Posts about BART
Bicycling
BART pilot will test bikes on rush hour trains
WMATA's counterpart in the San Francisco Bay Area, BART, currently restricts bikes on their trains during rush hours. But they've decided to pilot letting cyclists bring their bikes on trains during the peak period.
Video from BART.
Rules for bringing bikes on BART are more nuanced than WMATA's rules, which ban bikes outright during rush hours.
On BART, for example, the printed schedules specifically show which trains do not allow bikes. Essentially, during rush hour (roughly 7-8:30 am and 4:30-6:30pm), bikes are not allowed on inbound trains. Additionally, during peak periods, bikes are not allowed to enter or exit the stations in downtown Oakland or downtown San Francisco (except cyclists can board morning trains bound for the East Bay at Embarcadero and can ride to Embarcadero from the East Bay in the afternoon).
BART requires that cyclists not board crowded trains and give priority to seniors and the disabled. That will continue to be the case under the pilot project.
The pilot will allow cyclists to ride all trains, at all times, during Fridays in August. Depending on what happens, the rules might change Could the approach work in Washington? Our trains do get crowded, as do stations. But a cyclist going from Brookland to Silver Spring in the morning, would likely be on a very empty train. Could allowing bikes on outbound trains that don't pass through the core work?
The best way to find out might be through a pilot program. I'm glad to see BART is trying to get some experiential data.
Transit
Comic teaches new customers how to ride transit
San Francisco's BART has created a great new comic book to help new riders learn to navigate the system. Could it work here?
For new riders, any transit system can seem daunting at first. This effort might make it easier for people to figure out how to try transit, and perhaps help make them regular riders.
The BART system is very similar to Metro, right down to the graduated fare system. In many respects this comic could easily be used here, just by changing some names. And based on the number of (tourist) riders I see at Greenbelt each morning trying to go in an out gate, some people could clearly use a little extra instruction.
It's good to see a transit agency trying new ways of communicating with riders. What do you think Metro could do to make it easier for new riders?
Transit
More weekend closures, less single-tracking for Metrorail
To save time and money, Metro is revising the way they do some track work. Instead of single-tracking through work zones, Metro will now close whole line segments more often.
Photo by ElvertBarnes on Flickr.
When BART was being designed, a 1971 article in the IEEE Transactions on Industry and General Applications described its system for avoiding shutdowns by single-tracking:
The BART system will provide service at 90-s intervals during peak demand periods, extending to as long as 15-min intervals during the low-demand early morning hours. At no time will service be discontinued; by the use of carefully placed crossovers and the control of trains in a reverse running mode, maintenance work on the roadbed can be performed without serious disruption of the service.
But in 1971 BART had yet to open, and the Metrorail system had only broken ground two years earlier. Operating experience in the years since has shown that while single-tracking may preserve service, it does so at the expense of lengthened headways and disruptions along the entire length of the line.
Today, taking this experience into account, WMATA has announced a new approach to weekend track work on the Metrorail system, in which entire sections of lines will be closed and replaced with buses.
Single-tracking doesn't just disrupt riders in the work area itself; it slows down the entire line, and affects riders throughout the Metrorail system.
WMATA's new approach to track work will preserve service on the open portions of lines, and avoid the follow-on effects which usually occur when trains are single-tracking.
Closing lines to speed repairs is, by itself, nothing new. In 2006, London Underground elected to close the Waterloo & City Line in its entirety for five months, in order to avoid a projected 70 weekend closures necessary to complete the major overhaul of the line.
Because of the complete closure, weekday riders who would have been spared disruption under a program of weekend closures instead had to take alternate routes. But because the complete closure was more efficient, the work was done (and the disruption ended) in 5 months, rather than in more than a year for weekend closures alone.
New York City's MTA has also been examining partial line closures as an alternative to frequent evening and weekend disruption. No decision has been made yet, but MTA Chairman Jay Walder seems to think it's a strategy that's proven itself in London, and which may prove viable in New York as well.
