Spare My Ass

Lots of ranting lately... 'tis the season... Spring cleaning, bitching and moaning.

Today's rant: Spare the Air. Spare my ass, please. I am so sick of Spare the Air messages telling me to ditch my car and "think about how I get to work without driving" when it gets a wee bit smoggy.

Why is it the citizens who are always asked to totally rearrange their lives when the air quality starts to decline, but ultra-polluting businesses and soot-spewing trucks can merrily go about their smog-making ways?

Not only that, but for a lot of people in the Bay Area, public transit is not a realistic option. Consider the person who lives in, say, Alameda and works all over Marin County as a photographer, for example.

There is NO Bart line that services that area, no ferry direct from the East Bay to Marin County, and the number of buses and transfers it would take to accomplish such a feat is something best reserved for a marathon leg of The Amazing Race, not for someone trying to make a living.

Forget me - how about someone who lives in Fremont but works in Palo Alto? This is a typical Bay Area commute. Just for fun, I looked this up on 511.org.

It looks like the fastest way to service this commute would take over two hours, three buses, one light rail ride and cost $7.25 - ONE WAY. The list of buses & transfers is very long and very confusing.

A person would board the first bus at 7:50 AM and not arrive in Palo Alto until just before 10 AM. And that's if all the buses are on time and no connections are missed.

That - my friends - is bullshit.

There is no Bart train that crosses the Bay other than under the Bay Bridge. There is no ferry that goes anywhere south of Pier 48 in SF. And there appears to be no Transbay bus from the southern East Bay area to the Peninsula.

The commute mentioned above takes the rider south from Fremont to Milpitas then west through Alviso (the crotch of the Bay) then north to Palo Alto. Fucking bananas.

Caltrain only goes north & south from Gilroy to SF along Hwy 101, then you get to enjoy VTA or SamTrans buses for anything beyond the freeway. It does not connect with Bart on the south end. Bart only goes as far south as Fremont.

Once you're in SF, Bart works for the downtown crowd, but if you need to go west, good luck using Muni. Sometimes it works - sometimes it runs people over and kills them. If you're lucky, you might only be robbed or physically assaulted. Other than that, it's totally safe & reliable.

The ferries run only in the northern part of the Bay and they all connect into/out of SF - no direct service from the East Bay to Marin or anywhere else.

The next time you want me to spare the air, you can kiss my ass. Though when I'm not working, I try to use transit as much as I can. For example, today I had a doctor's appointment in downtown SF. No way would I prefer to drive - the traffic is redonkulous and there's no parking.

I happily drove to my local Bart station and Hey, would you look at that? NOT ONE OPEN SPACE IN THE ENTIRE PARKING GARAGE. At 1:30 PM, that sucker was packed so tight there was barely enough room to turn around to get the hell out.

I would have loved to have taken Bart into the city, reading my book while listening to the unintelligible announcements made by the train "operator," saving myself the time, gas and hassle of driving and trying to find parking. But, thanks to the ever-poor planning by the Bart kids, there's never enough parking in that garage. Total joke. And they wonder why more people don't use it.

We could get a lot more people to regularly use public transit - and enjoy it - if it went where we needed it to go and it didn't cost a freaking arm & a leg. If you transit kids can get your shit together and link it all up and get the costs down, we can abolish the Spare the Air campaign forever. Make it usable and people will use it.