As news reports indicate, the recent BART strike made a mess out of the Bay Area's morning and evening commutes. For planning think tank SPUR, it has helped to illustrate significant gaps in the region's transportation infrastructure.
"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:
- The Need for Redundancy
- Transportation Requires Communication
- The Benefits of Workplace Flexibility
- The Need for Complete Communities
Read the full story: What the BART Strike Means for the Regional Transit Agenda
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Same drill, round two. After almost a month of apparently fruitless negotiations, the unions gave a 72-hour notice of going on strike. Unless an agreement is reached, 200,000 Bay Area rail riders will need to find alternatives for the Monday commute
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