INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF BART AND BUS COORDINATION IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

The experience of the San Francisco Bay Area with discussions and negotiations regarding coordinating bus and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) should be of interest to other metropolitan areas currently operating or constructing new rapid transit systems. While the technical aspects of implementing such service, for example, mutual fare-collection systems and realignments of routes and schedules, tend to be the more frequent subject of discussion among transportation professionals, the subtler political and institutional aspects of consideration negotiations can be the deciding factors leading to implementation or, conversely, to the continuation of duplicated transit service and inadequate feeder-bus service to rail transit stations. The service-coordination issue, then, calls for politically acceptable and institutionally feasible responses as well as technical studies. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a regional transportation planning agency for the San Francisco Bay Area, armed with the authority to allocate local and federal discretionary transportation funds, has established a framework that acknowledges the political and institutional constraints to BART-bus coordination and facilitates negotiations among the transit operators. While a resolution to the service-coordination issue is still off in the future, the Bay Area experience thus far has implications for other regions faced with similar transit problems.