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2010 Holidaze Road Trip — Part 1 — Bay Area -> Reno -> Elko -> Ketchum

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It was tough for BJ and I to wake up at 5:00 am and finish packing the car for the 750 mile drive to Idaho. There were a variety of reasons we had decided to drive to Sun Valley instead of fly, most notably what a miserable experience it is to fly these days. Happily we were getting a good jump on any traffic at 8:30 am on a Thursday, and there was a break between storms for our trek over the Sierra Nevada. Prospects were good for a smooth trip.

The car was packed pretty tight, with a snowboard and accessories (boots, snow pants, etc.), 10 days of clothing for two people (including a hat box and formal wear for New Year’s Eve), Christmas presents, a couple of emergency blankets, camera gear, and more. In time though, Dan-ta Claus, and Mrs. Claus were able to unhitch the sleigh and get on the way.

The drive to Reno was pleasant and relatively traffic-free, not like many of my stop-and-go wintertime Tahoe trips of years past. Before we knew it we were pulling up to the Great Basin Brewery in Sparks, just outside of Reno, for a pre-arranged lunch-date with Uncle Ken and his kids.

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Uncle Ken looking serious

Klint and Sommer are my cousins from Mom’s side, and we are all part of a pretty large extended family from Las Vegas. Early on in childhood, they moved to the one-horse town of Tonapah, Nevada. That, combined with the fact that they’re quite a few years younger than me, made it so we didn’t get to hang out much as kids, and this was really the first time we would get to catch up in many years.

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Cousins Klint and Sommer doing their thing

We lingered over an excellent lunch of sandwiches, soup, fish-and-chips, and of course beers, reminiscing and talking shop (Klint, BJ and I are all IT pros). At the end we wandered across the street to take some pictures in front of the historic old schoolhouse.

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The whole gang

Before long BJ and I were back on the road. We still had miles to travel, and travel we did. Northern Nevada can be pretty desolate, but all-in-all, things were looking quite scenic, with a dusting of snow in some of the valleys, moderate snow on the mountains, crows perched on fenceposts to get a better view of the treeless high-desert, and the low angle of the mid-winter sun lighting it all like sunset in act two of a spaghetti western.

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The word Nevada means “snow capped mountain range”

Our destination for the night was the small city of Elko, 500 miles from our starting point in the East Bay. Elko is known mostly for its annual cowboy poetry festival, but alas we would be resigned to a mediocre meal at our hotel restaurant, watching competing broadcasts of alarmist Fox News on one TV vs. Whoopi Goldberg as Santa’s replacement in Call Me Claus on the other. Oh well, at least they had a full bar.

We got back on the road the next morning, Christmas Eve-day, at about 9:00, and the rest of the drive was mostly uneventful. We passed through Wells and turned off the 80 and onto the 93, happily noting the wildlife bridges across the highway, which allow deer to migrate safely. Better still was the sight of two juvenile coyotes, playfully chasing each other other across the road. They had thick winter coats and looked healthy. Our only concern was their proximity to our 80 MPH Subaru. Get off the road pups!!!

Into Idaho, and north of Twin Falls the terrain changes, first with large swaths of lava rock, jutting rhythmically up through the snow, and later by ever larger mountain ranges, layered back to the horizon. There was more and more snow, and more and more luxury SUVs carrying skis and snowboards. We were certainly headed to a different place.

Finally at about 3:30 we arrived at our vacation rental in Ketchum and unpacked, mentally preparing for what lay ahead.

To be continued…

BAM: San Jose to Santa Rosa, and beyond!

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As part of my ongoing fantasy reworking of Bay Area transit, here is the next installment: a 150+ mile rail corridor from Cloverdale to Gilroy, including San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Rosa and more. It sounds crazy I know, but hear me out.

First of all, remember that my transit plans are only loosely tied to reality. I have created a world where the vast majority of public transit is handled by one agency: the imaginary Bay Area Metro, or BAM. In this world there are no environmental impact surveys, no budget deficits, no earthquakes and no NIMBYism. I just want to imagine what Bay Area transit could be if our leaders were more visionary, our state was less broke, and our populace was less obstructionist.

