The Bay Area's Traffic Apocalypse

Today a funny thing happened. For reasons yet unknown, about 2:15 am a fire broke out--perhaps because of metal theft--in a building under construction in West Oakland. As amazing as it seems, real estate is so precious that new buildings are going up in the shadow of transit tracks, and proximity of this fire damaged the electrified "third rail" of the BART system. The nightmare scenario happened: All trains leading into San Francisco were shut down for the morning.

The BART system was created the 1970s to serve a much smaller population. Since that time, the Bay Area's population has greatly increased, both in numbers and in geographic distribution. The serpentine Washington Metro--which in many ways borrowed ideas from BART--is designed so that one is never more than a brisk walk from a nearby station. But BART runs only in narrow corridors, far away from large population centers, so that commuters must in many cases drive several miles just to fight for a scarce parking space at a BART station. At many stations, all available parking is consumed by 7 am. (This hardly seems designed to encourage people to get out of their cars.) Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of commuters use this system daily, especially using the transbay tube to get to San Francisco from the East Bay.

Today that route was unexpectedly shut down.

Here are some of the things that resulted:

• Gridlock. Very quickly, all freeways leading to the Bay Bridge became virtual parking lots. Mornings are often difficult near the snarl of 4 freeways merging into one in the lead-up to the Bay Bridge toll plaza, but those "red" delay today became thick "black"
• Accidents. In the middle of this snarl, it was inevitable that cars would break down and accidents would happen. A motorcycle accident on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge added to the misery and the delays; cars queued to pay the $5 fine to enter the Bay Bridge sat for many minutes at a time without moving
• Bus shortages. Buses tried to fill the gap and accommodate commuters. But they filled up so quickly in earlier stops that people waiting to get on a transbay bus found that the buses were jam-packed and didn't even stop. People waited in lines around the block for buses that would not stop
• Ferries jammed. The ferry system seemed like a good idea to many people--so many, in fact, that the boats were quickly filled, and parking at ferry stations became impossible. 

The reason we should think about these problems is the geology of the Bay Area. Someday soon, certainly within the next thirty years, an earthquake on the Hayward fault will damage BART to such an extent that it will be completely shut down. According to BART experts, the system will be off-line for a minimum of 2-3 years--and perhaps several years longer if the rebuilt BART infrastructure is to upgraded to higher earthquake standards.

In other words, today is but a tiny taste of the future post-quake Bay Area commuting. We are going to lose BART soon, and not for one day but for years.

One of the frustrated commuters interviewed by morning news stations pointed out that the transit system seemed to have no "Plan B." They don't.

There is no Plan B when a major artery such as BART is closed. There are no legions of empty buses and ferries waiting to be pressed into service. There are no extra drivers and pilots at the ready. There is no excess capacity on freeways to handle an instantaneous doubling of the traffic. There are no alternate parking lots for commuters to park in order to use alternate routes. There is no plan at all.

Everything, everywhere is completely overwhelmed on a daily basis by the population crush. The traffic arteries of the Bay Area resemble someone with severe heart blockages; the slightest problem, the slightest strain throws the whole system into crisis.

It didn't have to be this way. The expansion of the Bay Area's population could have been managed and planned in a rational way. We could have avoided the crazy freeway system, which seems designed to produce regular, unnecessary backups (why, for example, does someone wanting to go from Richmond to Fremont have to deal with the same traffic as those trying to get on the Bay Bridge to San Francisco?). But instead we've chosen to spread authority over a Holy Roman Empire of competing, antagonistic jurisdictions who cannot agree on something as simple as whether BART should go to all airports. No one is in charge--and no one can be blamed. And what he have today is the result of this unplanned, undesigned chaos. And one day soon, it's going to be much worse.