North SF Bay commuter rail?
Former US Department of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (namesake of the Mineta International Airport in San Jose) was in the North Bay giving his blessing to the most recent (and what seems like the most realized) proposal for commuter rail through Sonoma and Marin counties. Whether or not the sales tax funding for the proposal will pass in November is a good guess, as voters have rejected proposals a couple times before. People in the North Bay say they want more commuting options, to use less oil and all those nice things -- as long as it isn't in their nice green beautiful backyard (and if you have ever been in those two counties, they have some of my favorite places in the country).
If the Bay did not sit between them and San Francisco or Oakland, some sort of rail link probably would have been made a long time ago, but the isolation means any rail link lacks connectivity, except to the very good ferry system on the Bay. We shall see if the increasing price of gas has changed the minds of enough people to think that some alternate form of transportation besides the slow crawl down Highway 101 in the automobile might be worth funding.
Note: maybe a BRT system is a better idea than a fixed rail link. The proposal has rail, stations and feeder buses/shuttles to the stations. A BRT system would have lower capital costs, although they do already have the rail right-of-way. Let's see how this proposal fares.
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csa | 10:02 PM |
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