So, how well will this strategy work for Metrorail? At the extremities of lines, complete closures will probably be superior to single-tracking. Work will go faster with no trains running through the work areas, and the unaffected parts of the line won't have to contend with the bottleneck caused by single-tracking. In the core of the network, though, where ridership levels are high even on weekends, shuttle buses may end up swamped with passengers, leading to delays for riders traveling through the closed areas.
In the end, riders will face disruption whether trains are single-tracking or replaced with shuttle buses
Development
Metro beats BART with suburban transit-oriented jobs
Planners from San Francisco's SPUR recently visited Greater Washington to find out how Metrorail compares to BART. They found that our strong transit-oriented development at suburban stations has led to greater transit use and higher farebox recovery rates.
Photo by mindgutter.
According to their article, the two cities' systems, while built at similar times with similar technology, took very different turns when communities made their land use choices.
"When BART opened in 1974, many suburban Bay Area communities "downzoned" the areas directly adjacent to the station," they write. That hasn't stopped; Pittsburg, California did the same thing when their station opened in 1996.
That's a significant factor in why BART has remained predominantly a park-and-ride system. Running the lines in medians of freeways and having a much more spread-out system didn't help either.
In Washington, on the other hand, foresighted leaders in Arlington and Montgomery County took the opposite tack, planning for higher density right around the stations. Especially in Arlington, they satisfied neighbors opposed to changing their low-density neighborhoods by promising to limit the upzoning to a quarter-mile radius around new stations. We all know the result: new walkable neighborhoods have thrived around these stations.
It's not just about condos in Clarendon, however. This approach also created significant numbers of jobs right around many suburban stations, including Rockville, Bethesda, Friendship Heights, Silver Spring, the Pentagon-Crystal City area, and the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. Rosslyn-Ballston has more than doubled from 30,000 jobs to 80,000 jobs, and, SPUR writes, "this two-square-mile corridor would occupy fourteen square miles if it were built at typical suburban densities."
Those jobs give the Washington region a significantly different commuting pattern than other cities.
Over 30 percent of D.C. residents who work outside the city take transit. This compares with only 17 percent of San Francisco residents who take transit to their jobs outside of the city. In general, it is difficult to get a large share of residents to choose transit over driving for reverse commute trips. Not only is there less congestion leaving the city in the morning commute, but parking is usually cheap or free in the suburbs. So to attract reverse commuters, transit must be particularly convenient and work destinations must be directly adjacent to suburban transit. Due to the design of many Metrorail stations outside of D.C., this is the case for many reverse commuters.That also brings a very significant benefit to Metro from collecting fares in both directions. When most riders use a system in the peak direction, the transit system has to run empty trains the other way; the more people commute to jobs at outer stations, the more use they get from that extra capacity. SPUR credits this with generating a 71% farebox recovery rate (in 2008) for Metrorail, compared to only 52% for BART (in 2007).
Why did the Washington region do things differently? Smart leadership in Arlington and Montgomery County played a role. So did a few factors that, SPUR notes, "are difficult or undesirable to replicate," such as the height limit, higher taxes, and DC's "poor reputation" in the 1970s, which drove more jobs outside the city core. However, many other cities also experienced this flight of jobs to the suburbs, and failed to concentrate them around new or existing transit.
One of the largest factors in this TOD success story is the federal government's "policy (dating to the Carter Administration) to locate federal agencies near Metrorail stations," and the federal transit benefit for employees. Those are some of the reasons, SPUR says, "federal employees represent nearly 50 percent of all peak period Metrorail riders."
The federal role in Metorail's tremendous success makes it all the more tragic that the government is now proceeding to reverse its brilliant policy by relocating defense jobs away from Metro-adjacent offices through BRAC. So too is the tragedy of Montgomery County's plan to create a "Science City" 4 miles from Shady Grove Metro instead of utilizing all the empty space and industrial parks on top of it.
