The northern terminus of SMART, the new light rail system officially opening this weekend in the North Bay, is the Sonoma County Airport Station in Santa Rosa. But after my 8-year-old son and I disembarked from an Alaska Airlines flight, we learned that the airport is more than a mile away from the train.

We didn’t know how to bridge this transportation gap. My son wasn’t up for a long walk. There is as yet no shuttle from plane to train. The public bus that would take us in the train’s direction didn’t show up on time. Uber wasn’t picking up at the airport. My Lyft app kept crashing. And the four cabbies parked outside the airport all refused to take us, saying they didn’t want to give up their place in line for such a short, cheap trip.

The Bay Area is the richest large metropolitan region on the planet because of the ability of its people and institutions to connect with each other and the larger world. But if you need to make transit connections in the Bay Area, good luck.

Inspired by the soft launch of SMART—the 43-mile Sonoma and Marin County light rail has offered preview rides for months—I recently spent three days navigating the Bay Area without a car. And so I experienced beautiful rides on trains, ferries, subways, and buses. But I was also bewildered by the utter failure of a place that’s famous for integrating culture and technology to integrate its own infrastructure and transportation.

For all its global clout, the Bay Area remains, at the local level, a fragmented mess of nine counties, 101 municipalities, and hundreds of government districts.

“The counties grew up separately, and so we’re stuck with a mishmash of agencies and of transportation,” says Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council. “I don’t think this is sustainable anymore.”

After waiting 40 minutes at Sonoma County Airport, we called a new cab, which took us the 1.2 miles to the train station for $10. The new SMART trains might have been comfortable if they weren’t so jammed. My skinny son squeezed into a tiny spot between a seat and a bike rack. I stood in a mass of people near the front of the car. The first 43-mile segment of what promises to be a 70-mile train runs from the not-quite-airport station to downtown San Rafael. Given the distance and the length of the rides—more than an hour—the trains offer bathrooms and a café that sells wine. This is Sonoma after all.

The ride south took 90 minutes and offered a grittier view of Sonoma and Marin Counties—mobile home parks, big empty parking lots, old industrial properties (all of which could be used to build housing, but that’s another story)—as well as views of the Petaluma River, Mt. Tamalpais, and even Mt. Diablo.

The SMART train is eventually supposed to reach the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, from where it’s a 35-minute boat ride to San Francisco. But the first segment ends two miles short of the ferry. There’s a bike path to the terminal that’s walkable, and a bus station in San Rafael that can get you to the ferry, but that bus ride takes between 14 and 26 minutes. We wanted to get there faster and opted for an Uber.

The ferry, which left 10 minutes late, entered the bay next to San Quentin Prison; inmates waved at the boat. It was a clear day and so we enjoyed views of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Once at the Ferry Building, I kept my son happy with soft serve ice cream from Gott’s.

After two hours of interviews for other stories, we found ourselves at the BART Embarcadero Station in San Francisco, eager to get to the Oakland Airport and fly home. But the first six trains were too full to board. This wasn’t a surprise. BART is a system built for 60,000 riders that moves more than 400,000 daily. The system badly needs more and newer cars, better maintenance, governance that isn’t dominated by unions, and a second tunnel under the bay.

When the seventh train arrived, we couldn’t wait any longer, and pushed our way in. “That’s rude,” said one rider.

“We’re from L.A.,” I replied.

We made the flight, but with significant sticker shock. The six-station ride from San Francisco to Oakland’s Coliseum Station, from which a tram takes you into the airport, cost $10.20 each. Add that to my $11.50 ferry ticket (my son’s was $5.75), the $9 Uber ride to the ferry, the $11.50 one-way fare on SMART, and $10 for the airport cab ride, our journey was pushing $70.

In Los Angeles, I pay just $1.75 to board a Metro train, and all transfers are free for two hours. In the Bay Area, even public transit is pricey.

A couple of days later, I flew back to Oakland for another expensive and overcrowded BART ride, this one into San Francisco. After switching to the local Muni system, I arrived late to an appointment because of a train breakdown.

Later, I found myself at BART’s Powell Street station, needing to get to San Jose, a city that BART doesn’t quite reach (though an extension should be complete next year). I needed to take the Caltrain, but how to get there? BART and Caltrain share a station in Millbrae, but the schedules aren’t synchronized, meaning I could wait for 45 minutes. So, carrying luggage, I did a 25-minute walk to the Caltrain station at 4th and King, where I purchased a one-way $9.75 ticket to San Jose.

In San Jose, I disembarked at Diridon Station, which may have a bright future as northern terminus of high-speed rail. But for now, it is just another setting for connection frustration, as I waited a half-hour for a light rail train on Santa Clara County’s VTA system. I contemplated getting on ACE, a railway connecting San Jose with Stockton, but the limited schedule meant there was no return train until morning.

The next day, I needed to get to San Jose Airport, and so I took Caltrain to the Santa Clara Station, which is close to the airport and offers a VTA bus shuttle. But the bus driver refused to open the bus door for passengers for 15 minutes, even during a brief squall of rain. The station is only five minutes from the airport, but the shuttle took us on a meandering route that included a stop at San Jose’s pro soccer stadium.

