Patch fanned a Facebook fracas Tuesday with an inquiry about late morning park at Walnut Creek BART.
It seems that's a sore point with many readers. We asked Facebook readers this: "Today, Patch editor David Mills drove to Walnut Creek BART to catch an 11:20 a.m. train to San Francisco. However, the parking lots were all full and that 11:20 a.m. went whizzing by, so Dave ended up driving into The City. Has anyone else experienced this -- the BART lots filling up, even after 10 a.m.?"
The answer is clearly yes. A sampling of Facebook commenters:
- Most certainly. Attempting to park at 9:30AM on a Tuesday, nothing at PH, WC, or Laf! Nothing!
- Why would it be emptier later? People get there before 830am and leave their cars there all day and bart into sf. PH fills up very early.
- That's why I drop my husband off and pick him up every day, out of necessity not convenience. There needs to be more Park n Ride options....
- I have better luck (late morning) at Lafayette. You have to park very far away, but I still find spaces.
- certainly have. Next step is a drive to Lafayette, if that's full as well, drive to the city. There are some pay garages around bart in WC, but I have not explored those. And don't park at Target, they do mark cars and you might find a ticket - or no car (towed) when getting back.
- This is one big reason more people don't use public transportation, wasn't built to handle the quantity of "public" we have in the bay area. And don't tell me to use a bus to get to BART, that's definitely not a solution for most of us. We should have taken a lesson from New York before building BART.
- I totally agree. It turns Bart into a commuter train only since if anyone wants to go into city in week to shop, etc then its impossible to park and then all trains after 9am are empty cause nobody gets on :) Bart is weird. It also needs to run later on Friday and Saturdays otherwise it forces people to drink and drive. Bart needs to listen to what peopel want, not what makes it's life easier.
So tell us in the comments below what your secret is for finding the elusive BART parking spot.
Maybe if they all were not so overpaid it would be different, but do not hold your breath.
Along the way, public transportation becomes an afterthought. In recession, the first utility cut is public transportation. This failure extends from neighborhood to town to county to state to the country. A liberal-minded administration could have turned the present on-going "great recession" around more quickly with a vast public works project targeted at transportation infrastructure, including public transportation. In the end, expanding BART parking will be of little help. What we really need is a well-designed network of public transportation to reliably and efficiently deliver passengers to the BART stations. Unfortunately, the way we pay for such public works defeats the project in favor of... you guessed it, the car.
Traditional public transportation is a dinosaur. The future is smart ride sharing, using smart phones to match up strangers in real time for transportation that takes them where they want, when they want. No fixed-line, fixed-schedule system could ever match that adaptability.
Have you considered that parking at the WC BART station may be limited because it serves the interests of the WC Chamber of Commerce? The Chamber doesn't want any mid-day patrons taking BART to San Francisco to shop, they want them shopping in Walnut Creek. This also explains why our City Council isn't DEMANDING more BART parking with the proposed Transit Village - their Chamber of Commerce overlords don't want it.
Since adding peak transit capacity costs tens of billions, and allowing self-policing time-shifting is essentially "free," then the choice is simple. (I acknowledge that the requirement to time-shift away from "preferred" (if preferred=peak) is not "free," but the free market will tend to cause the least valuable and least "costly" time-shifting to occur....) Finally, more BART parking (cheap, but not free) would ABSOLUTELY help this. Everyone who shows up to a BART station at 11am should be able to find parking-- but they can't.
And sorry, but I don't think there is any City Council conspiracy about anything regarding shopping.
Measure A was voted in by the residents because our Council can’t be trusted to uphold community standards.
The system is full, something needs to be done - and it's not just suburban parking. Walnut Creek City Council is _certainly_ wed to the South downtown shopping clique - just look at the _free_ Shopping Shuttle which serves only to ferry workers and customers to the Nordstrom's area.