SF in SF

[kevin_standlee]

In a little while, I'm heading up to the New College Valencia Theatre in San Francisco, where I'll meet up with cherylmorgan and we'll both attend the SF in SF reading, featuring Robert Silverberg and Kim Stanley Robinson.

I hate driving in San Francisco, so BART is my best choice. Fortunately, the event is near the 16th Street Mission station. At first glance, you'd think the best thing to do is to drive to the end of the BART line at Millbrae and take a train toward San Francisco. But thanks to the boneheaded design errors (that I and many other transit advocates pointed out at the time¹) that locks BART into serving SFO with direct trains, every Millbrae BART train gets to make a detour into SFO, where we sit while the operator changes ends and heads on back out toward The City.

Rather than deal with all that, I plan to drive to the San Bruno station (I've never been there before) and avoid the Airport Tour.

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¹I and many other people who consider ourselves transit advocates said that the logical way to build the Airport line was to bring BART straight into Millbrae to a multimodal station shared with Caltrain (that part was done), and to extend the SFO people mover (which was being built at the same time as the BART extension) to Millbrae, a couple miles away. People riding BART intending to go to SFO would transfer to the (free) people-mover, which would take them to the terminals. Instead, they built a wye-shaped line, with legs pointing into the airport and to Millbrae. For a while, they ran some trains to SFO and some direct to Millbrae, but the loadings were much lower than the (wildly optimistic, inflated to get federal funding) projections, and to save money, they cut back service so that all trains go via the airport, adding a bunch of time to travel to/from Millbrae. Sigh.

Comments

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Ah, that explains why the process of getting from Millbrae to the airport was different last December from when I'd previously tried it.

My own consumer opinion of the link at this point is 1) Could you people put up some large, clear, signs showing just where one goes to get to the bloody airport if you're arriving from Caltrain and only infrequently use this mess of a station? Especially if you've changed how it works such that any train heading in one direction now goes to the airport? The few times I've used this connection, the majority of folk arriving from Caltrain huddle together going "Anyone got any idea where we need to stand now?"

2) Lessee, the current transfer to the airport from Caltrain is: get off Caltrain, have to buy $1.50 ticket, have to figure where to stand, wait for train (arrivals don't seem particularly coordinated with Caltrain arrivials), take train to airport people mover which is at one end of SFO, wait for people mover, get dropped off in several cases a 5-10 walk from the concourse and need to take an elevator up (and have to wait for several elevator trips if a fullish people mover), finally get there.

Previous transfer method: A minibus is waiting next to the Caltrain station, since they know when the train's arriving. Get on without charge. Get dropped off at regular car passenger dropoff locations across SFO. Only have to change vehicles once, get dropped off much closer to actual destination, doesn't cost me more money.

Current method: You better allocate at least a half hour from the time Caltrain arrives at Millbrae to when you'll be at check-in. Previous method: 15 minutes max, 10 if low traffic.

Personally, I vastly prefer the previous method at this point.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If you really want to drive as little as possible, consider picking up BART at Fremont. I sometimes do that on my way to SF.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Of course, and had I been at home, I would have done that. But I was at my office, which is in San Mateo.