Do you live in the bay? The transit agencies have territorial fiefdoms rather then compete. BART and Muni force customers of both to go up and down to transfer at the stations they share.
BART uses wider than standard gauge, Muni uses standard gauge. They don't share track because it's physically impossible (though it would be logistically problematic even if it was possible, given the pack frequency for each at those stations), not because of “territorial fiefdoms.”
> It is true that Bart doesn’t use standard width track.
> However, Caltrain, Muni, VTA, ACE and Amtrak all use standard width track, and none of them cooperate with the others in a meaningful way.
Part of the reason it might seem that way is different federal regulatory regimes between the light (Muni, VTA) and heavy (Amtrak, ACE, Caltrain) rail lines, which makes many naively simple kinds of cooperation difficult in practice.
> These agencies need to be combined under an umbrella organization with the authority to make unilateral decisions for the subagencies to implement.
Yes, the best way to make bureaucracy more efficient and responsive is to make it larger and more distant from the community served.
> It's not about sharing track. It's about having to go to mezzanine level to transfer vs going out the landing after one flight of stairs.
You can only have two tracks at a level without either (1) people walking on the tracks, which is a safety issue even without the electrified third rail, or (2) people going up and down, or vice versa, to transfer between tracks at the same level. Unless each system has only one track through the station (which complicates traffic control for two-way traffic), or unless you split levels by direction instead of system (which still requires changing levels for some transfers), you are stuck with what they have.
You're still missing my point. Why can't people walk one flight of stairs instead of three, two up and one down? Have you literally never looked through the bars on the Muni level or on the stairs?
> Why can't people walk one flight of stairs instead of three, two up and one down?
Presumably because the management of at least one of the two systems thinks that the initial and ongoing cost (and therefore, ceteris paribus, fare) increase of either system integration or additional fare gate infrastructure (the latter of which may not be practical due to space constraints on the platform level) isn't worth the convenience increase, at least compared to other improvements they could make to their systems at the same cost.
Building and maintaining more entry/exit gates doesn't have an upfront and ongoing cost? Integrating Muni and BARTs entry, exit, and ticketing systems wouldn't have upfront and ongoing costs?
I suspect an solicitation of bids for either of those would not have any $0 bids.
I live in San Francisco. The method of transferring you describe is reasonable to me and congruent with my opinion. It's good they share the station is my main point.
Imagine if the stairs to BART weren't separated by a cage from MUNI. How on earth is it reasonable to force someone to the ground floor when going between floors 1 and 2?
