Oakland, Berkeley, SF

[Matthew]

Oakland city center 12th street to 19th street

These bike racks aren't going anywhere.

Oaksterdam!

BART station Macarthur in the median of a massive highway interchange. Quite typical, although this station is special.

Timed transfers! The fact that any American rail operator is able to pull this off regularly, day after day, hour after hour, is stunning to see.

 

[Matthew]

Back to Berkeley. Always love seeing the Allston signs.

Berkeley seems to have had its own "roar of the four" where BART now runs underground.

Center and Shattuck

AC Transit not afraid to experiment with bus models (mostly Van Hool):

I think nearly every bus I got on board had a different layout. So weird.

Musician crossing:

BART Art:

(the 70s sucked here too)

Finally a good use for one of BART's idiotic park and ride stations in the middle of Berkeley:

This land is "so worthless" that it only costs $1/day to park. In the middle of affluent North Berkeley. BART planning is so ridiculously incompetent it boggles the mind. Yeah, that brown hump is a station in the middle of the crater.

Some actually decent planning from BART, the Ohlone greenway:

(some kind of food truck festival going on next door)

The up-to-date parts were fairly decent. Minus the trademark "BART Screech" of course, every few minutes.

An older section through a pre-existing park:

University Ave:

The path is kinda-sorta-terribly connected to Richmond (okay, so we had to dash across a wide highway-like street without any nearby traffic signal, then we had to do some kind of weird loopy-loop following confusing bike lanes/sharrows on a grade separation/highway ramp between BART and highways that even locals couldn't figure out -- one of them was riding the wrong way on our bike lane and almost collided with me -- not to mention the part where the path just went to dirt before disappearing into a tunnel under BART...) but it's great through El Cerrito at least.

Richmond seems to have their own thing going on:

I should have taken a picture but across the tracks must be the world's largest basketball court. Could be hundreds of hoops. No idea.

Richmond is also a connection to Amtrak.

 

[Matthew]

Gotta spend some time in SF. Mind the gulls.

I bet this is the most photographed building in SF. The Ferry building:

Out to the neighborhoods. Judah and 9th

The Mucky Duck. Sounds promising to me. I even got a free beer!

Dedicated bus lanes on Church at Market. And the world did not end! Someone tell Boston.

West Portal is neat. Yeah, that intersection is unsignalized, busy with peds, cars, bikes and trolleys coming from three directions. You hear that sound? Heads at BTD just exploded.

Here comes the MBTA's worst nightmare! Street running trolleys.

Do Not Enter the SF Railway Museum.

(although, shortly thereafter, I saw a tourist turn their minivan into that section of street and get chewed out by a cop, which was neat)

Mission Dolores Park still as awesome as ever, plus brand new playground and a lot more construction. And look, cranes! In SF!

Most of the rest of the time I spent in SF was at night, alas, my camera is not that good.

 

[Equilibria]

Thanks for the pictures! I don't know how familiar you are with the Bay Area (and it seems like you are), but it's always fun anyway to see places you lived in and walked though every day in a tourist montage (again, you might not be a tourist). I thought about how all the tourists were experiencing things all the time in Berkeley, and think about it all the time in Harvard Square now.

I don't know if you watched, but the timed transfers on BART are even more fun in the Oakland tunnels when the trains will actually race each other down parallel tracks. The issue at McArthur, though, is the PITA to run all the way down to the lobby and up the other set of stairs when you're connecting to Rockridge or Walnut Creek. Of course, you can walk or bus to Rockridge from much of Berkeley, but not across the hills, and a fair number of people work over there (not to mention they have the BART-accessible Target and their DMV has much shorter lines). It would have been an interesting idea for BART to look at a center platform set-up to eliminate one of those hard transfers, but it's way to late for that now.

The Ohlone Greenway is great as long as it's daytime. I did some research on it when I was trying to defend multi-use paths in Boston, and as it turns out it's kind of a crime magnet. It's the major walking route from several schools to hang-out spots and shopping centers, which probably doesn't help - lots of unsupervised kids.

The North Berkeley BART station was a constant bugbear for the Planning professors. The station was supposed to be in Albany over Solano Ave. (the main street in that area), but NIMBYs killed it. BART then simply relocated the station to what was then cheap land in the middle of nowhere. Now, of course, the land is worth quite a bit, but the neighbors have shouted down any suggestion of TOD, and BART hasn't fought them. BART isn't actually opposed to TOD on their parking lots - McArthur has an enormous development going on at the moment.

 

[Matthew]

I lived in the Bay Area for about 5 months worth so I'm not exactly a tourist, but I'm not exactly a local either. I was just out there visiting old friends and stuff. I took pictures of some things that I thought might be of interest later.

I did the connection to Lafayette and I figured that there would be no help going down and up the stairs, but luckily the timing worked out just fine. I actually made it back to Berkeley within twenty minutes of saying good bye to my cousins. Mostly because I hopped on the train as the doors were closing. The tunnel under the Berkeley Hills is remarkable! So long. I can only imagine how much that cost.

I have to say, from the perspective of an out-of-towner, BART signage is absolutely atrocious. You could easily pull into a station and not know the name, since the signs are tiny and few, if you aren't paying attention to each stop. And then finding the right escalator/staircase in some of those underground mazes... that is if they're not out of service completely (as 19th Street escalators were at the time)... oh, and BART's lovely tendency to put up useless messages on the digital screens when what you really want is a next-train countdown. WMATA does that too. Thankfully the T mostly avoids this problem when they do have signs.

Back to Berkeley, I kinda figured the Ohlone Greenway might have problems at night since its so isolated. Same deal with the Esplanade here. Luckily the mostly grid-like street network means there's a mostly complete "bike boulevard" system.

The lack of a station at Solano was a real puzzle to me. I went up there to get some food and do some shopping, so I just biked or used the 18 bus.

I saw some TOD at Macarthur and West Oakland (I think this is new since I last passed thru 2 years ago). I also stopped in at some kind of hipster bar/coffee shop on Telegraph. It was too cool to have a name, but it was very busy. Oakland is really quite convenient, so I'm surprised it's taken this long for the SF overflow to spread out.

 

[datadyne007]

I'd argue the T has one of the best/most consistently signed systems in the world thanks to C7A. The graphic design standards are impeccable and precise right down to what side arrows should be on.