A transportation disaster for sure but nothing like the "advise" being given out. Two Decks of the I-80/580/+ East Bay interchange are closed after a tanker crashed, burn and ultimately collapsed several sections. This is one of the busiest interchanges in the country. Traffic is gonna be a mess. Officials are urging the use of BART. This last part is what got me. Freakin' BART? Do they have any idea? Ignoring all the commerce, goods, services, and not transit functions these roadways carry and just focusing on moving people BART is not going to do anything. Running as many trains as often as possible and not 1/10th the necessary capacity can be provided and that not in the right places. The commute tomorrow, or should i say starting tonight shall be interesting to watch. Oh, and so much for getting any benefit from the multibillion dollar transportation improvement proposition we so foolishly approved last year.
38 comments:
PEARL JAM RULES
PEARL JAM RULES
No one said first or murst
I found teh BART to be a pleasant experience when i took it - of course, this was on a Saturday morning from SFO to Fulton Street.
I wonder how many angry VW and Prius drivers will be on it tommorow?
Public transportation is for loosers. It's just like renting...
The local news is having a field day with this. Channel 4 has resorted to reading unfathomable alternate routes from web sites and showing unreadable maps. You'd think that in the heart of the tech community they'd be able to display something better than a blurry map that looks like it was photocopied from an old USGS document. I guess not.
While I do have clients in the east bay most are in the city or south bay, and I usually work out of my home office, so this won't affect me too much. It'll be interesting to watch the commute from afar tomorrow morning though. Rob is right, this is a very busy interchange, many people depend on it to get to the bay bridge, SF, and the pennisular. There are alternate routes, but most mornings they're already crowded.
We had a similar accident last week in Houston. Gasoline tanker truck crashed and burned - it will take 2-3 months to rebuild the ramp.
The interesting parts are
1. Houston does not allow trucks carrying hazardous materials inside loop 610 and this guy was definitely out of his area. Same story, early morning hours and speed probably was the culprit. Our driver didnt walk away, he was killed.
2. The trucker company is liable for the damages, not the state.
There are alternate routes and this will be a big headache until it is rebuilt. I think the ramp was brand new; just opened in the last month.
Not as bad as your bottleneck. I heard the spokesperson recommending BART and "the other bridges". It isnt just the commuters, but the goods and materials that have to be moved from one side of the bay to the other.
geez.
As a former Bay Area resident and someone who use to live really close to that intersection...this is going to be a nightmare. Of course people can use BART. Most East Bayers should be use to this. They have been doing work on the Bay Bridge at night on the weekends. It's annoying if you have to drive into the city for dinner with friends. You have to use the Richmond or San Mateo Bridge. BART needs to expand their hours...No more closing at midnight. I live in NYC now and must say that I enjoy being able to live in a city without a car.
The East Bay sucks, and this is just going to make it suck even worse.
Kirk -- Highway 280 for the win. 101 is going to be a nightmare with all the extra people trying to use the San Mateo bridge.
Hey "The Dude", whats going on here?
Not First? Not even Murst?
I think you are becoming like KC, running out of steam !
@Dawg -- I know that 'I hate mass transit' is one of your particular pet peeves, but how else should commuters get to their jobs in a situation like this? If the choice is to take BART or to spend an extra 2+ hours in your car every day trying to use clogged alternative routes, you're a fool if you do NOT take BART.
Disasters are good for the economy.
On a different note, is another quake hit San Francisco (liek in 89) how much would prices go down?
Are we sure this isn't the result of a failed fix'n'flip by YouKnowWho™?
People always leave after a big quake. Population declines are the norm. The population already is in a decline.
BART just doesn't have the capacity. By suggesting that BART can even help s going to break BART and the traffic around stations in addition to th existing problems. If you are planning on using BART the best strategy would be to drive outward to gt on. When the train arrives full and cannot let anyone onboard the damage to transit advocacy will be more than my complaints have ever accomplished.
Lol. The fine folks at KRON showed some dramatic video of some poor bloke being taken to the hospital, said he was the driver of the tanker truck and gave his name. That was 15 minutes ago, now they're retracting it. Apparently the name was wrong, and the video had nothing to do with the accident. It's funny seeing how poorly these guys are covering anything more breaking than the frog races in the north bay.
@Sprezz: Yep, 280 is the best kept secret when it comes to bay area freeways. It's the only freeway that has regular commute time speed traps, on the rest of the freeways it's hard to break 30 MPH for any length of time. When heading south from the city it's usually faster to go out of your way on 280 and then cut across to one of the other freeways when you're close.
@Anon 11:12AM: I've heard more than one person fondly remember the days after the '89 quake when rents were low and the more fragile folks deserted the city. It would definitely drive down prices if there was a moderate to large quake. I'd guess something between 5 and 8 on the richter scale. After experiencing the '89 quake I'd wouldn't want to go through anything bigger though. We are most definitely over-due. Before '89 there were quakes on a regular basis, I can't remember the last one I felt now.
@Dawg: I have to disagree about BART. If it happens to go where you want to go it's a pretty good system. Sure, it does get crowded at times, but that's usually due to them not running enough trains. They can run 10 car trains but, due to budget problems, frequently run much smaller, even during commute hours. After the '89 quake they did a pretty good job of accomodating the loss of the bay bridge, I don't see why they won't be able to deal with this too.
That's not to say there won't be backups and problems. In '89 traffic wasn't too bad because there was simply no way to get across the bridge, after a few days people adjusted. In this case there are alternate routes so I suspect some people will still try to stay in their cars so traffic could be pretty bad.
Rob, I have to play devil's advocate.
