Transit

Count on an extra twenty to forty minutes for your trip if you plan to travel on BART between West Oakland and Fruitvale, or between 19th Street and Fruitvale, this Labor Day weekend. "That's our advice to riders," said Assistant General Manager for Operations Paul Oversier at a BART press conference this morning in Oakland. He said with a planned bus bridge, it should really only add twenty minutes to a typical trip, but he cautioned people connecting to flights to add extra time. "The forty minutes is if you're flying from Oakland or SFO." He added that BART will run more frequent train service than normal between SF and Oakland.

Some 20 people crowded onto the San Rafael train station platform this morning, waiting for the 11:29 SMART train heading north towards Santa Rosa. But they were in for a disappointment--the first train wasn't actually going to leave until 2:29 p.m. The platform was a chorus of groans and grumbles as word got around that "Full [emphasis added] train service begins Friday, August 25, 2017," which the SMART train operators announced far and wide, wasn't completely accurate.

The Marin Independent Journal's Dick Spotswood made it clear in his column today that he doesn't support Senate Bill 35 by Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, because it could bring denser housing to Marin's towns and cities.

To be a successful transportation planner, you've also got to be a persuasive salesman, said two consultants at a recent SPUR event.

Last week I took the train from Oakland to Bakersfield. In Bakersfield, I transferred to a bus to get to Los Angeles.

The San Mateo Transit District (SamTrans) released its report today on improving transportation links across the Dumbarton bridge and right of way. The agency will be soliciting public comment on the document--which runs 267 pages--over the next couple of months. The study proposes phased implementations of improved bus services and, somewhere down the line, rebuilding either a one-or-two track rail bridge that would eventually permit Caltrain to connect the job centers of the Peninsula with the East Bay. The full report is available for download here.

Caltrain is displaying three different bike racks today until 7 p.m and tomorrow from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 4th and King. They're asking riders to check them out and vote on what kind of bike rack storage they want on the railroad's new electric trains, coming some time in 2019. The options are to either keep bike cars more or less as they are now, where cyclists stack their bikes up along a rail, or adding some bike racks - either with angled parking or suspended from hooks.

A local assemblymember secured a promise of $20 million in state funding to build a parking garage for BART. But in the interim staff had come up with intriguing alternative proposals, and the board of directors opted for the quicker and less expensive option.

The mainstream media was all over it: private cars to be banned from Market Street under the city's "Better Market Street" plan. It will also have sidewalk-level protected bike lanes. For advocates in the safe streets community the design announced by the city this week is a major victory and a reason to celebrate.