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article by Dennis Ratcliffe on "Can Single-Bore Tunneling Transform Urban Subway Construction?"
http://www.vta.org/News-and-Me...

barely has change for the 25

Creimer takes the express bus from San Jose to Palo Alto. An express bus pass is $140 per month that he has to pay for out of pocket. The three-letter agency he works for isn't enrolled in the Eco Pass program that allow employers to provide free passes to their employees. An express bus pass is also valid for all bus and light rail services in Santa Clara (not San Diego) County. Whether he has change or not, creimer can get anywhere in Silicon Valley. Don't let this inconvenient fact get in the way of your stupidity.

They're extending BART into Silicon Valley — 30 years late. Your tax dollars at work.

http://www.vta.org/bart/

BART is finally coming to Silicon Valley. I'm so excited. Meh...

http://www.vta.org/bart/

and lets take San Francisco Bay as our example (since I live here and have first hand knowledge and experience). VTA handles "some" of the South Bay, but limited to North San Jose and Mountain View.

VTA Buses go from Palo Alto to Fremont to South SJ to Gilroy. The light rail, from Mt. View down to Los Gatos and east San Jose to the Alameden valley area of SJ....in fact...just...here's the map: http://www.vta.org/getting-aro... (VTA focuses on SJ because it--SJ--has grown like a cancer or ambeoba, absorbing smaller communites, until it's most of the urban South Bay).

Caltrain handles a single strip running North to south from North San Jose to South (not the city) San Francisco.

Wrong. It goes from from SF (right next to AT&T Park) down to downtown SJ regularly, extending to Gilroy (30 miles south of the downtown SJ station) during "traditional" commute times (ie, not the 10a-8pm Valley standard time). Here's their map: http://www.caltrain.com/statio...

Bart handles SF -> Oakland, and a straight line down to Fremont.

Wrong. BART goes to SFO and Millbrae (and where it shares a station with CalTrain) up through SF and into the East Bay, extending from Richmond down to Fremont and out to Dublin/Pleasanton and Pittsburg/Baypoint. Here's BART's map: http://www.bart.gov/stations

These systems don't connect, use different payment systems, have different rates, and are _MORE_ expensive than driving.

The one bit that's true, but due to the compound sentence ends up being wrong. Connections are a pain in the ass, but the Clipper card is accepted by BART, CalTrain, VTA, SamTrans (San Mateo's bus service), Almeda Transit, MUNI (SF's transit system), plus more. Oh, and both VTA and SamTrans have stops at or near (ie, a block or two) almost all CalTrain stations on the Peninsula (the Atherton station is at least one exception) and VTA has service up to Fremont's southernmost BART station (and VTA is in the process of extending BART into east San Jose--it's not their fault that in the 1950s & 60s San Mateo and Santa Clara residents opted out of the BART system). And add into that that we're talking about five counties (SF, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa) with all the territorialism and desire for control that brings with it (leading to different fare schedules, subsidies, etc.).

Taking our "cheap" (said with a hearty chuckle) mass transit is extremely expensive and time consuming.

Trip from Mt. View to Twitter's HQ (in SF): Leave around 8am. Car: 40-45 mines, $17.64 (31.5 mi at $.56 per mile); starting from Shoreline & 101 (hell, saving you driving from the CalTrain station to 101). (via Trulia's map...it looks like Google maps will no longer let you specify the time for traffic projections and 1am is actually one of the times the freeways are relatively empty). Pub: 1:03, $9.50: Mt. View CalTrain station to end of line in SF, then 38X followed by 2 minutes of walking (per 551.org). Oh, and you can read, sleep, etc. on the train. Plus, monthly passes and commute FSA will reduce that cost.

Yet instead of addressing the problems with mass transit, California is dumping many billions into a train from Fresno to Sacramento. Go figure..

True, but the train is also supose to go to SF, SJ, LA, and SD (PDF of rail proj

True, cost is an issue. But also time is an issue. Life is short. You cannot spend three days to walk to the other end of the city to buy flowers for your GF because when you are back the flowers will become straw and the GF will have a new BF. In middle ages most people lived sedentiary lives because going somewhere was a costly and risky affair, and they didn't really have a good reason to go.

Today if you look at who rides buses it's exactly who you said would be - students and poor people. Bus passes are expensive -- very expensive. I used to ride a bus when I worked, back in 1995, but the pass was $100/mo or something like that. Here is what the local bus company says:

VTA's Adult Express Pass, which is equivalent to Eco Pass, costs $1,540 a year per person.

Hey, you can buy a nice junk car for this money and go anywhere you like! Most people in the market for bus trips will need to take a loan to buy such a pass. I'd have to be insane to buy one. I'd rather buy a cheap scooter or an electric bicycle.

Today a single fare on a bus here costs $2 or $4. Since most trips are both ways, you are looking at spending $5 to $10 per day at minimum if you go somewhere on a daily basis. Over the year it will be $1800 to $3600, with nothing to show for it. These monies can buy you a very decent car, and you will keep it - so that the next year you only pay the maintenance (insurance and fuel) and not the capital cost.

