The agency is allocating $12.2 million to help AC Transit and WestCAT purchase seven double-decker buses, which WestCAT General Manager Charles Anderson said will add more than 20 seats on each bus, a roughly 40 percent increase. So, most of MTC’s short-term solutions focus on adding capacity on buses and ferries and making it easier for buses to get through the toll plaza.
There’s not much BART can do to add capacity in the short term, said Ellen Smith, its manager of strategic planning. “We have a long-term problem in that we need to have more service and we need to have the operating money to do that,” Connolly said. After that, if nothing else happens, the agency will have to cut back its newly expanded service, he said. The MTC is spending $2.5 million so WETA can maintain its more frequent summer service in Alameda, Oakland and Vallejo all year round, though Connolly cautioned the money will only last through 2017. Kevin Connolly, the Water Emergency Transportation Authority’s manager of planning and development, said the ferry agency recorded around 10,000 riders per day in June, a 30 percent increase over June last year, the agency’s previous record. Transit ridership, which includes BART, bus and ferry service, increased 42 percent between 20, though bus and ferry officials say they have yet to satisfy demand. Between 20, jobs in San Francisco grew by 25 percent, and 41 percent of downtown San Francisco’s estimated 353,000 employees in 2013 were commuting from the East Bay, according to the MTC. Still, Jerabek said he looks at the number of cranes going up in San Francisco, and it makes him nervous about his future commute prospects. For someone who has kids, it’s a whole different situation.”
“So, I just adjusted my personal life around the bridge, but I don’t have kids. “I get up earlier and go to bed sooner, but I pick up the 35 to 40 minutes sitting in traffic,” Jerabek said. Take Oakland resident Don Jerabek, who says he crosses the bridge around 5:15 a.m. It’s already commonplace for commuters to plan their lives around Bay Bridge congestion. It’s also one of the most congested corridors in the Bay Area and, if left unchecked, could seriously hamper prospects for sustained growth, said Michael Cunningham, the Bay Area Council’s senior vice president of public policy.Ĭompany executives are keenly aware of this economic Achilles’ heel, and while Cunningham said he’s seen the Bay Area go through several peaks and troughs, never before has anxiety over worsening congestion been more acute. “We have a real proposal to use real money to help people on that very congested corridor.”Įvery weekday, more than a quarter of a million people cross the Bay Bridge, what regional leaders call the single most important transportation artery in the region, pumping hundreds of thousands of people straight into the heart of the Bay Area’s economy. “We’re trying to do some quick and easy things that we know are effective, and we want to make that permanent,” said Randy Rentschler, MTC’s director of legislation and public affairs. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s plan focuses on solutions that can begin serving commuters within the next several years - everything from double-decker buses and designated carpool pickup areas, to more ferry service and bus and high-occupany vehicle-only lanes approaching the bridge, to better HOV enforcement technology and more commuter parking lots.īut regional transportation planners say significant increases in capacity won’t come without serious investments in additional infrastructure - the largest and most complicated of which could be a second transbay rail crossing. With buses, BART, ferries and travel lanes all clogged along the Bay Bridge corridor, Bay Area transportation officials are hoping a $40 million suite of programs, approved Wednesday, can offer commuters some short-term relief.
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