Not so Marvelous Marin

The summer semester has begun at Dominican University of California in San Rafael, so once again I am taking the Golden Gate Transit bus to school in the evenings for class.  At the urging of my office manager and with some financial support from my workplace I have been taking college classes since Fall 2005 in the Pathways Program.  With any luck, I will be able to graduate before I retire.

I like to get out of the City and enjoy the countrified feel of Marin.  Usually the commute doesn't bother me.  But today, the traffic on 101 North seemed worse; unsurprisingly just this very week it was named the ninth most delayed freeway location in the Bay Area in a study conducted by MTC and CalTrans.  As traffic inched northwards, it occurred to me that the reason for the delay is Marin's topography--a series of east-west trending ridges and valleys that are traversed by the freeway.  In some areas 101 is the only north-south route, so local traffic must take the freeway because there are no nearby parallel streets.  The traffic could be greatly reduced if parkways were constructed running parallel to 101 to the west through the hills that would take some of the traffic from Novato to Terra Linda and from Terra Linda to Fairfax.  Other places where 101 is the only route are the stretches between Mill Valley and Corte Madera and from Larkspur to San Rafael, where the traffic predictibly slows down at rush hour.  But I doubt if new roads will ever be built because the open space that they would run through is all protected--this is Marin--and the land values are so high that condemnation is too expensive to consider.  Although the Marin Independent Journal heralds the carpool lanes being built as the Second Coming that will deliver drivers from the horrors of congestion, I don't see Marinites carpooling up, however liberal they may be.  These are the people after all who lecture you about global warming from behind the wheel of their Escalades.

Could public transit be the answer?  Hah.  For the carriage trade who take the ferry to their jobs in view offices in downtown San Francisco, Golden Gate Transit bends over backwards, but for the hoi polloi who schlep to and from school at night, their attitude is that we should be thankful to have a once-hourly bus.  And so what if it doesn't come?  That's what happened last night.  The 9:18 bus from the San Rafael Transit Center didn't show up. I asked the relief driver who was also waiting what happened, and he brushed me off with a "why do you care?"  I told him that it would be nice to know if the bus was 15 or 50 minutes late, and he said "it'll get here when it gets here".  Finally it rolled into the transit center around 10:00 PM.  The drivers changed shifts and I asked the driver if the driver he relieved told him what had caused the delay.  He brushed me off again by saying "I have more important things to do".  Yeah, right. 

I take the Capitol Corridor to Sacramento fairly frequently. The train is sometimes late. It happens.  But at least the Capitol Corridor has electronic signs and messages that tell you why a train was delayed (heavy traffic near Hercules) and what its revised ETA will be.  This gives you the opportunity to call others, and keeps you from feeling stranded.  GGT should install signs in its poor excuses for "transit centers" and give its bus drivers a lesson in customer service.

Glittering off in the distance, like the Holy Grail is the promise of rail transit in Marin.  The Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit was formed to turn the former Northwestern Pacific line into a transportation hub, that also includes a bicycle freeway.  Being something of a pragmatist, I'm not holding my breath.  But being something of an idealist, I can dream, can't I?