’s a woman with a baby and a group of boisterous teenagers as well. After so many commuter-filled or simply deserted transit experiences, it’s refreshingly bus-like.
Our route meanders through strip malls and office parks. We catch a glimpse of workers striping fresh bike lanes on a six-lane road. Kind of boiling the ocean, but it’s a valiant effort.
For a while we follow the shoreline levee, with the Hayward bridge just visible through the haze. Sea level rise, anyone? Eventually we loop back around in the direction of Caltrain. (Consensus seems to be that if we got off this bus at any point we would be stranded on the Peninsula for hours, so we have no destination on this excursion except for looking out the window.)
Discussion is focused on Transit versus Moovit for transit apps. Apparently BART has a new app out as well, that may or may not support multi-modal route planning and have terrible UI.
Caltrain, revisited
NB 151, 1:42 PM
They really did space the SamTrans stops as far from Caltrain as possible — easily a ten-minute walk from the bus stop to the train station. After a brief stop at the Hillsdale Mall bathroom (apparently this mall is part of the reason San Mateo County pulled out of the original BART system — they didn’t want the riff-raff coming down from SF) we are ready to board.
After some discussion and minor route revisions, we aim for the most famous bad connection of all: Caltrain 4th and King to BART.
Interagency Transfer: Caltrain to BART at 4th and King, Embarcadero
Grade: A/B/F
Caltrain to Muni (A): Despite two different platforms for Muni light rail boarding, real-time departure information and abundant signage makes it easy to hop on Muni within minutes of detraining. A fifty-cent discount only sweetens the deal.
Muni to BART (B): It is pretty quick, of course, but they really couldn’t figure out an escalator directly between the two platforms? Better signage and a fare discount couldn’t hurt either.
Caltrain to BART (F): No matter how well Muni performs here, it should not take an extra $2 in fare and twenty minutes to transfer between the Bay Area’s two heavy-rail backbones in the heart of the region’s densest city.
Agency #8: Muni
KT Inbound to Castro, 2:47 PM
Welcome to San Francisco! We manage a quick transfer to a KT train, and a brand-new one at that! Pretty snazzy — long bench seats oriented parallel to the direction of motion make for lots of standing room in a single-car train that would feel crowded in a normal configuration.
Our ride is only mildly stop-and-go into Embarcadero.
BART
Antioch, 3:09 PM
And so we go our separate ways, BART being the system that (unlike just about every other one today) actually gets us to the diverse set of places that we want to go to. The three different trains that we split onto each arrive within five minutes of our arrival on the platform. Something smells a bit weird on the train, but it’s really not too bad. I make it to Oakland uptown within 20 minutes of stepping off the Muni train. That last leg was indeed seamless!
The Bay Area’s regional transit: world-class, sometimes; incoherent, always
In case you haven’t been keeping score, here are the final ratings for our major transfers.
Some surprisingly good performers, mostly around East Bay BART stations, but some shockers as well: sketchy hikes to poorly signed bus stops; pointlessly barricaded platform transfers; and high-stakes connections where missing means waiting…for a very long time.
The bottom line: there’s plenty world-class transit in the Bay Area, it’s just unevenly distributed (and very poorly connected). Our regional transit system doesn’t really merit being called a “system”, at least not until it becomes more coherent — and stops punishing those who have longer commutes or happen to live in somewhere inconvenient for the few high-performing backbone services (which, let’s face it, is a whole lot of us).
I look forward to the day when the different modalities and agencies have the right incentives — not maximizing their own budgets or ridership, but collaborating to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get around the Bay.
Want to learn more about Seamless Bay Area? Check out our website and follow us on Twitter. Want to be a part of the action? We’re always looking for help on engagement, research, campaigning, fundraising and more: reach out by e-mail anytime.
