During overnight hours
(from the end of regular service until opening of regular service)

Saturday, Feb. 18th: 4,200 riders
Sunday, Feb. 19th: 9,100 riders
Monday, Feb. 20th: 2,300 riders

All-day service

Saturday, Feb. 18th: 230,600 riders
Sunday, Feb. 19th: 178,000

For comparison:

Saturday, Sept. 1st, 2007 (highest ridership for a Saturday): 278,600
Sunday, Feb. 5th: 112,700
Sunday, Feb. 12th: 121,000

Updated 2:50 p.m.: Ridership numbers released today show BART had a really big weekend during the closure, including its fifth busiest Saturday ever.

Possible alignment for the Broadway streetcar corridor in Oakland.

Officials will soon launch a new study on the potential costs and benefits associated with building a streetcar line in Oakland (a city which, in the interest of full disclosure, this writer hella loves). This isn’t the first time The O has looked at bringing back rail, but the lack of any viable funding plan means the cars won’t be rolling any time soon.

The idea is to lay rail down a corridor roughly from MacArthur BART to Jack London Square via Broadway – backers promise that the permanency of the rails and catenary would then encourage economic development along the corridor in a way that a bus line could never do. The streetcar corridor would also link established employment centers including Kaiser and Alta Bates Summit Medical Center to BART, Amtrak, and the ferry terminal, as well as the future East Bay Bus Rapid Transit service.

Currently Broadway is served by a number of AC Transit lines as well as the popular Free B shuttle. The shuttle is, as the name implies, fare-free, and operates on an annual budget of nearly $770,000. It is claimed to result in nearly $10 million in purchases for merchants along the corridor, but streetcar backers have their eyes on an even bigger prize – they hope to replicate the success of Portland’s groundbreaking modern streetcar line, which has reportedly resulted in billions of dollars of development in that city.

A search of hotels within a 15-minute transit ride of the Moscone Center in San Francisco using Google Hotel Finder.

A new tool from Google lets users find hotels based on travel time – now it is easy to see hotels that match simple criteria such as “within a 10 minute walk of the convention center” or “no more than a 20 minute transit ride away” . This tool could disrupt the mostly complacent online travel search industry, which has failed to focus on the role transit and walkability plays in the lives of travelers visiting unfamiliar cities.

It is nowhere near as detailed as Walkscore’s Apartment Search tool, which lets you drill down Craigslist housing listings based on advanced criteria such as the proximity to specific bus lines. The interface is also somewhat clunky and Google admits the tool is currently an “experiment”, but hopefully other travel sites will feel the need to step up and offer similar functionality. Give it a try at google.com/hotelfinder.

The totally rad folks at OpenPlans are trying to answer these questions. The non-profit org, whose mission is to promote sustainable mobility with new technology and open data, launched beautiful.st on Valentine’s Day – the site presents users with photos of two streets and asks one simple question: which is more beautiful? All data collected will be publicly available online for anyone to download and parse. [Atlantic Cities]

Spring Street green bike lane in downtown L.A. Photo by LADOT Bike Blog.

The lane in question is on Spring Street, which is sometimes used as a stand-in for a 1920s era big city in car commercials. An especially smug editorial in the L.A. Times claims that the shade of green used on Spring is the problem, as it apparently cannot be digitally edited out. But the real problem is about street space according to a representative from Film L.A., the entity that helps film crews get permits to shoot on-location in the city. From LA Weekly:

“Because they took out a traffic lane, there are difficulties putting filming vehicles on the street,” says Audley.

He estimates that in 2012, about 10 percent of filmmakers who would have otherwise shot in downtown L.A. have stayed away because of the lanes.

…

Film L.A. first learned of the Department of Transportation’s plan for a bicycle-friendly Spring Street when officials asked the org to “move any film crews” that were in the way, according to Audley.

Now, he says his group is deep in negotiations with the mayor (and bicycle advocates) in anticipation of more bike lanes being constructed on surrounding streets — particularly “upper Main, [which] is a heavily filmed area.”

So is it the lane’s shade of green or the loss of some green that is really driving this controversy? Is a street that accommodates non-motorized modes of travel simply unfit for selling cars? Thankfully, LADOT appears to be holding firm on the green bike lane for Spring Street, and we hope that the department’s plans for more green bike lanes aren’t delayed or dialed back just because they may not be film-friendly.

• President Obama’s proposed FY 2013 budget included $47 billion for high-speed rail over the next six years – much of this money could go to California’s HSR project, the only such project in the nation that would achieve speeds of 220 mph. Robert Cruickshank points out that this would put California’s project in a very strong position, especially if the Democrats retake the House and Obama is re-elected.
• The president’s budget also includes $150 million for BART‘s San Jose extension, $150 million for Muni‘s Central Subway, and $50 million for LA. Metro‘s Westside Subway. Other projects getting a nod from the White House include the L.A. Regional Connector, the Van Ness and East Bay BRT projects, phase 2 of Sacramento RT‘s South Light Rail Line, and San Diego’s Mid-Coast light rail corridor (Keep in mind, of course, that this is only from the proposed budget).
• The House’s legitimately horrible transpo bill – which would eliminate dedicated sources of funding for transit and bike-ped improvements – continues to live on, albeit in three parts. The President has said he will veto it, assuming it ever passed the Senate. If it were to go into law, the bill would cost California billions in federal investment, including an estimated $638 million annually to Bay Area transit agencies alone.

The historic Petaluma River swing bridge. SMART intends to replace it with a newer drawbridge from Galveston, Tex. Photo by The Press Democrat.

The North Bay’s budding commuter railroad intends to buy a used draw bridge from Galveston, Tex., to replace an aging swing span over the Petaluma River. The current swing bridge is 109-years-old and repairable, according to Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, but the agency thinks it would need to be replaced anyway within 20 years – instead, they expect to buy and install the bridge from Texas at a cost of about $20 million and have it last 75 to 80 years. The bridge is currently used by BNSF to cross from mainland Texas to Galveston – it is being disassembled this week and being replaced (apparently at the request of the Coast Guard). If the deal goes through, SMART would take bids from BNSF and Union Pacific to ship the bridge to Petaluma by rail. SMART expects to run diesel multiple unit commuter trains down the corridor within four years. [PressDemocrat.com]

Bi-directional service will operate on two lines – an El Cerrito del Norte-Dublin line and a Concord-SFO line. All trains will stop at MacArthur and 12th Street stations in Oakland to allow for transfers between the lines. In the city, go to Embarcadero, Powell, 24th Street, or Daly City catch the train.

Now, BART, when can we start seeing this all the time?

[PDF: View the schedule release for BART's limited overnight service]

The organization hopes to encourage better mode choices by showing the prices of the vehicles side-by-side, challenging the borrower to decide whether their trip or errand can in fact be completed on two wheels instead of four. The pilot project will include 90 bikes at 25 locations mostly in San Francisco and Berkeley. Bike rates are expected to be 50 to 70 percent lower than City CarShare’s hourly car prices, which can be as low as $5 per hour. [New York Times Green Blog]