Here’s what gets forgotten in this crazy quilt of disconnected systems: the people riding them. No wonder that for all the different transit offered in the Bay Area, a relatively small share of residents (less than one-third) actually use it.

If the Bay Area is ever going to resemble the design-savvy ecotopia it purports to be, it will need to get majorities of its people on its trains and buses. And that will require combining operations and linking schedules of these different systems. As any good Silicon Valley company knows, any service—from public transit to email—requires that the user have faith that the system will work, that it will be affordable, and that it won’t drop you off a mile from the next station, or be a half-hour late, or offer trains so full you can’t get on them.

Right now, using Bay Area transit makes you feel powerless. And that should be unacceptable in California’s most powerful region.

The post Connect the World? The Bay Area Can’t Even Connect Its Trains appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Phoenix voters recently approved a transportation tax hike that should provide decades of funding for new light rail lines. Dallas has more miles of light rail than any other city in the country. Los Angeles’s rapidly expanding light rail system has more riders per day—far more—than any other city in the nation except Boston.

Houston carries more light rail riders per mile—the typical measure of success—than any other place except for Boston and San Francisco. Meanwhile, Denver is building a light rail system second only to L.A. in size and breadth, and it’s renovating its historic downtown train station in the process.

Such growth follows the success of mature light rail systems in Portland and San Diego—each of which carry more than 100,000 riders per day—and the surprise hit of light rails, Salt Lake City. And almost all of these cities have built, or are building, light rail connections to their major airports.

What explains all this construction, especially in the traditionally auto-oriented South and West?

The short answer: Light rail is a lot faster than a bus, but doesn’t cost nearly as much to build as a subway.

“Light rail” is a broad term that means a passenger rail system with tram-style cars—as opposed to “heavy rail” subways, as in New York and Washington, D.C.—that runs on its own right of way, usually at street level. Light rail cars typically run at 30 to 40 miles per hour at top speed, much less than a heavy rail subway.

In many cities, the building of light rail lines represents only one aspect of broader efforts to solve the public transportation puzzle. Cities are increasingly connecting light rail lines with major nodes of activity and other transportation modes such as expanded express bus services or bike lanes. Phoenix’s light rail connects downtown with Arizona State University in Tempe and Sky Harbor Airport. Charlotte has a light rail system and is now adding a streetcar. Atlanta and Miami have traditional heavy rail transit systems but are investing in other technologies such as streetcars and bus rapid transit. Las Vegas has a monorail along the Strip but is talking about a rail line to the airport.

These trends are even causing some cities to rethink huge parts of their urban environment. Dallas built a cap over a depressed section of a freeway and used the space to build the popular Klyde Warren Park. Houston is talking about tearing down a stretch of freeway on the edge of its downtown.

So is the Sun Belt giving up on cars? Hardly. Most people who live in Sun Belt suburbs still have no choice but to travel by car—and all the major Sun Belt cities are planning major freeway construction or expansion. But something else is happening simultaneously. Major urban areas in the Sun Belt are experiencing new and growing demand for housing and activities in their cores. This influx of downtown residents has forced leaders in most cities to change the way they think about their city’s streets and transit system.

Light rail can serve urban residents better than commuter rail and express bus services, which focus on shuttling commuters from the suburbs into urban job centers.
And well-designed light rail systems can be catalysts for the development of denser, more walkable and bicycle-friendly neighborhoods. Since rails require a much smaller footprint than roads, cities have found new space during construction of light rail to improve sidewalks, add bikeways, and create car-free public spaces.

Even in cities like Houston, where local land-use laws and custom have made local government and the transit agency hesitant to directly influence redevelopment, construction has begun to pick up as property owners have finally made land near stations available for new construction. Along the most established section of the city’s Red Line, between downtown Houston and the Texas Medical Center, several new apartment buildings, restaurants, cultural institutions, and mixed-use developments are slated to open in the next year.

Light rail systems have their detractors, who argue that buses can carry people more cheaply, or that light rail investment shouldn’t be used to fuel real estate speculation. Still others say all transportation money should be invested in roads because most people drive most places.

While buses are more flexible, a bus rapid transit line on a separate right-of-way costs almost as much as a light rail line, and the ride isn’t nearly as comfortable. Moreover, all transportation investments fuel real estate investment; that’s why there’s a gas station and a 7-11 at every freeway exit. Light rail lines have the ability to concentrate investment in efficient urban locations. And light rail lines can expand transportation capacity in a crowded urban location at a much lower cost than new roads because their smaller footprint requires less disruptive construction.

There are obvious limits to what light rail and other forms of transit can do for cities that are as spread out as Sun Belt metropolises. But, rather than focusing on the conflict between highways and transit, it’s more important to focus on how to weave these elements together to create the best possible transportation systems. Roads and rail are just different parts of networks which, if built cohesively, can provide interconnected, intermodal mobility in the urban cores and the peripheries of even the most sprawling metros.