For those with no assets even the cost of a car plus insurance may be too much, but a weekly or monthly travel-pass may be an option.

As the numbers above prove, that person should be taking those trips rarely - certainly not every day. Only then he can save money on taking the bus. He still loses time, but people without a job usually have time. People with a job can afford a car.

I remember filling out a VTA questioneer about what they should prioritize with their spending and I put traffic signal synchronization as #1 priority for me.

I am not sure who reads that in the end and what affect it has.
Maybe you can email some of the people in the Group 2 section VTA board and see if you get any positive response.

I usually don't even have enough luck to make it 2 signals before hitting a red light. I can hit it every single time.
Going through S.F. on a medium traffic time, on the other hand, I usually can get through the whole city stopping 3-4 times.

How long before Google gets together with some of the other tech companies in the area to run a shared service?

There are various public transport systems available. These include Caltrain - a train service which runs all the way from San Francisco to San Jose in around 3 hours. Caltrain also provides various shuttle services, but the problem with this service was that so many people used to crowd into each shuttle that it became near impossible to get out when it was your stop. I was told that attempts to extend the service to cover more company offices were cancelled due to the overwhelming demand (ie. the employees from one company would completely fill the shuttle before anyone else from other companies could get on).

There was also the VTA tram system which ran from Mountain View to the Convention Centre and out to Diridon.

VTA also operates a good number of bus services, but you really need to know the exact timetable of each service to be able to make long distance journeys. However, they did have rendezvous points beside Caltrain stations, so you could get from the suburb of one city to another with some effort.

Consequently, company funded shuttle services remain the best choice.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, most US cities offer door-to-door shuttle service for disabled people who cannot reach or use the normal bus or rail lines by themselves. More information is available from the transit authority for Santa Clara County, which covers most of Silicon Valley. Similar programs are available throughout the Bay Area and nearly all major cities.

None of which are representative of LRT. To have a better sense of light rail, go see DART, Houston METRO, Salt Lake City UTA, St. Louis Metrolink, San Francisco MUNI, Santa Clara VTA, Philadelphia SEPTA, Portland Max, Baltimore MARC, and so on.

Jointed tracks cause the "clickety-clack" most people are familiar with. Modern systems use Continuously welded rail to solve this problem.

Referring to me? I'm for transit in all its forms (bus/BRT, LRT, heavy rail, monorail, even maglev)but I just want to make sure people make their decisions for the right reasons.

Speaking of light rail, that is a solution which is hear now, it is proven and it works. And it need not be too expensive if you control costs. Same with monorail, the situation in Las Vegas notwithstanding (ugh, don't get me started on that mess).

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority has a nice light rail system which is run well. I rode the whole system back in September/October 2001 (they have since added to it) and found it a very pleasant way to travel.

Nice map, but that's got nothing on the VTA System Map.

A related issue is that of linking up major metropolitan areas.

Who decided that San Jose should get a Light Rail system that is wholely incompatible with BART. If they had thought for maybe a second, the entire Bay Area could be linked by one complete system.

The same goes for Baltimore's Light Rail and Washington's Metro. Sure, they're about 25 miles apart now... but eventually they'll converge. When they converge they'll be incompatible.

I'm no transit expert, but it seems like it is COMPLETELY RETARDED to have adjacent metropolitan areas building incompatible systems.

And what crackhead decided to build Seattle's Bus Tunnels. That's just weird.

Las Vegas' Monorail (that's right, MONORAIL!) will be cool but doesn't go very far and is a couple of LARGE blocks off The Strip.

Public transportation is a good idea - but buses, basically, suck.

They are slow, noisy, polluting, have a high operating cost, come at irregular times, have a high rate of failure, subject to and contribute to congestion, and are generally unpleasant.

Light rail is much better. It is faster, much quieter, much cleaner, has a lower operating cost, maintains excellent on-time performance, is reliable, and not subject to, nor contributing to congestion, and much more pleasant to ride. Heck people with access to a car will often take light rail BY CHOICE (I would if it were available to me here in Las Vegas (*)), you do NOT see that with buses.

The system in the Santa Clara Valley (San Jose, Mountain View, etc) is an excellent example. It made life MUCH easier when I was there for a business trip.

Yes, light rail costs money to build, but so do freeways (which are MUCH more expensive). Light rail gets ALL its costs attributed to it - but the costs of buses are often not attributed to the buses themselves, e.g. increased road building and rebuilding needed to deal with the need for more capacity and wear and tear brought on by buses.

So when light rail is compared to buses in regard to costs - buses have an unfair advantage - since they aren't made to account for the ancillary costs they entail.

(*) In Las Vegas they do have some privately owned systems between casinos (which I use) which are quite nice (albeit limited). In 2004 we will have the Las Vegas monorail system for the resort district.