Samtrans’ Dumbarton study is looking in the short term at improvements to bus service and a bike/pedestrian trail, and in the longer term, managed lanes and BRT or rail options, according to a short report at the SamTrans board meeting this past week. More detail will be presented at two upcoming meetings this week in Newark and Redwood City.
Bus improvements being considered in the short term include more frequent DB Express service, and new transbay routes from Union City BART to Menlo Park/Redwood City and from Union City to Mountain View/Sunnyvale. Other short term improvements include transit signal priority and queue jump lanes for buses and improved park-and-ride service.
In parallel with potential bus improvements, Facebook is funding a study of a 4.5 mile bicycle/pedestrian trail along the rail corridor from Facebook HQ to North Fair Oaks near Redwood City. According to presentations earlier this year, the trail could be built in 2018/19.
Those “improvements” are based on a transportation planning concept known as Integrated Corridor Management - ICM. It’s basically applying tech solutions to modern transportation issues. It is de rigor in transportation planning these days.
It’s not all bad but, autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles seem to be way closer than we realized. Although they integrate into the ICM model, their roll out would have a much larger impact on traffic flow and patterns than connecting all of the real time data systems we already have in place individually among each transportation mode.
Having a middle lane that changes direction during the day doesn’t seem all that hard. Golden Gate Bridge has been doing that for a long time. It surely doesn’t take 15 years to do. Or may be it does because many bureaucrats like @tomhVallejo need to have some say in it?