Much of the infrastructure for the Cloverdale -> Gilroy train already exists. It includes the entire length of the work-in-progress SMART system (Cloverdale -> Larkspur), approved by voters in 2008. That right there is 70 miles of track.

Additionally the 60 miles of Caltrain’s existing tracks between Millbrae and Gilroy is part of the corridor.

Finally, the 10 miles of BART track between Millbrae and Daly City is the last bit of existing infrastructure to be included.

That leaves roughly 20 miles of track to lay, and eight or so stations to construct. Not a trivial task to be sure, but far easier to get your head around than an entire 150+ mile system.

At this point I should probably explain the monstrous caveat with the above plan. You see, even though in my world Caltrain and BART (and all the other transit agencies) have merged, the physical reality is that Caltrain and BART use different gauge tracks in their systems. Caltrain uses what’s called standard gauge, where the distance between rails is 4 feet, 8.5 inches, while BART uses Indian gauge at 5 feet, 6 inches. So clearly my idea as described would appear to be fatally flawed.

The solution of course is to rip up the BART tracks (yes all 100+ miles of them!) and replace them with standard gauge, which is how it should have been built all along. Standard gauge is used by 60% of railroads worldwide, including the New York Subway and Chicago’s ‘L’ train. Once the BART tracks are replaced, we can have true integration between it and Caltrain (and eventually Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor to Sacramento, and the Altamont Commuter Express to Stockton).

Caveat aside there is still the expensive and politically difficult task of building the 20 miles of track between the southern terminus of the SMART line (Larkspur Landing) and the Daly City station. Below you’ll see my proposal for such a system. The way I see it, most or all of the new track running through San Francisco would be underground, while the part in Marin would be mostly above-ground.

And yes, it goes across the Golden Gate Bridge! How cool would that be to remove a couple lanes of traffic to accommodate a train? People would go ape-shit in protesting this of course, but I don’t care. Marin commuters can take the train to work. Commuting to downtown SF will be a snap because if you remember from my previous post, the BAM system also has a new subway running the entire length of Geary street. These two lines will intersect at a new subway station at the intersection of Geary and Park Presidio Blvd, allowing for easy access to downtown.

So I guess that’s enough backstory. Below are a few maps showing the proposed layout.

The colors are as follows: red is the existing commuter rail infrastructure (BART and Caltrain), green is future commuter rail growth (both real and imaginary), blue is existing light rail (MUNI), and cyan is future light rail growth. Purple icons represent transfer stations.

The first map shows the entire system. You can zoom and scroll around the map as with any Google map, or look below at some pre-zoomed views.


View SMART Extension in a larger map

The second map is a closeup of the new rail that would be laid along 19th Avenue/Park Presidio Boulevard in San Francisco up to the Golden Gate Bridge. Note the station placement intersects with existing light rail lines at Judah and Taraval, and the future rail line at Geary. It also has strategic station placement at SFSU/Stonestown, the museum complex at Golden Gate Park, and the Golden Gate Bridge itself.


View SMART Extension in a larger map

This final map shows southern Marin. The tracks would be primarily above ground, with two new stations south of the already planned Larkspur Landing Station. I envision a large park-and-ride at the Strawberry Station to accommodate SF commuters. And yes, I know it’s pretty ambitious to include a station at Sausalito, but what the hell.


View SMART Extension in a larger map

New Year, New Look

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You may have noticed a new look to the ol’ blog. I’m still figuring out how I want all this to work, and this easy-on-the-eyes theme seemed like a nice step. I’m also working on my integration with some or all of these other blogging and Internet services. Originally my goal was to find a way to integrate everything: WordPress (this blog), Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, Instaram…

Currently, when I post to this blog, I also “announce” that post via Tumblr, which also propagates to Twitter and Facebook. I don’t know if that’s the best solution, but it’s what I came up with when I started this whole thing. You may wonder why I even have a Tumblr, seeing as how this WordPress site is my primary blog. Again, I’m not entirely sure myself, but so far I (like most people it seems) tend to use Tumblr to share random bits of Internet goodness, and use WordPress for longer, text-heavy posts.

