HOT Lanes in the Bay Area

Photo courtesy of johnmarkos.

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) has approved a plan to allow solo drivers to pay a toll to drive in Bay Area carpool lanes, turning HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes into HOT (high occupancy toll) lanes. The article states:

The system would be phased in over nearly two decades, starting in late 2010 or early 2011, and the first pilot projects would open on two congested corridors: southbound Interstate 680 over the Sunol Grade and both directions of Interstate 580 between Livermore and the I-680 interchange, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a regional planning and funding agency, which is coordinating the plan.

Eventually, the toll-lane network would be expanded to cover nearly 800 of the region's 1,200 miles of freeway lanes.

The price of the tolls hasn't been decided, but it could start out at a couple of dimes per mile. Motorists would use FasTrak transponders to pay.

You can read more about MTC's proposal here.

Is the Bay Area Ready for Congestion Pricing?

Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

In August 2007, the US Department of Transportation’s Urban Partnership Program made $158.7 million available to the San Francisco County Transportation Authority to relieve traffic congestion. In order to receive the funds, SF hopes to introduce a variable toll on Doyle Drive, a connector to the Golden Gate Bridge. This would encourage drivers to switch to public transit or drive during less congested times of day.

Federal funds are at risk, however, as Marin and San Francisco argue about the fairness of tolls on the bridge and Doyle Drive. The board of directors of Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District voted on May 9 to consider a congestion-based toll for the bridge but what impact that will have on Doyle Drive tolling remains to be seen. The SFCTA has issued a Toll Feasibility Fact Sheet that outlines how the electronic tolling would work.

The proposal is meeting from resistance from North Bay drivers who characterize it as an attempt by San Francisco to make them help pay for the rebuilding of outdated and seismically unsafe Doyle Drive. Others argue that this is a regional problem that needs to be addressed from that perspective. The public will be able to weigh in at a bridge district hearing July 11.

Laura Stonehill, a student in the dual-degree program in Transportation Engineering and City Planning at UC Berkeley, won First Prize in the American Planning Association’s Transportation Planning Division’s 2008 competition for her paper, Congestion Pricing on Doyle Drive. Congestion pricing in this context, she notes, would serve not only to reduce demand during peak traffic times but also to generate funds to reconstruct the connector to the Golden Gate Bridge. She recommends addressing concerns of North Bay residents, being open with the public about the pricing scheme and its objectives, and setting prices so that congestion is actually mitigated. The success of such a project is critical since it would be the first large-scale application of congestion pricing in the U.S.

Berkeley Lecturer Emeritus W. Homburger in BDP

photo courtesy of ITS

W. Homburger's (Institute of Transportation Studies Lecturer Emeritus and former acting director) recent talk to the Berkeley City Commons Club was written up this week in the Berkeley Daily Planet. The topic concerned, among other things, the proposed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) designed to ease traffic issues in the San Francisco Bay Area's East Bay (most notably, for Berkeley residents, eliminating a lane on Telegraph Avenue for BRT operations). Homburger is skeptical of this project, noting that, despite his general support for some associated measures,

AC Transit wants to spend capital funds, which is money with a ribbon-cutting at the end. [...] When’s the last time you saw a ribbon-cutting for maintaining a building?

Homburger goes on to explain that more robust support from local citizens is necessary for the proper implementation of such a system. He is not without his critics, however. A blog entitled Friends of BRT Blog has written a recent post criticizing some of Prof. Homburger's thoughts on BRT in the East Bay (which came in the form of another article in BDP). Charles Siegel, of the Berkeley-based Preservation Institute, explains in the blog post that

Homburger claims that "loss of a pair of lanes on Telegraph will increase congestion and the anger of residents on parallel streets where backups are already formidable." In reality, the BRT project would actually reduce, not increase, the number of cars entering the neighborhood.

For example, AC Transit analysis forecasts that the number of vehicles traffic crossing a line just north of Ashby Avenue stretching from Sacramento Street to College Avenue during the afternoon peak hour in 2025 would be 15,400 without BRT and 14,900 with BRT - a decrease of 500 cars. In addition, AC Transit could provide traffic calming devices to protect residents of streets near the BRT line.

Of course the East Bay BRT project is still in its planning stages, so no commitment has been made one way or another by AC Transit on the matter. Information on the proposal can be found here.

-J. Chipman

Volkswagen Sponsors New Research Center

Volkswagen has given $5.75 million to Stanford for the creation of a new research center to be run by Sebastian Thrun, director of the university's Aritficial Intelligence Lab and winner of the 2005 DARPA Challenge. The new center, to be named the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, will focus on improving automotive safety through robotics. In a speach Thursday night Thrun outlined the his plans for the new center, described here by Kristina Peterson in today's Mercury News.

