San Francisco's Train (Episode 7 - BART - Part 3)

Following part two, we'll be talking about BART from the impressive Millbrae transfer station, through the dissapointing San Mateo County cities of Daly City and Colma, and of course the impressive Market Street Subway and Transbay Tube heading into Oakland!
Music from Epidemic Sound.
Patreon: / todgod
Discord: / discord
Sources:
gatewayatmillbraestation.com/...
www.ci.millbrae.ca.us/259/Mil...
static1.squarespace.com/stati...
www.sanbruno.ca.gov/DocumentC...
www.macfarlanepartners.com/pr...
www.sanbruno.ca.gov/629/Gener....
www.teamwlrea.com/education/2...
shapessf.com/wp-content/uploa...
www.smcgov.org/media/103926/d...
www.dalycity.org/760/History-...
bridgehousing.com/properties/...
bridgehousing.com/properties/...

[@banksrail]

Part 3!!!🔥🔥🔥

[@todgod]

Banks!!!! Love to see you here bro!

[@TohaBgood2]

Let's go! New TODGod episode! I'm getting the popcorn already!

[@todgod]

Thanks Toha!!

[@hightyd3]

Although its hard to tell, the Daly City Station does have a few things within the walkshed: Cinemark Daly City+ a few other commercial spaces and an office building, also you mentioned West Lake which is not really walkable but lots of people catch Samtrans buses there. There is also the Top of the Hill commercial district on Mission St, which will get your legs pumping on the way up. Lastly the station is very close to the SF border where you can walk over 280 to the little plaza on Alemany. So yeah, wish all those things were right by the station instead of a 15-30 min walk away.

[@todgod]

Daly City has a lot of stuff to offer, just wish it was more accessible on foot!

[@mitchbart4225]

@@todgod The song "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds is about the post-war single-family housing in Daly City built by developer Henry Doelger.

[@todgod]

@@mitchbart4225 No idea! I'll have to check it out

[@timothystamm3200]

Sounds like they need a circulator bus to hit all of those points from the station.

[@jfungsf882]

@@todgod Even though Daly City Station is quite bad in terms of land use, for most days of the week it is a pretty busy well utilized station because of the many good transfer connection to different Muni & Samtrans Bus Routes, but most importantly because of its proximity near SF State (Not walkable from SFSU) where many students take the Muni buses to and from SFSU to get to & from that BART Station.

[@theautistictransitfan]

this man underrated fr

[@todgod]

Appreciate it!

[@TohaBgood2]

Yep. He better get big!

[@stealthninja2058]

You forgot to talk about the SFO station and the air train extension!

[@todgod]

Yeah I was gonna make a note of that. You can’t really have any TOD when it comes to airports so I decided to exclude it, as I found that talking about the Oakland Airport Connector wasn’t really relevant in Part 2

[@kertchu]

@@todgodwith airport stations, you could still talk about how well the station is integrated with the airport

[@Cupertinorail]

Millbrae BART is my go to station on some occasions. With the BART going to Berryessa it now hits different

[@todgod]

It’s so convenient!

[@Mike__B]

Does VTA/ACE not connect well with CalTrain? Seems like San Jose is really missing out by not trying harder to link their local transit to the peninsula corridor via CalTrain. As going to Berryessa from Milbrae via BART seems like an overly long route.

[@ethanchernicoff5750]

@@Mike__B VTA and ACE both connect to Caltrain at San Jose Diridon.

[@Mike__B]

@@ethanchernicoff5750 I thought it might, I don't travel that far south so I didn't know, but it seems like it would a shorter trip to go Caltrain-ACE than it would to take BART all the way around the bay unless the timing was off on the trains connecting at Diridon.

[@arxligion]

looking forward to a future SacRT episode

[@todgod]

Same here! That’s gonna be a fun one to film!

[@teuast]

It does my heart good to see almost 2000 housing units planned for the West Oakland parking lots. That's a blueprint for how to heal the scars left on these communities by freeways. Wish it didn't require damage from earthquakes to get rid of them, maybe then we could get the 580 too.

[@anthonysnyder1152]

A lot of those plans were cancelled when the interest rates and WFH rates rose post-covid

[@SpecialKomrade]

How dare you insult my glorious freeway! Interstate 580 is the greatest Interstate to exist. A beautiful route and helps hilly communities get to work.

[@teuast]

@@SpecialKomrade the 580 sucks ass 🍑 💩

[@SpecialKomrade]

@@teuast for what reason?

[@teuast]

@@SpecialKomrade I’m glad you asked! 1. For the same reasons every freeway sucks ass: huge, polluting with all the adverse health effects associated with it, loud, inefficient for moving people, inefficient use of land, spurs the kind of car dependent development that makes for shitty towns like Dublin and Pleasanton. 2. Slices right through the middle of downtown Oakland and was built there to cut a major black community in half. Makes Oakland immeasurably worse as a result. 3. Has Bart running down the middle of it from Castro Valley and heavily reduces Bart’s usefulness in the area, as well as TOD possibilities in Castro Valley, Dublin, and Pleasanton. In short, it sucks ass and we should get rid of it and replace it with more rail infrastructure.

