Collapsed bridges in San Francisco Bay Area

You would think that with this tragedy (that fortunately killed no one that we know of), Bay Area transit leaders would start thinking about how to do things better. But no, instead of actually dealing with some of the ridiculousness that has existed in the Bay Area for years, we just hide it under the carpet again.

Case in point. One of my oldest pet peeves in San Francisco is Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), a train system that runs throughout a good deal of the Bay Area. If you're advocating rapid transit rather than cars, this should be the most logical way of pushing this agenda. Instead, this organization is run by people who have no concept of how to make it more attractive to the public, which is why we have so many damn cars running the commutes every day. An example: When the Bay Bridge leaders decided to raise the price of the toll on the bridge by a dollar, BART, which was being targeted as something that could fix the commute, decided to raise its fares the same day. Right now, if you don't work a very lucrative job in San Francisco, taking BART every day is prohibitive. Parking is practically impossible to find so that you can park and ride it. And they don't run enough trains to handle the influx of more customers.

So, the Bay Area has a traffic meltdown the other day, and this should get people to start thinking about how to create an alternative traffic flow that DOES NOT INVOLVE ADDING MORE CARS TO THE ROAD. Instead, I recently heard that a solution is to raise tolls, and possibly the price of BART.

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