BART Strike Provides Lessons for Creating a Resilient Bay Area

"For a group like SPUR — one that works to promote transit, walking and biking as primary forms of mobility — there’s no question that a transit strike is a major setback. It instills in people the sense, consciously or unconsciously, that they cannot count on transit being there when they need it."

But with auto demand on highway links like the Bay Bridge already exceeding capacity, say Gabriel Metcalf and Ratna Amin, the need for reliable public transit is significant, and growing.  

"Assuming we are not going to add more road capacity on these corridors, we actually need transit to carry significantly more people each year than it did the year before," note the authors, who outline four important lessons for the Bay Area's broader transit agenda:

1. The Need for Redundancy
2. Transportation Requires Communication
3. The Benefits of Workplace Flexibility
4. The Need for Complete Communities