[@tventures2]

balboa park is a childhood station of mine. i’ve always loved how unique it is, inside and out! it’s looks a bit different now, but for good reasons!!!

[@maddonhoh-choi9640]

Excited to watch!! We love TOD GOD.

[@todgod]

Love you too 🫶🏼

[@user-fd1qi2hp4t]

Great stuff

[@todgod]

Thank you!

[@valimback5109]

And I think it’s still to expect to extend the lines and some areas in the bay area

[@todgod]

Check back in the last episode ;) I’ll be covering all of that

[@jfungsf882]

Great video!😉👍💯 A few things, from my understanding the Tanforan Mall in San Bruno is slated to permanently close in the future. A real estate firm bought the land and will redevelop it into a biotech office of some sort as well as other mixed use proposals though the Target and the movie theater will still remain somewhere. Secondly, I should note that Glen Park Station has a small parking lot across the street and is the only BART Station in San Francisco to have a parking lot. Hopefully one day that will get redeveloped as it is such prime land for mixed use residential in that neighborhood.

[@shubdotclub]

Powell best station 🙏🙏 has two perpendicular muni line connections, access to a mall (and some great Pakistani food in that food court) and also where most sf Bart events are held ! Also interesting thing to note is that Embarcadero is an infill station and wasn’t originally part of the Bart plan, you can tell how it’s designed differently than the other underground Bart stations under market Also 8:50 you used footage of 16th street and Valencia not 24th street

[@todgod]

Yeah I’ve been to that Pakistani spot before in Westfield!! It was so good!

[@noodlenomnom6746]

Yessss time to miss home.

[@TimR123]

I don't disagree with your thoughts that TOD is better going forward for those stations in the north peninsula. But understand that that parking capacity was oversubscribed before Covid. Huge usage of people driving up the peninsula, leaving their cars there to complete the commute into the City. You had to either have a reserved spot or get there before 7 to find a spot. This did serve a purpose of getting people out of cars for at least the dense part of the commute that is well served by transit. Now, going forward... Who knows. Will downtown commuting return or will these communities become more TOD first? No idea.

[@griffin3607]

you can still build underground or parking further away but the 1/4-1/2 mile around a station should be a destination as much as it is a way to get to work

[@Mike__B]

Yeah which way things are going to go is a tough read, how long out are we from the pandemic and weekday ridership numbers still are floating between 35-45% of what they were pre-pandemic. Granted as someone who takes BART to work (Glen Park to Lake Merritt) every day I love the cars that are less crowded, however me not liking crowd doesn't exactly help push transit forward.

[@ljrobinson9698]

Hey TODGod! Do you happen to know anything about North Valley Rail, by chance? It's a proposal in Norcal that is supposed to connect Natomas/Sac Airport to Chico. IDK if you ever plan to make videos on systems that don't even exist yet, but if you plan on it, then it's a cool topic! I live further north in the Redding area and my DREAM would be a rail connection from here to Sac or even up north into Oregon.

[@todgod]

I’ve never heard about this before! I’d love to do a vid on it when more about it becomes available in the future!

[@dymsza]

Can you do episode on SF Van Ness BRT ? there is not good reporting on it at all.

[@SlackActionBumble]

How do you reconcile your ( occasionally quite justified) criticism of Park and Ride Lots with the fact that some people living in the outer suburbs need those to have the option of taking Transit instead of driving all the way to the city and causing even more crowding and pollution? Is there some kind of an acceptable compromise that maximizes overall Transit use? Maybe underground parking lots with retail on top?

[@timothystamm3200]

There should be regional transit that can reliably get them there. Like the Caltrain extension, or making the ACE and Capitol Corridor much more frequent. Also, add busses and European style right of way trams to the outer areas to make that work better.

[@SlackActionBumble]

@timothystamm3200 Realistically speaking, that won't be happening for every single family low density suburban section of Bay Area (and those area aren't going anywhere) Besides, transit is about giving people a superior choice and winning them over away from cars, right? Well, it's just a fact of life that: for most affluent suburbanites a fast and comfortable train with a park-n-ride might be a viable choice, but a slow and bumpy bus is an absolute non-starter. Basically... by waging war on any car/transit interface, you are not magically "fixing" car dependency. You're just creating more miles driven and pushing the car problem into other areas.

[@timothystamm3200]

@@SlackActionBumble but the car transit interface can be moved out of being just outside of San Francisco.

[@SlackActionBumble]

@@timothystamm3200 Yeah, that's fair for places like Daly City. It's got a huge garage because it used to be the end of the line.

[@Mike__B]

​@@SlackActionBumble Every peninsula station outside of San Francisco has a huge garage because they are suburban cities, period, and all the TOD in the world isn't going to change that because even using Millbrae as a "shining" example of what to do, the other 99.9% of the city's residents don't live near by. And sure one can argue "there should be regional transit ..." bottom line is there isn't. In Millbrae outside of one line that runs north/south down El Camino, with a 30 minute schedule I might add, there are literally zero buses anywhere else in the city, click on one of the homes in google maps and get transit directions to the BART station, it literally tells you to walk there.