I may rethink these approaches, but for now it’s what I’ve got. Maybe using disparate tools in some sort of political-esque talking-point-stay-on-message onslaught is not necessarily the best use of those tools. Also, I don’t want to spam people. Next thing you know I might be “woofing” all my posts:



So anyway, dear reader, I am working on the right level of self-exposure for 2011, but rest assured I will keep this going with such topics as travel, photography, infrastructure, transparency, technology, media overload, and maybe, just maybe I will be become a first-time homeowner in 2011 and write about that.

Heh, heh, I said homo…

Okay, and on that note, thanks for checking in, and Happy New Year!

Transit

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As I mentioned in a previous post, I consider myself somewhat of a public transit nerd. I love public transit. Specifically I love train-based transit; buses can go to hell.

Growing up on the fringes of Tucson, with a single Mom, and no older siblings to shuttle me around, I was often left to the mercy of the Sun Tran bus system. Now, in all fairness, Sun Tran was not a terrible system. It covered the city thoroughly, and the buses were modern, air-condidtioned and comfortable.

But Sun Tran had one major flaw: it operated buses, and not trains.

It’s an interesting question why I, and so many people, prefer trains to buses. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not completely above riding buses, but I feel more like I suffer through them, than enjoy them. In part, I think there is a certain classism amongst myself and my peer group — you know the type; we’re perfectly happy to take BART to San Francisco for our commute, or a night out (nevermind the godawful closing time of 12:00), but god forbid we ride the 72 down San Pablo through West Oakland.

Another anti-bus argument, and perhaps a more reasonable one, is that they are stuck on city streets, at the whims of traffic, and so are slower and less reliable than a train system.

Plus people romanticize trains. Whether you’re a subway-riding New York commuter, a five-year old fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, a model-train hobbyist, or a backpacking 20-something with a Eurail pass, trains are just cool. Buses? Well, not so much…

Bay Area transit is decent, especially for a West Coast city, but it could be SO much better. Maybe the BART system was a bold idea in its day, but since then little has changed. It’s true that BART now goes to SFO, and further out into the East Bay exurbs, but that’s hardly bold. What about the densely populated, inner bay area? Arguably, investing in more BART coverage in San Francisco and Oakland would server more people than extending the fringes (which by the way just encourages more leapfrog sprawl instead of denser urban areas).

But it’s not just BART that we need to consider, and that gets to the crux of one of the biggest problems we have: too many transit agencies. The Bay Area’s 7.5 million residents are served by many different agencies. Here’s just a handful off the top of my head:  SF Muni, BART,Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit.

Now I understand the reasons for this: primarily that the Bay Area is made up of a diverse group of cities and counties, each with its own interests, demographics, taxes and budgets, and their transit systems have grown up organically, more-or-less independent of one another. It would be impossible to have a regional transit system with all those competing interests. Right?

Wrong!

New York’s MTA serves many  millions of people in 14 counties in two states, including subways, commuter rail, and yes, buses. Portland’s TriMet covers three counties, and is widely considered a model for smart, sustainible approach to transit, and urban planning in general. Elsewhere in California, yes it is true that the Metro agency is limited to Los Angeles County, but that includes more people than the Bay Area, and in many diverse municipalities, over a similarly large geographical area.

So why is a regional approach better?

For starters, with a regional authority you have planners looking at the big picture, so they can work to accommodate transit patterns that cross city and county lines. Also, with regional control you could greatly eliminate redundant transit service and administrative overhead, and simplify union wage/benefits negotiations.

A third reason is the greater customer simplicity of one single system, with one single fee structure and transfer policy. Wouldn’t it be great, for example, if you could exit BART at Civic Center, and go directly to the N-Judah Muni line, without having to climb to the ticket level, exit BART, then enter Muni, and go back down to your new train?

