Transportation Watch
By Casey Miner on Dec 5 2011 - 7:01pm
For more than a year now, BART's board of directors has been discussing whether – and how – the system could stay open later. Right now the trains start their final runs at midnight, leaving many patrons scrambling to catch the last BART home, especially on the weekends. The board had been...
By Julie Caine on Dec 5 2011 - 6:52pm
While BART managers are trying to bring the Bay Area’s rail system into the future, state officials are trying to bring a new train system into existence. High-speed rail is supposed to whisk passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just two and a half hours. It’s a controversial project,...
By Julie Caine on Nov 2 2011 - 11:07am
The California High Speed Rail Authority released a new business plan yesterday outlining a multi-phase strategy for bringing bullet trains to the state. The total pricetag? $98.5 billion. That’s almost three times the original estimate made in 2008 when voters approved a $9 billion bond...
By Molly Samuel on Oct 26 2011 - 5:32pm
Take a quick look around while on Muni, BART, or AC Transit, and you’ll notice that a lot of the people who depend on public transit are seniors. But not all seniors are that comfortable navigating the system. So at ages 70, 80, and 90, as Molly Samuel reports, some seniors are going back to school...
By Julie Caine on Oct 26 2011 - 5:24pm
For many of us, the time we spend riding BART or Muni can be one of the least inspiring parts of the day. It’s a time out of time, spent mostly waiting to be somewhere else. Commuters with headphones snake headphones from ear to ear, eyes focused on smartphones and iPads, or on the pages of books...
By Julie Caine on Oct 18 2011 - 4:25pm
A new amnesty program in California will give people with outstanding traffic tickets a chance to clear their name, and their debt, at a 50 percent discount.
Beginning on January 1st, drivers with unpaid violations, dating from January 2009 or earlier, will have six months to pay up at the reduced...
By Julie Caine on Oct 14 2011 - 1:19pm
In theory, thinning out traffic in carpool lanes should make traffic move faster. But kicking those drivers out of California carpool lanes had exactly the opposite effect, according to a new study by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies.
In July, 85,000 owners of hybrid...
By Julie Caine on Oct 10 2011 - 7:37pm
In local artist Brett Amory’s “Waiting” series of paintings, isolated figures inhabit washed out, spare landscapes—solitary people waiting at bus stops and crosswalks, on BART platforms or at the airport. It’s an ongoing series, focused on themes of anticipation, distraction, and the culture of...
By Julie Caine on Sep 21 2011 - 5:00pm
If you heard that public transportation and on-time rates for buses had steadily increased in over the past ten years, you’d think that was a good thing, right? Not so fast, say a group of Stanford University undergraduates and recent alumni who have created California Common Sense, a non-profit...
By Casey Miner on Sep 8 2011 - 4:37pm
If you’re driving right now, or riding a bus, trolley, taxicab or your bike after a long day at work, your mind might be on the traffic, or what to cook for dinner, or – why won’t that guy turn off his blinker already? But have you ever thought about what’s underneath your wheels? The actual road?...
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