And for every TOD success story in the suburbs, there's a park-and-ride station no better than BART's disappointing stations. Even in DC, there are plenty of areas that successfully prevented new housing and offices atop Metro stations, like Cleveland Park and Tenleytown, just as many residents of Berkeley have since the 1970s.
The Metro system and jurisdictions' good TOD choices across the years have created a transit network that's enormously valuable to the Washington region. It's up to residents and leaders to continue and expand the good practices of the past as the region continues to grow, instead of foolishly abandoning them for the sake of expedience.
Transit
SmarTrip's delayed, but at least we're not San Francisco
Despite the issues with new SmartBenefits changes and delays in new features, Metro is well ahead of many other systems of comparable size in number of smart cards and integration across jurisdictions.
Photo by AgentAkit.
Metro's SmarTrip system is the oldest and largest of the major transit agencies' smart card systems. SmarTrip launched in 1999 and now has 1.8 million cards "active in the system," with 876,500 smart card transactions each day, according to data in a recent report by New York's Permanant Citizens' Advisory Committee to the MTA (PCAC). By comparison, the next largest, Chicago's CTA, has 474,000 cards and 260,000 transactions per day on their system that rolled out from 2002 to 2004. New York, the largest transit system, is still in the pilot phase. Update: New York's MetroCards do work pretty well despite not being proximity cards.
Metro also integrates a large number of agencies, 9, with plans to expand to 16. The San Francisco Bay Area's MTC system, TransLink, now links 3 but is expected to grow to 26. But if we thought Metro was slow, at least we're not the Bay Area: original plans called for all of those transit agencies to be part of TransLink by 2001, but there are still only 3: San Francisco's streetcar and bus system Muni, Golden Gate Buses and Ferries, and Alameda County's AC Transit. BART refused to join for years because of disputes over who would earn interest on the money paid in fares but not yet consumed.
Partly because of its older system, Metro still lags behind some other cities in features. Of the systems compared in the PCAC report, New York's pilot program, the Port Authority of NY and NJ's SmartLink, CTA's Chicago Card Plus, and the Bay Area's MTC system all allow automatic load, where the system charges a user's credit card as soon as the balance gets low like on E-ZPass. The BART smart card, EZ Rider, which is distinct from TransLink but is being phased out, doesn't offer autoload, nor does Metro.
On the other hand, SmarTrip does some things others can't. Only BART and Metro allow paying for parking with smart cards among the systems in the report, though some, like New York, don't offer parking as they don't serve the regional commuter role Metro and BART encompass. And according to the chart, at the moment TransLink doesn't offer any kind of employer transit benefit on the card like SmartBenefits.
By the way, the PCAC appears analogous to the Metro RAC, but the PCAC has a staff of six and is able to create research reports on important issues. Wouldn't that be nice?
Photo by Audrey Penven.
Transit
Google Transit isn't about Google
Technology writers and entrepreneurs talk about "innovation" a lot. It's a tough concept, though. For many people, the products and companies we can see and touch right now are easy to grasp, while the vague potential of people building new tools we can't conceive of today is less obvious.
iPhone transit directions in SF. Image from Trillium Solutions.
Professor Lawrence Lessig wrote in Newsweek about the FCC's failings. It's supposed to manage our airwaves and telecommunications systems to encourage more and easier communication. But in practice, it ends up regulating these systems to benefit the companies operating services today in ways that impede new people building new services tomorrow.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, writer Douglas McGray talks about San Francisco's experience releasing its schedule data for Google Transit:
Just a few days after Apple's iPhone launched, a trip planner for the San Francisco Bay Area's subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download. User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local government agency move so quickly?Too bad Metro staff don't feel that way.Turns out, it didn't. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format
— a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas — so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform. "It's not 1995," BART's Web-site manager, Timothy Moore, explained. "A single Web site is not the endgame anymore. People are planning trips on Google, they're using their iPhones. Because we opened up our schedule, we are in those places."
