I have a 6 mile/10 minute freeway haul to the last suburban train station on the way to work, then 20 minutes on the train. They've announced a plan to demolish the parking lot at that station and build offices, with the intention that people like me switch to bicycles. There are good reasons to do this, but I think it's absurd to suggest that we'll be equally happy with ~40 minutes added to our daily roundtrip.
There are some good arguments. BART will make money from those offices, meaning it needs to ask for less from the taxpayer. There will be fewer traffic accidents near the station, and less polluted air (though the real air pollution problem there is urine). I merely argue that the happiness of the reluctant bicyclists isn't one of them.
Or they could align their charges to their costs, and have the users pay for the service.
Now, consider the case where the current prices could actually cover costs if utilization was high enough. (I don't know if that's true for BART, but it's certainly possible for a public transit system.) Wouldn't it make much more sense to increase ridership than prices?
This strategy is hardly unique to publicly-funded projects. Lots of businesses sell a new product at a loss, expecting to grow their sales of it until they can use economies of scale to make the product profitable.
A policy of naively basing prices solely on recent demand and current costs misses a lot of possibilities. It's very worth considering how increased demand changes economies and pricing with a long-term plan in mind.
In peak hours, BART seems pretty close to capacity. My favorite is that while fewer people travel south of the city, rather than east, because of all the "back-trackers" looking for seats (but adding 10 minutes to their commute), even the other direction is pretty crowded.
That would be by far the best way to make a dent in the Bay Area housing shortage.
What's proposed for these sites is mostly commercial, with a little bit of lottery housing for homeless seniors, at-risk veterans, etc. Market rate housing, if proposed, stalls out (see MacArthur).
(Happened to me yesturday when roadworks closed the bridge sidewalks. City didnt provide the shuttle vans they normally do in such circumstances and one biker decided to make a point. Or, more likely, the vans were there but he didnt want to wait.)
Being in a car makes you feel like your drive gets 10x longer when stuff like this happens (whether it's a slow car or a slow bike), but the reality is that we're rarely stuck behind someone slow for more than a minute or two, and for that minute or two you're still only going maybe 30% slower at worst. In other words, it's mostly perception.
Totally untrue. The DC area has plenty of two Lane roads whose speed limit is higher than the average bicyclist can maintain, with the predictable result that you'll have a line of cars being held up by a bicycle. It's especially bad on the Virginia side; many very pretty Virginia roads are virtually undrivable on nice days because of slow bikes.