A Failing Grade for the MTC (Organizational Skills)

As I wroter earlier, the Department of Transportation wants to know how good a job our Metropolitan Transportation Commission is doing, and is accepting citizens' input by email at cert.review@fhwa.dot.gov. Here's my response:

If the MTC were doing a good job of organizing transit in the Bay Area, I wouldn't need to know how many transit agencies there were, or which were responsible for which lines.

Today, if I want to travel beyond my own county, or make any transfer between transit modes,

• I will have to spend a lot of time researching schedules before I begin.
• I have to buy a pay a new ticket for each leg.
• I will probably waste a lot of time waiting for connections.

If the MTC were doing it's job well

• There would be one, clear map and timetable of all major transit routes.
• There would be a fare system (perhaps dividing the region into zones) giving access to all systems with one ticket.
• Schedules would be coordinated for timed transfers.

The MTC is not totally ignorant of these problems, but the only solutions it seems capable of imagining are ones that add more complexity to a broken system, rather than actual fixes. They have sunk $150 million into TransLink, a farecard system which may (someday) allow riders to transfer between systems without literally digging through their pockets for change, but still requires multiple fares to be paid. They have built an online trip planner--whose main utility is in documenting just how poorly coordinated our region's transit is, through the onerous itineraries it provides--but are incapable of printing a simple, unified, regional map.

Cool Bus

A SamTrans bus, seen at Sequoia Station:

Complain and Maybe Someone will Listen

First of all, thank you to the Mountain View Voice for printing a (slightly toned-down version of) my post lamenting Democrats' collusion with the Governor to strip transit funding (original blog post is here, letter in online edition of the Voice is here).

But perhaps it would be better to tell them directly. You can find out who your state representatives are, and their email addresses, at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/yourleg.html.

Transit riders need to start acting like an interest group, and advocating for our needs, and not taking crap anymore!

Redwood City to Mountain View--Via Fremont!

I ascended the Dumbarton Bridge by bike again, and pushed on to the other side.

Looking down, I noticed that the eastern stub of the original highway bridge is open as as a fishing pier.

On the Fremont side of the bridge, the bike path goes past baylands and sloughs.

What looked at first like an old-fashioned riverboat turned out to be a dredger, I think.

The bike path connects with Thornton Blvd. I passed this interesting agricultural remnant, which I think was once a pump house with a water tank on top.

Thornton leads almost directly to Fremont Centerville Station.

At Centerville Station, you can get on both Amtrak Capitol Corridor and Altamont Commuter Express trains. If you're heading south, either one will take you to Santa Clara/Great America (not the same place as the Santa Clara CalTrain station). There's a vending machine for Amtrak tickets in the station's waiting room, but for ACE tickets, go to the Depot Cafe in the other end of the station.

I was waiting for an Amtrak train, but I checked out the cafe because I needed some coffee. It was pretty good and their breakfast menu looked allright, too.

Centerville is an interesting area, with nice old small-town downtown type brick buildings, many filled with middle eastern businesses. This is the heart of Fremont's "Little Kabul".

The station has a webcam which you can view at oiccam.com, which caught this picture of Mr 295bus checking a schedule.

The train was punctual, lead by some unexpected motive power. Hey, buddy, wasn't expecting to run into you over here!

A CalTrain engine was coupled in front of the usual Amtrak California one. Probably it was on its way back from maintenance at Sacramento.

The run from Fremont to San Jose is more scenic than you'd expect to see from a commuter train. There's a mountain of salt,

and the ghost town of Drawbridge.

The VTA's light rail passes right over the Great America train station, but it's not totally clear how you're supposed to get between them. I think you're supposed to climb up a spiral staircase and walk a block east--since I had a bike, I went a different way, and rode several blocks west, to the VTA Great America station. I'm pretty sure now that that's the long way!

After a few minutes, a light rail train came along.

It was surprisingly crowded. I had to stand. Perhaps business is picking up?

This has been my most roundabout commute yet, but definitely the most fun!

I Feel like I've Entered a Parallel Universe

I just discovered the MetroRider.Elhay.Net blog, and recommended it. Seems like transit riders have to put up with a lot of the same crap down there too.

