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Comment by antonovka | Hacker News Reader

The engineering issues are very interesting, but I find the social issues even more intriguing. What would happen if the bay bridge only re-opened to commercial traffic, and BART service was radically increased?

The bridge carries 280,000 thousand cars daily -- that's a lot of traffic driving around our city, people eating at restaurants, etc. Could we maintain that level of commerce while relying almost solely on public transportation?

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Yes, and no. Certain areas of the city and Oakland would become further gentrified. There's a large demographic of folk who are happy riding BART but won't get on a bus or Muni.

How has car traffic been in SF this week without the bridge?

It's been absolutely dead. Probably less than 50% of what the norm is, from just my observances. It's actually quite nice (since I bike around). But, at the same time, it's really wreaking havoc on a lot of people's daily lives.

Traffic in SOMA is a lot less around evening rush hour, because there isn't a mess of cars backed up on the streets leading up to the I-80 enterance.

Traffic is worse, however, around the other bridges in the area, since the interchanges to the major freeways (101, 880) at those bridges do not have the capacity to handle the offload from the bay bridge traffic. Some of those interchanges only have one lane vs. multiple for the bay bridge entry and exit points, and not enough merge distance to make things smooth.

Parking at most BART stations is also pretty much at capacity, whereas usually there is plenty of empty spaces.

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