[@combusean]

It's funny this is the way you chose to describe BART when they would probably have none of it. Their social media and marketing teams have definitely elicited that they're East Bay folks where the bulk of their service area is anyways.

[@realadrieno]

Hot take: Bart should be extended south along the median of 101 down to santa clara, would provide really great service to all the sprawling corporate campuses off of the freeway (like google)

[@TohaBgood2]

100% this! It just makes so much sense! But I don't know that it's such a controversial take though. A ton of people support it. The Four Foot channel advocated for it too. And I'm sure that we could brainwash Alan Fisher into supporting it if we badger him enough about it. Soooooooo much development along that highway. Normally, highway median lines don't work, but this thing is a massive exception with how much higher-density housing and office development the NIMBY peninsula cities pushed to that highway. Ironically, they teed this line up perfectly in their rabid NIMBYism.

[@anthonysnyder1152]

It would parallel Caltrain though, since Caltrain is less than a quarter mile from the highway. I think the peninsula cities should just invest in stronger bus transit (even 15 min headways would be useful, rather than 1-2 hours… it’s awful), cycling/walking routes and a city the size of San Mateo should at least have 1-2 light rail lines that intersect with the 3 Caltrain stations in the city. BART running to San Mateo county doesn’t make sense since Caltrain can’t even pull their pre- Covid numbers which was only 70k at its peak… to have metro headways and ridership you need to be able to attract no less than 5k riders per station to justify its existence. BART can’t even get more than 3k per day on many of the peninsula and east bay suburban routes. Majority of the ridership is still coming from Oakland/Berkeley/SF. Those stations alone are subsidizing the rest of the system that aren’t pulling their weight.

[@realadrieno]

@@TohaBgood2yess let’s get alan fisher to talk about it

[@realadrieno]

@@anthonysnyder1152i honestly think mountain view should have more light rail lines going between caltrain and the office parks. The one vta line isn’t rly enough tbh

[@TohaBgood2]

@@anthonysnyder1152 The reality is that people don't like busses and bus connections. A direct rail link right to the office parks along the 101 will gain a lot more ridership than the current model of Caltrain+bus/shuttle. Caltrain has it's own ecosystem of tech companies that are moving their offices next to the stations. As those grow so will Caltrain's ridership. But all the people who work in the offices along that highway will keep driving until you put BART right under their noses. If you've ever talked to one of those tech commuters, unless they can walk from the Caltrain station to their office they're not taking the train. That's just the reality of the situation. A slow bus transfer adds 30-50% more time to your commute. That's just too hard of a sell vs Caltrain or BART to the doorstep which is faster than driving to work 70-80% of the time.

[@Mike__B]

Something maybe worth mentioning is how that ground level retail is absolute dying in San Francisco ... dying is probably not quite the correct term, it's being murdered by shoplifting. And you can buy all sort of those stolen goods (and those stolen by car break ins) just outside both the 16th and 24th street stations, while BART has taken measures to move people out of the plaza area selling they still sell along Mission between those two stations. Now I get it, this isn't BARTs fault at all, but I feel it really detracts from any benefits of building around BART stations. It's the type of urbanism that people do not want, but what inevitably comes with being an urban area as these things are not seen near the suburban stations. That said, I hop on at Glen Park to go to work in Oakland, I don't live in Glen Park, but it is the most convenient station for me to get to from my home. I do hope BART really works on getting their new fare gates out though, as there's a little too much "urbanism" on BART trains at time.

[@physh]

Saying "San Francisco cares about urbanism" is a HUGE stretch.

[@TohaBgood2]

Lol, how so? It's only second to NYC in terms of urbanism on the continent.

[@physh]

@@TohaBgood2 We'll have to define "urbanism" here... SF has a lot of truly awful suburb-like sprawly neighborhoods with mediocre housing stock and absolutely nothing for blocks on end, and above all its government is completely anti-housing, anti-density, and anti-bikes (see the Valencia st. bike lane fiasco).

[@TohaBgood2]

@@physh Dude, what are you talking about? Even SF's "worst" residential neighborhoods are muuuuuuuuch denser than any type of 1950s American suburbia. All of SF consists of streetcar suburbs that are both denser and more livable than regular suburbia. And all of those neighborhoods, even the more "suburban" ones have super-high-quality transit with a transit line running on every other street. Where are you getting this nonsense from? What neighborhood in SF has "mediocre housing and absolutely nothing for blocks on end"? Tell me the exact cross streets.

[@todgod]

It does, I think, generally. Compared to most other American cities, at least. Then again it’s not a high bar. That’s just my opinion

[@stevens1041]

People need to stop projecting their Cyberpunk fantasies onto San Francisco. Its the second densest city in North America. So many comments online always insulting the city of SF because it didn't go full Hong Kong. Very few places have built as much infill development in the last 40 years as SF. This process continues uninterrupted, but for some weird reason, transit nerds online aren't satisfied.