Mark my words, though: I expect that in 20 years Bay Areans will say, "I wish we had good public transit like they have in LA".

A skeptical, car-oriented culture may actually be a healthier environment for transit to develop, since there it needs to continually prove itself by actually moving people, rather than being seen as inherently good (passenger trains are only good for the environment when people ride them, folks!) or as a point of civic pride.

The Record Man

Is a decent, hole-in-the wall little record shop in Redwood City, a block south of Sequoia Station on El Camino.

You can find them online at www.recordman.com.

Their web site makes them sound like one of those shops for the "vinyl sounds better" crowd, but in fact they had plenty of CD's, a few of which I bought on the way to the station yesterday.

I hope that in light of this plug, they won't mind me linking to this image, which might also help you find the store!

Betrayed Again

First, the Democrats joined up with the Gov to sell us on "infrastructure" <cough>highway</cough> bonds, an investment in and indebted, smoggy future for the next generation of Californians.

Now, in the midst of budget wranglings, they are preparing to give up $1.3 billion in operating funds for public transit, after months of assurances that this gas-tax revenue was safe.

As you may have deduced from this blog, I am results-oriented. Being "theoretically" in favor of public transit doesn't do us riders any good.

So that's it. I'm not voting for any of you guys until you actually earn it. It's Green all the way, baby! Don't tell me I'm throwing my vote away--what good does it do me if the people I vote for win, and do nothing for me?

And I'm still pretty mad about NAFTA, "don't ask, don't tell", the war, and the rest of it too.

I can't be quite as mad at the Governator, because (a) I already know he's a dumbass Republican, and (b) I didn't vote for him. But he better stop calling himself an freakin' environmentalist!

Half Way to Fremont

On my occasional bayside rides to Mountain View, the Dumbarton Bridge has always beckoned, promising to up my mundane ride to work into something more like an adventure.

This morning I decided to make a practice run, and went to the top and back. It was not as hard as I expected. It's a long climb, but not very steep. Lately I've been trying to keep my bike in it's top gear (better workout), and I was surprised that I didn't have to break my self-imposed no-downshifting moratorium.

The bridge has a pretty decent bike lane, divided from traffic by a low concrete wall. It's a pretty good view at the top--you can see all the way from downtown SF to downtown SJ. I made a 360° photostitched panorama:

(Click for full size image)

The current Hwy 84 birdge is neither the first nor the only Dumbarton crossing. Off to the south you can see a railway bridge, with a central swing span, out of service since the 80's but hopefully someday to serve a new Dumbarton Commuter Rail Corridor. The Hetch-Hetchy pipeline also crosses the bay here, carried almost all the way across on bridges, then diving under the floor of the bay to cross the very middle.

Immediately adjacent to each end of the current highway bridge are stub ends of a earlier bridge, which was low and level and had a moveable span in the middle like the railway bridge. They look as though they were open as fishing piers once, but seem to be gated off now. Here's the western stub.

As I came back down the bridge, another biker staring up gave me a big smile. I think I'm passing some kind of threshold into hard-core-dom here.

As I continued my usual bayside route to Mountain View, it started to rain. In July? Whatever.

Local kids seem to have found some interesting alternative routes.

Guess I won't be quite that adventureous!

Along the Stevens Creek trail, I found a few blackberries, which were appreciated. I made sure to keep the bike away from the thorns this time.

Happy 4th! Part I

We kicked off the holiday on the 3rd with a trip to the San Jose Children's Discovery Museum. Balancing practicality and transitfandom, we drove to the "Metro Center" station and rode the VTA the rest of the way--which turned out also to be fortuitous, since the CDM's own parking lot was closed for the day (we got off at the Children's Discovery Museum station. If you do this trip, note that Santa-Terese-bound trains stop at the CDM station, but Winchester-bound trains don't--but if a Winchester train comes first, get on anyway, and get off at the SJ Convention Center, the last stop before the lines split; it's only about a block away).

There was do-it-yourself facepainting.

