Why Bart Needs To Go To Sacramento And The Central Valley

bartable.bart.gov

The San Francisco Bay Area is a prohibitively expensive place to live. Everyone knows that. What people don’t know is that the Bay Area is no longer considered a singular region anymore. It’s now a part of the larger Northern California Mega Region. The higher the prices get the closer you are to San Francisco, the further out people go.  It isn’t uncommon for someone to live in Sacramento or Stockton and work in the Bay Area’s urban core.  We have to accommodate this new reality. And what better to accommodate this than fucking BART? Amtrak connect Sacramento to the Bay, but it’s expensive and doesn’t have many stops.

BART is no stranger to extensions. San Jose just received a BART station less than 2 years ago. Antioch got a fake BART station because Contra Costa County has been paying into the BART system since its inception and East Contra Costa, despite Antioch being the second biggest city in the county, was largely left out of the equation.

No one really seemed to mind that these parts of the Bay Area were underserved because until Silicon Valley changed the Bay Area forever. San Jose and Antioch are both roughly 50 miles from San Francisco. Antioch used to be a heavily blue collar town on the outer edge of the East Bay, and San Jose, despite its size, was rarely looked at as a metropolitan center equivalent to San Francisco or even Oakland.

So where are people going that want to own a home or  just rent something a little cheaper? The fucking Central Valley.

Tech changed this. Distance is relative, and what was considered far out in the past is looked at much more favorably now. San Jose is now treated like a world class city with a real estate market every bit as competitive as San Francisco, and Antioch is looked as a great compromise because a home can purchased for around $600,000.

I don’t know if you know this, but that’s a lot of fucking money.

So where are people going that want to own a home or  just rent something a little cheaper? The fucking Central Valley. Cities like Sacramento, Stockton and Modesto are the new bedroom communities for the Bay Area’s working class. And we should do everything we can to lessen the pain of this already shitty situation.

I know this goal seems unlikely, but at the rate the bullet train is taking, it’d probably get done before that. 

The commute from Sacramento to San Francisco during rush hour traffic is around 2 hours one way. Quality of life suffers immensely from these long commutes. That’s now to mention the environmental impacts of all those cars sitting on our roadways for prolonged periods of time.  According to climate scientists, we have until 2050 to achieve net zero carbon emissions. A great way of doing that would be to have a public transport network connecting our cities, suburbs and exurbs together.

I know this goal seems unlikely, but at the rate the bullet train is taking, it’d probably get done before that. Expanding BART to the Central Valley would also achieve BART’s initial goal of connecting the entire Bay Area. A lot of Alameda and Contra Costa County and now, Santa Clara County are left out by BART. Then in the case of the entire North Bay, they’re completely cutoff from the system. This is especially hard for Solano County cities like Vallejo and Fairfield that are largely working class, but due to lack of public transport face grueling commutes to their jobs.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be BART, but I don’t know why we spend so much money and get so little. We spend a ton in taxes and tolls, which is fine, if we get something… but we fucking don’t.

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