Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 34.1
San Francisco: reinvestment in urban rail to combat road congestion
San Francisco was the first major North American city to
recognise that continued investment in urban freeways
was not an effective answer to road congestion, and the
opening in 1972 of a new rail rapid transit system initiated
a period of public transport renewal and revival that has
spread to other metropolitan centres in the United States
and Europe. The city core of San Francisco-Oakland and
the peripheral suburbs around the Bay are
interconnected by a freeway network that suffers from
increasing levels of congestion, particularly on the Bay
Bridge, where cars and buses compete for space at peak
hours. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is an urban
rail network designed to attract commuters away from
their cars, and it was estimated at the initial planning
stage in 1967 that the new facility would carry 253,000
daily travellers (Figure 34.2). Two years after opening,
however, the total was only 126,500, and it was not until
1993 that the forecast level of passengers was achieved.
Difficulties in operating trains at high frequencies and
coordinating bus services with BART timetables were
partly responsible for the low usage in the first decade,
but even after twenty-five years the effect of BART upon
the city transportation system has been limited. At Bay
Bridge, the peak congestion location, rail has replaced
commuter bus services, but at the cost of encouraging
more car traffic, and accessibility levels have only been
substantially enhanced by BART in the central business
district and in the East Bay suburbs. Experience of BART
has shown that as more commuters use the system, with
its suburban carparks, so highways become less
congested and encourage other carborne commuters to
use them. The rail network has had little effect upon
residential patterns, and whereas in 1970 about 40 per
cent of the Bay area's 1.8 million workers lived in the
BART-served zone, by 1990 only 33.8 per cent of the 3.02
million workers had elected to reside in this zone. Despite
the failure of BART to make the expected impact upon
San Francisco's travelling patterns, it can be regarded as
the pioneer initiative in the current phase of urban public
transport renewal, and it is significant in the contemporary
context of environmental concern that the reduction of
traffic-induced air pollution and energy, as represented by
wasteful consumption of car fuels, were two of the major
aims of the original BART project (Fielding 1995).
Figure 34.2
The San Francisco
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
system.