That’s the mindset with which people in Sun Belt cities are approaching rail. At the same time that L.A. is expanding its light rail lines, Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed a new strategy to repurpose boulevards around the city and areas along the L.A. River into pedestrian- and bike-friendly spaces. And as Houston expanded two light rail lines this summer, it completely revamped its bus routes, vastly increasing transit accessibility for hundreds of thousands of residents at no additional cost. Salt Lake City and other Utah municipalities are taking an innovative regional approach to transportation by jointly building a system that combines regional highways, rail, streetcars, and bus rapid transit—buses that run at least partly on their own rights of way.

If you look carefully at the auto-bound cities of the South and West, you’ll see that leaders and residents are considering metro transportation networks that serve drivers, riders, and walkers all at the same time, whether they are crossing their metropolis or trying to organize their lives around a defined area within it.

No wonder there is so much laying down of tracks, and so much support for it.

The post Why Car-Crazy Cities Are Now Riding the Rails appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Part subway, part bus, the Orange Line is a mutant in the world of public transportation that runs a 14-mile route from Warner Center to North Hollywood. It’s a bus, all right. It lugs 60 or so passengers at a time to and from the Valley in its longer-than-usual belly. But it’s also a subway, gussied up in silver and gray like all Metro trains, and named after the Valley’s former carpet of citrus trees. Like all subway cars gunning their engines with impunity, it coasts on its own dedicated road, unrestrained by the traffic that chokes the regular lanes.

So if the Orange Line is a chimera of transportation, that makes me one of the brave adventurers willing to ride the beast. But it doesn’t take much courage to ride–in fact, the experience is much more pleasant than either a subway or a bus, not to mention my car. Unlike subway cars that ride in the deep, dark wombs of the city, the Orange Line sails along in the sunshine. If I’m lucky enough to get a window seat, I can see the cars stop and start alongside the bus, hampered by traffic lights as we cruise. As the bus coasts from one stop to the next, I see the trees from nearby Lake Balboa Park and joggers and bikers making their way in the morning sun.

Often, I ride the bus alone on the way downtown to interview someone for a story or to come in for my part-time job. (I’d rather not find parking, thank you). A petite, non-threatening woman with an evidently friendly disposition, I often become a prime target for casual conversation. Sometimes, it’s eye-opening, like when a fellow passenger told me about the post-production house that exists just to turn 2D movies into 3D; other times, not so much. On the Orange Line, where almost everyone is heading toward the Red Line terminus in North Hollywood to switch to a downtown-bound train, people often are in for a lengthy ride.

On my half-hour ride I’ve come across a woman reading my magazine over my shoulder (she works for L.A. Mart downtown), a man happy to give me tips on how to buy a foldable bike (he proudly showed off his own) and a woman who must have been a preacher in a past life.

I met the last character while jostling for a seat on the bus. She was a large African-American woman, dressed in an all black jogging suit. On her lap was an open notebook–perhaps a journal. She seemed engrossed in her thoughts. Her head pivoted back and forth from the window to her notebook, in turns musing and writing, I suppose. Seeing no other place to sit, I asked her, “Is this seat taken?” To which she replied, squeezing her large frame closer to the window, “Of course not, cher. You don’t even have to ask.”

As we rode, she scribbled notes her weathered notebook. Then she flipped her phone open and began what a conversation that would last the whole ride. “I just realized I need my life to change …” she related to the stranger on the other line.

She then proceeded to talk in Oprah-esque sound bites. “I feel the need to change my life. I have so much to give inside me.” I wondered if I had inadvertently sat beside an all-too-common muttering lunatic, but as I surreptitiously listened to her gospel I did start to see sense in her madness. “Everybody’s arguing. Everyone’s protecting their own piece of the pie. Nobody gets it, but we’re all just people living in one world.”

As she said those words, I averted my gaze from her and rested my eyes on the busload of people squeezing this way and that, all trying to get somewhere. I thought, “She isn’t so crazy after all.” Ensconced as we all were within the confines of the silver-grey bus, we were all part of the bigger picture–a picture all too easy to lose sight of in the age of getting what we want, how we want it, when we want it. It’s even easier to forget my own relationship to the whole when I’m zipping in and out of freeway lanes alone in my car.

A ride on the bus for me is many things. On the Orange Line, it can be a ride through history itself, as the lumbering bus travels over the same roads the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Electric Red Car once did. It can be a reminder of how inextricably tied we all are to each other, as the woman taught me, or it can simply be a time for quiet reflection on the way home after a long day.

As I made my way home from work on a westbound Orange Line one evening, it seemed as though the bus was chasing the setting sun. I had the perfect seat to see the sky turn from velvety blue to dark purple tinged with orange and pink, then a deep black blue hue interrupted by winking stars. It’s unexpected inspirations–like wannabe-Oprah’s surprising wisdom or that  rich tapestry of colors during the sunset–that make me glad I hadn’t taken my car. I might have been home in a fraction of the time, but I would have missed the world around me.

Carren Jao is a freelance art, architecture and design writer based in Los Angeles.

*Photo by Carren Jao.

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