Images courtesy of Stanford Univ.

Sorry Bicyclists- No San Rafael Bridge Trips Anytime Soon

photo courtesy of wikicommons

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Caltrans' recent rejection of a proposal by Bay Area bicyclists to open the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to bike traffic. The ongoing tension between bicyclists and Caltrans has lasted for 30 years with the current proposal projected to cost US$55 million.

Caltrans officials said Wednesday that they will reject a consultant's recommendation that a movable barrier be installed on the upper deck of the bridge to permit bicycle and pedestrian access 21 hours a day on weekdays and all day on weekends. Caltrans views such an arrangement as unsafe.

The Marin County Bicycle Coalition was instrumental in getting the proposal to this point and worked with consultants for the rejected proposal. Caltrans has contended that the project isn't feasible given safety concerns.

AC Transit's Van Hool débacle

AC Transit (Alameda County, California) in recent years has eliminated bus routes (from 157 to 93), raised fares (to $1.75 local without a transfer, with a plan to raise fares to $2) and increased taxes for county residents all to facilitate the purchase of Belgian made buses against the advice of experts and to the detriment of riders and the agency's own drivers. A recent article by Robert Gammon in the East Bay Express details the saga of AC Transit administration's extraordinary expenditure on Van Hool busses. The agency has recently spent $97.2M in public funds on 236 buses, which one AC Transit driver describes as, "the worst buses we have."

The reasons given for purchasing the Van Hools are the low floors and the extra set of doors, both of which facilitate boarding and leaving the bus. With the low floors, however, come sections of seating on raised platforms which have resulted in a post-boarding injury rate 100% higher on those buses. The third set of doors requires a shorter wheelbase which results in a much bouncier rider -- especialy for passengers sitting behind the rear wheels -- so AC Transit is now ordering some new Van Hools to be custom made with a longer wheelbase and only two sets of doors ... just like the old domestic buses.

In the second part of this two part story, Gammon tells us that to purchase the Van Hools AC Transit has spent over $1 million on employee trips to Western Europe and paid for a bus inspector to live near Antwerp for over five years, at more than $500,000 -- including $2,637 a month for his auto allowance -- on top his $121k annual salary. Since 2001 general manager Rick Fernandez, who earns $260k/yr., has made seven trips to Europe at taxpayers' expense totaling $22,983. During that period, 2001 through 2007, AC Transit employees filled out 163 travel vouchers for trips to Europe for a total of $947,238. And AC Transit has just increased the meal allowance from $50 to $134 per day.

Cool Traffic Modeling Program Says "Yes" to Congestion Pricing

SF City Planner, Billy Charleton, is interviewed on KQED Radio as he describes using SF Champ 3.0, an unusually sophisicated traffic modelling program which contains census data on 750,000 SF residents. In each scenario he runs, the simulation shows that traffic congestion is reduced with the introduction of congestion pricing. Critics of congestion pricing, however, point to London which charges about $16 to enter downtown during business hours. There, retail sales have declined since congestion pricing started.

Asha Weinstein Agrawal, of San Jose State's Dept. of Urban & Regional Planning, conducted a survey of 2700 California residents. 63 percent of respondents say that people with less fuel efficient vehicles should pay higher vehicle registration fees. This leads Agrawal to believe that people would be amenable to congestion pricing.

Greenhouse Gasses: Are They All Ours?

According to California state law, carbon emissions must be cut to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. As of yet we have had no way to determine how much of California's pollution originates within the state, nor any way to determine how much of the local pollution is generated by combustion or by rotting vegitation. Now two scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are beginning a unique experiment to monitor greenhouse gasses above San Francisco from Sutro Tower.

Bus Rapid Transit explained

The proposed East Bay Bus Rapid Transit program has attracted much comment in the local media, some of it ill-informed or hostile. (Why are so many people in "progressive" Berkeley scared of change and opposed to making life better for non-drivers?)

Wolf Homburger, a professor emeritus at ITS Berkeley, brings some measured judgment to this imbroglio, explaining how BRT works and what it entails for the region in Commentary: An Analysis of Bus Rapid Transit in the Berkeley Daily Planet.

(Image from AC Transit)

FasTrak is the fastest ... not always

SF Chronicle sleuths Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross uncover a shocking truth behind the FasTrak-only lanes at Bay Area toll plazas. The success of the FasTrak program -- up to 4000 new users per day -- has led to some backups rivaling the combo FasTrak/Cash lanes.

BART: 35 Years of Service

This week BART celebrates the 35th anniversary of their train service. What would the San Francisco Bay Area be like without BART? Smog ridden and painfully congested? BART has previously been named one of the Top 10 public works projects of the century as well as great planning disaster. Happy birthday, BART!

