Copyright © 2000 by Dave Badtke

As a result of some peculiar twist of fate or some bizarre repulsive force yet to be studied, my wife and I have almost always worked jobs that were diametrically distant from home.

When we first moved to California 22 years ago, I rode my bike to Stanford, while my wife commuted to San Francisco by train. My salary as a researcher and my wife’s as an attorney barely covered our older son, our Palo Alto house, and my bicycle maintenance, so when our second son was born, I took a job with a company in Berkeley. Carter was President; mortgage rates were 18%; selling and moving were out of the question – no one could buy – so we bought our second car and launched my California commute saga.

I would eventually commute from Moraga to Berkeley and Fremont, and from Danville to San Jose, Mountain View and back to Palo Alto. In chasing my tail around the Bay, I commuted close to ½ million miles alone in my car. Until about 5 years ago, though, I was able to console myself with the knowledge that 40 miles would take me about 45 minutes.

But then the number of forget-about-it routes increased dramatically and long commutes through the Bay Area became more dependent on time than distance. For example, the 680 Sunol Grade, recently rated as one of the worst commute corridors in the nation (NY Times, 10/20/99), is frequently gridlocked during weekday commute hours.

So even though I now commute to and from my second-floor office and my wife drives a short distance to Martinez, remember that I’ve been through your commuter hell. I feel your painful bottom and back. I understand your compulsion to find tortuous bypasses around chronic car jams. I understand, as perhaps your therapist and spouse do not, that books on tape, meditation, NPR radio, cell phones, language study, and music offer scant relief from traffic insanity. I know that you are trapped everyday for longer and longer durations in a cage constrained to move slowly along a narrow, clogged path.

Commute options like discontinuous carpool lanes that end when you most need them and mass transit that doesn’t go anywhere you need to go in a finite amount of time are no options at all. Is it any wonder that some of you commute in 4-wheeled houses, viz., SUVs?

This being the case, I was particularly distressed when I read in the Benicia Herald on Sunday, 1/16/00, that the Bay Area Transportation & Land Use Coalition reported (see www.transcoalition.org) that ferries to Benicia were a bum idea and that an extension of BART to San Jose wasn’t cost effective.

We always try to take BART to the City, even though it doesn’t really go many places in the city, and while commuting the 680 corridor, I would dream of BART circling and crisscrossing the Bay. (I warn you, though, that such dreams do not increase traffic-jam mental health). And wouldn’t you know it, the very day before Nathan Salant’s article appeared in the Herald, we took the Vallejo Ferry to San Francisco for the first time and discovered that it was even more stress-free and wonderful than BART.

So how could it be that the Coalition, with Vice Mayor Pierre Bidou concurring, has decided that buses are what we need when, clearly, during the next 5 to 10 years, buses will operate on the same clogged roads used by cars? And when the Coalition argues against BART extensions and for improvements in existing rail service, I believe it is clouding the issue.

While Chapter 1 of the Coalition’s Report, "Thirsting for a Vision", stresses the need for a regional transit vision, none is clearly stated. Though many good ideas are contained in the Report, I will argue in next week’s column that it flounders in transportation and community details and promotes a blurred vision of what transit should become.

Absent a clear vision, then, I offer my own for you consideration:

Within the next 5 years you will primarily use Bay Area Transit to commute to work because: 1) you will be able to get where you need to go in a time that is comparable to or better than your optimal driving time; 2) you will be able to easily schedule and pay for your trip; 3) the cost of the trip will be competitive with the real cost of driving; and 4) the trip will minimize the mental and physical stress associated with space, uncertainty and Newton’s Second Law of Motion.

- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.

Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com  

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