The Bay area certainly does need enhancement of its rail system for passengers and freight, because limited land for housing, parking, and road and bridge improvements, force it into a high use of rail.
Editorial: For Northern California rail, the future is here
New Bay Area rail plan lays out what needs to be done. Now's time to begin.
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Imagine that 50,000 people (nearly half as many as now live in Roseville) commuted to the Bay Area every day. That won't be imaginary for long. By 2030, that many people or more will be commuting from the Sacramento region to the counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay on an average weekday.
Even larger numbers of commuters, more than 60,000 a day, will make the trip from San Joaquin Valley cities such as Stockton and Modesto to jobs in the Bay Area. These commuters will join millions more who live in the nine Bay Area counties and also must travel to work on freeways, buses, trains and ferries.
To prevent traffic from coming to a complete standstill and to help keep the region livable, Bay Area planners unveiled a draft report last week. The San Francisco Bay Area Regional Rail Plan is the first such plan produced in the region in the last half century.
It concludes, among other things, "that freeways alone can't solve the Bay Areas traffic problems," hardly a novel notion. Given the crush of people and goods that will need to be moved into and around the region, planners say improvement in mass transit and specifically rail is essential.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, BART, will remain the backbone of the region's mass transit plan, but BART's outward expansion potential is limited.