We checked out science exhibits,

and the ever-popular bubble-basement.

There's a room of changing exhibits, and currently it's all about Clifford the Big Red Dog. Kids can bee fish and chip (and fruit?) cooks,

or deliver letters around Birdwell Island.

I climbed into the stagecoach. Stagecoaches are a form of public transportation, right? It's research!

Besides, I have a feeling this particular stagecoach may have been on display in a Wells Fargo branch in my neighborhood about 30 years ago.

Wanna Rip Someone a New One?

The Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission is the agency responsible for "Planning, financing and coordinating transportation for the nine-conty San Francisco Bay Area". Its reason for being is that the federal government requires some such agency to exist, not beholden to any one government, to propose the most effective and most equitable use of federal transportation funds.

The feds would like to know how good a job the MTC is doing. Since I signed up for something sometime, I just received this email:

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) are reviewing the Bay Area's transportation planning process carried out by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and its partner agencies. To provide the public with an opportunity to comment, the two federal agencies are sponsoring a public meeting:

Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Time: 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Location: Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter, Dahms Auditorium, 101 8th Street, Oakland, (across from the Lake Merritt BART station)

Oral and written comments may be presented at the meeting. Written comments also can be sent via e-mail to cert.review@fhwa.dot.gov or by regular mail to:

Jean Mazur
FHWA California Division
650 Capitol, Suite 4-100
Sacramento, CA 95814

or

Ted Matley
FTA Region IX
201 Mission Street, Suite 1650
San Francisco, CA 94105

Public comments will be accepted through Friday, August 17, 2007.

Please call MTC Public Information at (510) 817-5757 to request special assistance, such as an interpreter, at the meeting.

Thank you,
MTC Public Information

You might or might not care enough to blow an evening at some boring meeting--but it wouldn't take long to drop them an email with your opinion of how well organized, or not, you think Bay Area transit is.

So how do I think the MTC is doing? A few things to consider:

Pick two random points in the Bay Area. Try to get between them on public transit. How many tickets will you have to buy? Will the connections be coordinated, or you will blow half an hour at each transfer point. Is their even a map you can look at to figure out a route?

If the MTC were doing its job, you would neither need to know nor care what agencies operate what routes.

Are the MTC's favored projects of the past and future cost effective and fair? Or does the MTC just rubber-stamp the pet projects of political elites? Consider the cases of Muni's T-Third light rail line ($648 million, slower than the bus it replaced, but a fulfillment of Willie Brown's wheelin' and dealin'), and BART to San Jose ($6 billion for 17 miles, only eligible for federal funding because our local congressional delegation specifically exempted it from the FTA's cost-effectiveness rules, but the centerpiece of SJ Mayor Gonzales's hopeful "legacy").

Meanwhile, CalTrain's downtown extension never quite seems to make it to the MTC's funding A-list, since CalTrain is the unloved stepchild of Bay Area transit.

Biscuits

A bit tangental, I suppose. But transportation links to biking which is a form of exercise which leads into health so I might as well talk about cooking once in a while, right?

Well, Mom was out, so we decided to make biscuits. We started with Nature's Path flax-plus pancake mix (yeah, I'm on a diet but I still get to eat pancakes). Add milk and eggbeaters or equivalent.

Stir.

Glop onto a cookie sheet after spraying with nonstick stuff, bake, 10 mins or so. They look good!

Apply jam.

Enjoy!

One Way not to get Lost onPublic Transit

Permanent and effective!

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/bildstrecke/774/100674/p0/?img=1.0.

Since it's in Süddeutsche Zeitung, I presume that's Munich.

Das schmertzt means that hurts!

Landscaping Schmandscaping!

Nature finds her way through, inexorably, in the most hostile environments--see, for example, these California Poppies growing in a totally unlandscaped patch of earth between the CalTrain and VTA Light Rail stations in Mountain View.

Dumb*ss

A YouTube link, showing a very stupid driver, some nice improvisation by Muni, and lamenting the as-usual poor backup by the City:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecezmFchg4

In Search of the King in Yellow

The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers, is an obscure collection of Gothic short stories, was an inspiration of H. P. Lovecraft, and is not the sort of book you expect to find at Borders. I have been trying for several weeks to find a copy, thus far unsuccessfully.