Where are you parking your car when you drive to an "outward" location? It's the East, East Bay that causes congestion on BART. And parking spots at the Bart Station are already a problem. I use to go to work at 5 in the morning (working on NYSE hours) and the Bart was not crowded. By having people vary the time they get on BART, not at 8:30...get on at 7 or get on a 9:30, It would eliminate the mad rush of people trying to get to the same place.
@kirk -- It's definitely been quiet on the quake from the past few years, but in 99-01 there were a couple of decent-sized temblors. I was in an old brick building in downtown SF in the summer of '99 when a 5-point-some-odd came rumbling through and it scared the hell out of me.
Dammit....I take my first morning nap and another topic get posted. It would have been a 3peat. Dammit...
I have set the bar of FIRST so high, it's one of those records that will never be broken, kinda like the 4 minute mile, Babe's HR record, or Gehrig's consecutive games
I wouldn't mind a big one coming through and getting rid of all the yuppies in the Marina that are living on landfill. They can move to Danville or Walnut Creek and start contributing to traffic and BART problem.
It keeps getting better. The conspiracy theories have already started. I hope this is a joke, but i suspect it isn't.
http://suitablyflip.blogs.com/suitably_flip/2007/04/paging_dr_rosie.html
They tie in the collapse to 9/11 and Arnie. My favourite line is:
"To date, Schwarzenegger has been curiously silent about these amazing coincidences, further proof of a cover-up."
He hasn't talked about brain sucking aliens descending from Mars on purple unicorns either, I guess that means it must be true.
@Sprezz: Yep I remember that quake, I think it was centered somewhere in the norht bay. For some reason I didn't feel it myself though.
@kirk re that URL -- that person is a raving lunatic! He's certainly full of poop when it comes to his theory about high heat and damage and government conspiracies -- a quick search of the news archives will call up a number of additional stories of highway accidents involving high heat and severe damage to roads.
During the SARS scare, we called BART the SARS train. Hundreds of people packed in a metal tube. A bunch are coughing and weezing, and bad ventilation.
I'm glad my old employer had a nice building in Walnut Creek. I could avoid quite a few trips into SF.
Meanwhile over on Wikipedia....
Look at the Talk:Casey_Serin page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Casey_Serin&action=history
RobDawg: you might want to see if there is any correlation between the IP addresses used to make changes and your own logfiles.
I'm so effing glad I live and work in Walnut Creek, that intersection is bad even without traffic. I was gonna go to Ikea too, it's about half a mile north of that collapse.
*fingers crossed* Bart runs more trains, as they should - but with their budget issues...who knows.
I can feel the black sucking money hole known as CalTrans gearing up for another screwing of the CA taxpayers. The ONLY reason the damage to the LA freeways after the Northridge quake was repaired so quickly is the governor removed bidding restrictions and gave CalTrans a virtual blank check to get it done as fast as possible.
Arnold may have to do the same, or that overpass will remain broken for a decade, used as a convenient budget prop and overtime sink by CalTrans. They've fucked the new Bay Bridge budgetwise, I expect similar here.
The irony here is there is a CalTrans yard nearby - it's across the street from a band rehearsal space I used to hang out at, it was normal to see 10-20 CalTrans workers napping in their trucks all day long. CalTrans is one of THE biggest rip offs in teh state, and they've grown so powerful nobody dares accuse them.
As for the commute, people will find a way, or telecommute, like we did after the Loma Prieta. There's a few routes to get into town, if you have enough time - BART, the ferries, and the loooong way around north and south over the San Mateo and Golden Gate bridge. No matter what route you choose, it's going to be expensive, and watch our bridge tolls will go up to pay for this - they're itching to raise them again anyway.
Gotta love the Bay Area....well, not really. I'm out in a year or so, it's just gotten ridiculous, and most of the natives have moved away in disgust, it's all transplanted assholes now. People say NYC is rude, which is a myth anyway - SF is far, far mre rude than NYC was ever accused of being.
Imagine a city of narcissistic, selfish, arrogant shitheads like Casey. Seriously. I don't even bother with SF anymore, going there just pisses me off.
IAFF is down with an error I have not seen before...
I lived in the East Bay for a year and SF for a year. Hated it. HATED IT! I live in New York. I'm an East Coast guy. I got it out of my system.
SF is total Caseyland. Everyone I ever met was a preening, image obsessed shallow artist, musician, or screenwriter without art, a band or a screenplay. Ridiculous land of poseurs. And Casey is a "business man". He's kind of California to me in a nutshell, although I apologize to they intelligent left coasters here. I had a terrible experience there though.
IAFF is down with an error I have not seen before...
The server is in HTTP request ignore mode.
I live in New York. I'm an East Coast guy.
You should hear what they say about New Yorkers. Behind you back, of course.
Yur highway crash and burn just made local Orlando news. Jsut sayin.
At 11:05 AM, Lost Cause said...
"Disasters are good for the economy."
================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
kirk & sprez-
FWIW, I'm pretty sure the "429 truther" site is a joke.
unless of course, y'all are joking, and I'm being obtuse
So when will the environmentalists file their first lawsuit to stop the rebuilding?
Just got an email for the folks back East asking about the freeway collapse. Apparently it's a slow news day.
Officials are urging the use of BART. This last part is what got me. Freakin' BART? Do they have any idea?
Ahem. Despite the Dawg's forecast of doom, the sky failed to fall during today's commute:
The morning commute went smoothly today on roads and mass transit [...]
Overall, officials said, the flow this morning did not seem too different from a typical Monday, and even appeared lighter than usual in some places as commuters apparently avoided venturing into what had been predicted to be terrible traffic jams and gridlock. The free transit rides offered throughout the region also failed to bring the crush of commuters that some agencies, including BART, had expected.
It may well be worse on the return direction, it may well get worse during the week as those that chose to stay at home or work from home today straggle into work -- but so far people just seem to be getting on with it.
Post a Comment