Word: bart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This would be an impressive package by any standard. For residents of the San Francisco region, who will see the $1.4 billion Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) begin operation this week, it represents not only a considerable achievement-it is the first new rail transit system to be built in the U.S. in 65 years-but something of a challenge as well. BART was built as an attempt to entice San Francisco commuters out of their cars and onto a fast, smooth rail transport system that serves the entire Bay Area. Says Lawrence Dahms, BART'S assistant general manager...
Fund Failure. Apparently the voters of three Bay Area counties-San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa -thought so in 1962, when they approved a $792 million bond issue to fund construction. BART was intended to order growth more rationally than new highways on the theory that development follows a rail system's route while highways are usually built wherever anyone develops the land. Beyond that, the planners argued that BART would allow poor citydwellers to get to new industrial jobs in the booming suburbs. But what really explained the vote, cynics say, was that most motorists simply hoped that...
...from the state, a locally imposed sales tax and federal funds kept the ambitious project alive. The long years of construction were marked by lawsuits, as well as by a succession of knotty technical problems and press charges of waste and incompetence. There were times when it seemed that BART might be abandoned...
...BART works as expected, it will cut travel times by anywhere from 30% to 80%. For example, the trip from Oakland to San Francisco will take nine minutes, compared with 35 to 45 minutes by car in rush-hour traffic via the Bay Bridge...
Side Benefits. BART'S promise has sparked a $1 billion office-building boom in downtown San Francisco, plus a major beautification program the length of Market Street. In the suburbs, new homes and apartments are sprouting near the system's stations, and land values have been rising steadily along its route. Whether BART will in fact realize its planners' original far-reaching goals is still moot, mainly because the system is so much shorter than first planned. "We would like to think we've been a catalyst for good things," says Dahms...