A couple weeks after that first BART application appeared, a new trip planner went live. This one, called iBART, was a thing of beauty. Free, too. It was written by two former high-school buddies—Ian Leighton, a sophomore at UC Berkeley, and David Hodge, a sophomore at the University of Southern California. Forty thousand people downloaded the program in just a few weeks.
"We've created competition among developers," Moore said, "to see who can serve our customers best."
Metro General Manager John Catoe and Chief Administrative Officer Emeka Moneme told the WMATA board last month that they wanted to guarantee that any trip planner was up to the highest quality standards. But as McGray explained, the first BART trip planner for the iPhone had its flaws too. iPhone users didn't blame BART; they wrote their own, better trip planners.
Besides, the wmata.com trip planner isn't going to know about the special bus routes Metro plans for the Inauguration either. Metro staff are doing their best to adapt to quickly changing conditions, so I understand if it's impractical to fix the trip planner for this day. But Metro should not argue that the trip planner is perfect and anyone else's tool unreliable.
McGray continunes,
Last September, [BART's] Moore added a feed that broadcasts imminent train arrivals in real time. He's eager to see what people will do with it. "We can't envision every beneficial use for our data," Moore told me. "We don't have the time, we don't have the resources, and frankly, we don't have the vision. I'm sure there are people out there who have better ideas than we do. That's why we've opened it up."Barack Obama seems to get this. DC's Office of the Chief Technology Officer gets this too. They've released lots of data knowing people will make all kinds of unexpected uses of it. Recently, I attended a meeting where someone suggested reaching out to houses of worship about a project in their area. Fortunately, there's a feed for that. Who knows what great tools and analyses people could devise if WMATA released feeds for station locations, schedules, bus routes, ridership numbers, and more.
Tips: Joshua S. and Michael Perkins.
Previously:
Transit
Three Bay Area transit plans
As the car-dependent San Francisco Bay Area continues to gradually make itself more transit-friendly, the idea of building less car-dependent housing, even in less central areas, continues to attract at least some adherents. Here are three plans in varying stages of realism.
The most likely to take place is the Dumbarton Rail Corridor, funded with a ballot proposition in 1994 to run trains from Union City across the currently unusable rail bridge parallel to the Dumbarton Bridge. Six trains per day should run across the Bay, stopping at new stations in Fremont, Newark, and eastern Menlo Park to join the main Caltrain line, with three heading north to San Francisco and three south to San Jose. This would provide another link in the sparse transit network, allowing East Bay commuters and those from farther east to reach the Peninsula.
Somewhat speculative, but still apparently fairly serious, is a local group in Hayward with a plan to develop a quarry owned by Caltrans and once in the path of a proposed freeway that was never built. Quarry Village would be a development centered around a village square with a dedicated bus to the BART station and to nearby Cal State Hayward. Their site proclaims, "if you come, we can build it," as they seek out residents interested in living in such a community.
And , is SF Cityscape's detailed plan to develop Candlestick Point, the former site of the 49ers stadium, which will be vacated when the team moves to Santa Clara. Cityscape asks, what if we built a neighborhood with a regular street grid, at about the density of the Haight, and extended the new T Muni line to pass through? The result might look like this (click on "proposed"). It's so sensible it's probably beyond imagining, but a great opportunity to add a little more of what draws so many people to live in San Francisco, and ensure affordable housing at the same time.
@ggwash
- Bikeshare is a gateway to private biking, not competition
- Judge denies injunction against closing schools
- Long-term closures: A solution to single-tracking?
- Short-term Washingtonians deserve a voice, too
- Public land deals have both benefits and pitfalls
- Metro policy for refunds after delays falls short, riders say
- PG planners propose bold new smart growth future
Greater Washington
District of Columbia
