I believe the Bay Area has pretty good transit, but I don’t know the specifics at this location. The bus is probably more theoretically efficient, but I would wonder about usage in this case. I believe it’s slightly too suburban for light rail.
I think that is public transport is using that road, the bus will still transport more people/day, but I’m a bit uncertain if much of public transport is available in this case, or pretty much anywhere in the US
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 days ago
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I mean… the Bay Area has transit at least, but I don’t think you can call it good compared to places with actual transit.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
America-good, not Europe-good.
knexcar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s not. Marin doesn’t get BART or Caltrain. There’s a once-an-hour bus service that gets stuck in traffic. In fact it gets stuck in worse traffic than the cars because it takes a highly congested off-ramp (which shares car flow with an on ramp) to crawl to the Tewksbury Ave & Castro St stop. Then has to take the same on ramp. Sometimes the delay is so much you can not only miss your transfer, but the transfer an hour after that.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That is incredibly frustrating.
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
There’s tons of people living up there who make the commute up and down. If Bart can go as far as Antioch, I don’t see why it can’t go there and has in the past, proposed going through Marin County.
knexcar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sadly I doubt the once-an-hour bus service that’s notably slower than driving and gets stuck in even worse traffic than the cars (because it has to take congested off ramps to reach stops) is getting enough ridership to make a dent. One time the bus was so delayed I missed not only my timed transfer, but the transfer that came an hour later.
sukhmel@programming.dev 2 days ago
I don’t know the local specific, but what I was talking about is more like the bus that comes at least every 15 minutes, and those do get quite a lot of ridership in my experience
knexcar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah sadly not the case here. Marin is quite suburban and hourly bus service is standard, with the only people taking it being those with no other option. They seem to be slowly moving toward half hourly at least
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
There’s a bus service, but historically, there have been some very nimby reasons for why there’s no faster transit in and out of this region of the Bay Area.
TL;DR: having access to a light rail train would have meant less drivers paying tolls and the board owning the Golden Gate Bridge would want that.
For more about this in SFGate. I know this doesn’t make the journey from Richmond to San Rafael shorter, but BART has been known to expand their services and it’d probably still be faster going around than waiting in a car.