My three regular places to look for books are all conveniently located near CalTrain stations, and as usual, I managed to find something I wanted to read...

• At BookBuyers in Mountain View I found a collection of Saki's short stories.
• At Feldman's Books in Menlo Park I got an anthology of vintage pulp fiction.
• I discovered that Know Knew Books on Cal Ave, Palo Alto, is having a 50% off sale (but was glad to hear this in preparation for remodeling, not going out of business). No dice here either, though the owner had at least heard of the King in Yellow, and I found another of Chambers' works (unfortunately, a later, more conventional historical romance, though a hopeful looking read nonetheless).

Next on my list is McDonald's Books in San Francisco, and if they don't have it, I'm heading to Berkeley.

Summer's Here!

Us bike/CalTrain commuters have made it through that window between "too cold" and "too hot", where fair-weather bikers make it hard to get on the train, and can enjoy plenty of room on the bike car again. At least, we'll enjoy it when the A/C is working (I've found that on the older gallery-style cars, there seems to be separate A/C for each half, so if the bike section is sweltering, try the other side; and either it's my imagination, or else a trick of the internal thermostat, but when one side's A/C is out, the other's seems to go into overdrive to compensate, and it's very nice and cool over there).

I have a few tips for bike commuting in the heat:

• Bring lots of water (yeah, everybody knows that, but it's worth repeating).
• Take off your helmet the moment you stop riding, and you'll radiate a lot of heat out your head.
• Go to work early (not that I'm taking this advice).
• Ride just fast enough to get a breeze, but no faster.

I actually take a perverse enjoyment of biking in non-optimal weather. The world is not designed for our comfort. Suck it up, and thrive in the knowledge that dealing with a somewhat human-hostile environment means you're alive!

Summer is a good time of year for transit adventures. Kids are out of school, and if you take a day off of work, you can go places with them during the week when everything's running. Late sunsets help too.

Last week I took my daughter to Great America via CalTrain and VTA light rail. This works splendidly, but be advised to bring extra clothes--you will want to go to the water park, and a long walk and trolley ride in wet clothes is not so much fun.

Plenty of other outings will suggest themselves. This morning I saw a guy on the train with a fishing pole. Now it turned out he was meeting a buddy at SJ Diridon and they were going to drive to a lake, but there are actually in plenty of transit-accessible places to fish around here, especially on the bay. Just bear in mind that your fellow passengers will appreciate it if you make sure to have a fairly secure container for carrying your catch home.

Why Regular Americans Hate Tree-Huggers

Thanks to the Palo Alto Daily News for publishing this article! It can be viewed on their online edition at this url:

http://www.paloaltodailynews.com/article/2007-6-7-06-07-07-op-ed

Or right here on 295bus!

A few months ago, I dropped by a meeting of Redwood City Cool Families (see article here), a local group citizens with concerns that seemed to mirror my own.

This is the kind social get-together where the issues of the day are discussed, in an informal manner, over wine and fancy cheese. Discussion topics for the evening included:

• Apologies for driving to the meeting
• Printing a T-shirt, and finding a printer willing to use environmentally-friendly ink to do it
• Recycling
• The fate of the Redwood City Industrial Saltworks

The last topic was naturally the one that most piqued my interest, and discussion that evening seemed to be fairly balanced, between the pros and cons of reusing this bayland area as housing (in an area where it's very needed, and could potentially cut down on much car use by allowing a few thousand people to live closer to their work) vs wetlands restoration.

Lately Cool Families has started staking out a position on this issue, and it's one with decidedly less balance--they advocate complete restoration of the Saltworks to wetlands, on the grounds that developing it will:

• Fill in more of the Bay
• Destroy opportunities for habitat, open space and recreation
• Snarl traffic on Hwy 101 and Woodside Road
• Prevent completion of the S.F. Bay National Wildlife Refuge
• Place housing on low ground at risk from sea level rise

Now all of this is true (though it overlooks the small detail of the Saltworks being private property, meaning that turning it into a public space means buying it from the current owners, probably to the tune of a few hundred million dollars). But pointing these facts out, and utterly ignoring the good that could come, goes a long way to reinforce the general public's perception that environmentalists care more about wildlife than people. Very few people can afford an $800,000 house in Redwood City, and an awful lot of people are enduring pretty grueling commutes to get there (40,000 people commute into the city daily).

