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Friday, March 29, 2024

SPUR Talk: Will the Bay Area Finally Get Integrated Transit?

Note: GJEL Accident Attorneys Regularly sponsors for coverage on Streetsblog San Francisco and Streetsblog California. Unless stated in the story, GJEL accident attorneys do not consult about the content or editorial direction of the sponsored content.

Building an integrated transportation network, where customers no longer face a frustrating mess of tariffs and uncoordinated schedules, “can be really fun,” said Thomas Straitmeier of Goudappel, a Dutch transportation consulting firm, during a SPUR panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon. .

The key to developing a user-friendly integrated system is to remember that it is a customer experience, not just a bus and train transfer. “Thirty to forty percent of the total travel time is actually inside the vehicle of average travel. Sixty to seventy percent is invested in the transition to and from the transit station, [and] Waiting for a change at the station, “Straitmeier said.” If you’re talking about a connected network plan, you’re talking about more than a transportation service. “

This means considering the availability of a bike divider and other ways to troubleshoot the first and last mile. That means frequent service, across the clock, all day long. And that means transit stations are pleasant and inviting places that people want to spend time in.

In other words, not the Bay Area – not with its 27 operators, each with its own tariff system, branding, schedules, sub-stations, and this:

How not to put the rider first.  The bars between Muni and BART.  Photo: Streetsblog / Rudick
How not to put the rider in first place: the bars that separate Muni and BART. Photo: Streetsblog / Rudick

These are the iron prison bars that separate BART from Moni in downtown San Francisco. To move between the two systems, instead of crossing the platform blocked by these bars, climb the stairs, go through an exit gate, cross an mezzanine, go through another set of tariff gates, pay another tariff (no transfers allowed), and go down another staircase just to , More often, miss the connecting train.

SPUR’s panel discussion highlighted how these ridiculous and ongoing conditions are a reflection of the people who run and operate the systems and government agencies that oversee them. “When you have funding that draws between regional and local, and distributed authorities, it makes this discovery a shared space of accountability very difficult,” said MTC chief Therese McMillan, another spokeswoman. “It’s a structural pattern that has been around for so long … local is not bad. Regional is not bad, but we made them compete against each other instead of completing.”

A vision of a regional transition of the Netherlands.  Photo: Goudappel
A vision of a regional transition of the Netherlands. Photo: Goudappel

In fact, Macmillan spent much of his time talking about bureaucracy and research and warned people not to dream of integrated maps, like the main image and the one above. She also spoke of the many studies conducted by MTC, including the Blue Ribbon Transit Recovery task force, which had been meeting for more than a year, and said it might finally move the agency toward a “customer-based, consumer-re-imagined future.”

If there was time for questions, one could ask why it took fifty years for MTC, and it was was created Integrate transportation in the bay area, to decide that the customer should be first.

Meanwhile, Lisa Salberg from Access Planning in Ontario, Canada (another area with integrated transportation) explained how the world has changed since the days when most people traveled back and forth from suburbs. “The planning of the 1970s for that regional transportation network was not that complicated – people moved from the suburbs to the city center. Today the trips go everywhere.”

Representation of travel patterns throughout downtown Toronto, represented by the larger gray dot in the middle.  Image: Access planning
Representation of travel patterns throughout downtown Toronto, represented by the larger gray dot in the middle. Image: Access planning

This is why Ontario has worked to integrate its system, a necessary step to enable the transition to work on more complicated journeys. Ontario Metrolinks, The network manager of this area, was created in 2006 “… to improve the coordination and integration of all means of transportation in the Greater Toronto area and Hamilton”. Metrolinx is still working on it, but it has achieved more in sixteen years than MTC has achieved in over fifty. Macmillan, on the other hand, who started at MTC in 1984, did not have to combine transportation until “COVID changed everything.”

Of course COVID has put financial pressure on transportation systems around the world – including in the Netherlands and Ontario. But setting up bars – both verbal and metaphorical – between the Bay Area transition systems has always been a bad thing. They are a metaphor in your face for the failures of the administration and leaders in the Gulf region.

One example from Wednesday’s debate is that the people who perpetuated the Bay Area’s split system for so long are unwilling to fix it – nor to persuade operators to stop “looking in the rearview mirror in February 2020 and start looking.” [out] The windshield, “to question Macmillan’s unfortunate car-related metaphor. Clearly, the Bay Area will never combine its transition until it replaces that old guard with realistic but positive people who truly appreciate creating a system that works.

Three people on this panel think proachialism is a bad thing.
Three people on this panel think proachialism is a bad thing.

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