Besides the difficulty of wrangling and combining the multitude of transit agencies, there are certainly other major issues with expanding Bay Area transit. They include paying for it (California is broke), geology (ack, earthquakes!), geography (there are bodies of water and mountains in the way), and NIMBYism (yes to transit, but not in my neighborhood!).

Those things don’t concern me. In my Sim-City-esque mindset, I am King Dan, and I make the transit decisions. Pay for it? Bah, toll roads and gas taxes. Earthquakes? They do it in Japan! Cross the bay? Build more bridges! NIMBYism? Tough shit, I make the decisions.

And so, to that end, I present to you, the re-imagining of the Bay Area’s transit network in my vision. Naturally, caveats abound. For one thing, I am only going to concern myself with trains: commuter, subway, and light rail. Buses (and ferries) are obviously important components to the system, but since this is my transit-fantasy, I’m going to pretty-much ignore them, except of course where bus lines will likely be replaced by rail.

I have purposely left out a couple of rail lines into San Jose: Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor, and the Altamont Commuter Express. Also missing is Santa Clara county’s VTA light rail system. Maybe eventually I’ll focus more on the South Bay, but right now it will be mostly SF and Oakland.

Also ignored is the planned California high-speed rail. It’s a costly endeavor, with a lot of problems to solve, and a long ways away. Someday I might broaden my scope to the whole state, but for the moment I’m focusing on the Bay Area.

This is going to be an ongoing series of posts, as I plan and refine my transit takeover. I’ll add and modify lines to the system, and provide maps to show off the ideas.

For starters let’s take a look at how the Bay Area’s transit looks currently. Below is a map showing the three major rail systems. Red lines are BART (primarily commuter rail, with some subway stations in downtown San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland), aqua is Caltrain (commuter rail), and blue is SFMuni (light rail streetcars). The markers indicate subway and above ground stations on their respective lines. The purple markers are dual-purpose stations, for example the Market Street subway stations serve both BART and Muni. Looking at this view, it looks like we have pretty good coverage! San Francisco, for those geographically challenged, is the top of the western peninsula on the map. You can see it contains a rather dense-looking array of transit options.

View Bay Area Transit Today in a larger map

But looks can be deceiving. Here is a zoomed-in look at San Francisco. Notice how, despite the seeming-density in the view above, it’s a bit disappointing close-up. Not only is the northwestern quadrant completely devoid of trains, but also huge swaths of the rest of the city are not covered. Even the densely populated northeast corner is only serviced by the Market street subway, and the historic streetcar, which runs from Market up the waterfront to Fisherman’s Wharf. The old-fashioned streetcars are charming, but they are slow, and serve tourists more than locals. And the light rail lines in the western half of the city, once they’ve exited the subway, are pretty slow themselves. They run on surface streets, so have similar traffic problems as buses.

View Bay Area Transit Today in a larger map

Now remember, in the new Last-Dan-Standing-Bay-Area utopia, there is no MUNI, no Caltrain, etc. All Bay Area transit is consolidated into one agency: let’s call it Bay Area Metro, or BAM. BAM operates commuter rail (i.e. Caltrain and BART) and light rail (i.e. MUNI), plus all the rest of the agencies I list above (and more).

So first, what does the current system look like under BAM. I’ll change the colors to define the type of rail line, red for commuter, and blue for light rail. Also, let’s add in any known, or proposed changes to the Bay Area systems that are in the pipeline* such as the Transbay Terminal, the exciting, but flawed, central subway, BART’s extensions to Livermore and Santa Clara, and the SMART rail system that will connect Sonoma county with Marin. I’ll color those too: green for commuter rail, and aqua for light rail.

View MBA in a larger map

Finally, below I will add the first fantasy subway line across San Francisco: the six mile Geary line. Remember, the green indicates a new BART type of commuter rail, so I envision this new Geary line meeting up with the current BART subway at Montgomery and continuing into the East Bay. At least for now. Future posts may alter my crazy scheme even more. Mwahahahahahahaha!

View Geary in a larger map

* I am purposely ignoring the Oakland Airport Connector, as I have a better plan for getting to and from the airport. Stay tuned for a future post that explains it!