It also reinforces the slightly more nuanced view that people who call themselves environmentalists are often way more concerned with their personal, local, environment than the health of the Earth as a whole--the people who work in Redwood City are going to live somewhere, and if they're not stealing habitat from ducks by the Bay, they're probably going to end up stealing it from kit foxes and other grasslands critters somewhere out around Stockton, and putting a heck of a lot of CO₂ into the air getting back and forth.

Here's a good rule of thumb: in a world of problems, if you hear about a proposal that does some good, and you have some objection--you don't just get to say "no", you have to come up with a better idea. Our local Bay Area version will be: if you don't want housing to be built in one place, you have to say where to build it instead. So, for example, if you want the Redwood City Saltworks to be restored as wetlands, you could propose densifying the City's core as an alternative--for example, building a few thousand apartments and condos near Sequoia Station.

Or, if you don't care about other people's problems, at least be honest about being a jerk, and tell them to move to Manteca.

Bikes on CalTrain - Not Just for Hard-Core Commuters

I showed my daughter the ropes last Saturday. We went to Burlingame.

Washington Park, a fairly nice park, is right by the station. An antique firetruck was on display.

The High School is right next door, and this makes a good place to practice biking:

The park also has some good trees for climbing, at least if you're 7!

We had a picnic under a tree, and headed back to the station, and home.

Bike Helmets Really Work

Ask this guy!

CalTrain, iPod Hacking, and the Tylwyth Teg

Last Christmas, my employer gave us all iPod Shuffles as a thank-you for a good year. It came pre-installed with the "greatest hits" of 7 years of company morale-boosters. That was fun once, but pretty soon I wanted to put my own stuff on there.

You're supposed to use iTunes for that, but after several years of using iTunes, lately I've found that as this software evolves, it gets less and less useful. Lately I've been using a barebones PC music player program called FooBar on my office PC, and between this and the fact that I really had trouble figuring out how to get the tracks I wanted onto the Shuffle using iTunes (what happened to your intuitive interfaces, Apple?), it ended up sitting on the shelf for a while.

So finally I decided to try bypassing iTunes and using it as a generic portable MP3 player. It turns out you can do it, but it's not quite as convenient as with other brands--you can plug the Shuffle into your PC's USB port, copy MP3 files onto it, but it won't recognize them until you build a special index file.

You're supposed to use iTunes for this, but various hackers have put together alternatives. There are apparently some pretty nice ones if you're running Linux, and although I'm pretty Unix-centered at work, I haven't quite "gone penguin" to the extent of using it as my main desktop OS.

So here's a pretty simple way to do it from a Window's PC.

• Download the Shuffle-DB builder "rebuild_db" from http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net.
• The instructions tell you to install Python and do lots of other stuff. This will let you use the latest version, which is cross-platform and no doubt has lots of neat features, but you can ignore it all--just open the zip archive you downloaded and look for rebuild_db.exe. This is a standalone Windows program that doesn't do much, and is no longer supported, but hey, it works.
• Plug your Shuffle into your PC find it under "My Computer", where it should look like a disk drive. Copy rebuild_db.exe onto it (you don't have to put the program onto the Shuffle, but if you do that, then when you run it, it the Shuffle will automatically be the "current directory" and it will find your music without any extra help).
• Copy MP3 (and I suppose other formats) audio files onto your Shuffle, delete old ones, whatever. Whenever you're done, double click on rebuild_db.exe. It will run (in a DOS window) and rebuild the track db so that the Shuffle knows what's actually on it.

So what are the Tylwyth Teg? That's the "Fairy Folk" in Welsh, which I'm using my Shuffle to brush up on, by listening to folktales, on the train.