I Can Has New Deck?

Photo courtesy of jeffc5000.

The Bay Bridge will be closed Labor Day weekend. After the major information campaign by Caltrans and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, everybody in Northern California and beyond shouldn't be surprised come Friday night when the bridge is closed. Over $1 million has been spent to advertise the closure. Despite this effort, some travelers won't be satisfied. Hopefully engineering firm C.C. Meyers will work as efficiently as they did on the MacArthur Maze Meltdown.

If you do need to cross the bay this holiday weekend, plan ahead. BART will be running trains around the clock to compensate.

New Biometric System Introduced at SFO

The new SFO fast-pass technology Clear was launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Clear is part of a new wave of biometrically-based technologies being deployed at airports across the United States. These technologies provide airport customers with expedited security lines in exchange for voluntarily submitting their fingerprint, iris, and retinal data, which are linked to the customer’s other personal information (see Airports International, vol 40 no 3 pp 28-39 for further information).

While the federal government monitors these programs under the Registered Traveler's program (RT), the creation of biometric databases is, apart for privacy issues, a cause for concern for some. One such critic is Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who notes that, when biometrics was first implemented, it was used solely for the control and regulation of recidivist criminals.

from the Oakland Tribune, 8/6/07
Minnesota collapse gives Bay Area bridge riders pause

Now you see it, soon you won't

Hurry on out to San Francisco's Ocean Beach, at the western end of Noriega Street, where the remains of a clipper ship that foundered in 1878 have suddenly become visible. Last seen in 1980, the timbers may be covered again at any time by the beach's constantly shifting sands.

A further article and a gallery of photos has become available from the SF Chronicle.

The Maze Meltdown

The San Francisco Chronicle has a well-organized webpage providing full coverage of the April 29 MacArthur Maze meltdown and its aftermath.

The Great Quake of '06

In 2006 the Transportation Library participated in The Great Quake: the Legacy of Disaster exhibition in UC Berkeley's Main Library in 2006. The exhibition was part of the campus's recognition of the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Focusing on themes such as transportation, water resources, public policy, and earthquake preparedness, the exhibits gave a glimpse of how UC Berkeley researchers and local agencies have worked to reduce risks and improve disaster management.

Staff member Seyem Petrites selected items from the Library's collections to arrange an exhibit featuring programs developed by Bay Area agencies and transportation providers to reduce the region's vulnerability to earthquakes. The exhibits were on display from April 18 through the end of August 2006 in the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery in Doe Library. An expanded version of the exhibition continues online, courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

Bay bridges exhibit

From 2002 to 2004 the Transportation Library and the Water Resources Center Archive ran a joint exhibit on the history of Bay Area bridges with sections on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, and the Carquinez bridge; the new east span of the Bay Bridge; unbuilt projects; and the Golden Gate Bridge in popular culture. The site was created by Randal Brandt, formerly of the Water Resources Center Archive and now chief cataloger at the Bancroft Library.

Pavement Lousy in Bay Area

In what may come as a surprise to Bay Area drivers, road conditions in the Bay Area have improved during the past year, according to a report issued today by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. But despite the modest improvement, much of the pavement is in a danger zone where further deterioriation will require major rehabilitation.

Said MTC Vice Chair John McLemore, “...our streets and roads are still at a critical stage. There are thousands of miles of streets and roads all around the Bay Area with PCI scores that have fallen below 60, which is the point when pavement begins deteriorating rapidly. So we need to invest in both preventive maintenance to keep the good roads above 60 and in rehabilitation to bring poorer roads out of the danger zone. Given the size of our funding shortfall, that’s a huge challenge.”

Gas Crisis in BART Parking Lots?

From the Contra Costa Times:

BART patrons have become targets for gas-siphoning thieves, and police say it could become a neighborhood trend if inflation at the pump continues.

Thieves have drained from a quarter-tank to a half-tank of gas from at least four vehicles parked at different BART stations in the past month, including one Thursday morning in Bay Point, said spokesman Linton Johnson.

Vehicles, which sit unattended for hours in parking lots or garages, are like rows of treasure chests for petrol pirates.

Gas prices have leapt more than 30 cents a gallon in the past month, making it increasingly expensive to keep cars on the road -- especially SUVs whose gas tanks top off at 25 to 30 gallons. A gallon of unleaded was going from $3.20 to $3.30 in the Bay Area on Thursday.

"If these prices continue, it shouldn't be long before it's a trend everywhere," said Walnut Creek police Sgt. Shelly James.

Does this mean locking gas caps will be popular again? It is 1977 again?