Commuting

The 2009 Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) Annual Report paints a sobering picture of funding crises at nearly every Bay Area Transit operator -- crises we've covered extensively on Streetsblog -- and sums up the situation bluntly: "There is no way to sugarcoat it: These are difficult, daunting days for public transit in the Bay Area."

Between 2001 and 2009, the share of trips that Americans made in cars dropped by more than four percent, with walking, bicycling and transit use picking up the slack, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Disney's Magic Highway USA is one of the more extraordinary examples of the myopic devotion to automobility and its infrastructure I've ever seen. It's probably also required viewing at the Reason Foundation and among Senator James Inhofe's staff in Washington DC.

Transit and bike commuters in many cities are able to rush home quickly if an emergency strikes -- but for commuters looking to give up their cars in less dense areas, an emergency often means a pricey cab ride. One California county that falls in the latter camp, Santa Cruz, has come up with a unique solution: "ride insurance."

Standing in front of union headquarters in downtown Oakland this afternoon, leadership for BART's Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555 announced that their rank and file would walk off the job after the last trains finish their run this Sunday night, effectively shutting down BART across the Bay Area.  ATU 1555 represents train operators and station agents and is the second largest union working for BART, representing roughly 900 employees.

The Government Computer News magazine, part of the U.S. General Services Administration, called the 511 Transit website maintained by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) "a heroic act of interagency coordination" when naming it to it's list of the "10 great government websites nationwide for 2009."

In New York, the standard icon of corporate prestige is a gleaming tower downtown bearing a company's name. Here in the Bay Area, one of the preferred symbols is a sprawling, parking lot-ringed "corporate campus" off US-101 (Google, Yahoo) or I-280 (Apple,) 30 miles or more from the region's densest city. Ironically, though these campuses were designed for convenience, many Silicon Valley employees prefer to reside in San Francisco. As a result, companies have discovered the recruiting value of something transportation planners have long touted: high-quality, car-free transportation.

While the dispute between the MTA and NextBus Information Services (NBIS) over how real-time bus data on NextMuni (a separate company from NBIS) is used and licensed continues behind closed doors in downtown San Francisco, across the Bay, BART has flung its proverbial doors wide open to third-party developers to use its real-time data in as many and as interesting ways as they can conceive. In fact, BART is a national leader in data transparency among transit operators, and was second only to Tri-Met in Portland to release its real-time arrival feeds to the public.

When three agencies in President Obama's Cabinet -- DOT, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency -- banded together to promote "sustainable communities," the initiative sounded promising but somewhat lacking in concrete ideas.