 This video is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your online presence. Check out the link in the description, or stay tuned to learn more. Hey everyone, welcome back to RM Transit, and Transit Explained for our second episode stateside on BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. I've received tons of requests to make videos about BART over the years, and I'm super excited for this one. BART is a shockingly large system, with nearly 200km of tracks spreading across numerous cities in the Bay Area. BART has struggled significantly in recent years for varying reasons, however its impressive size and unique features make it a fascinating railway network, with massive potential for the future, especially given its connections to San Francisco, arguably the most important city in the world in the air of modern technology. Let's break it down. If you're not already, consider subscribing to the channel to help me bring you more videos like this one. As it turns out, BART was not the first rail system to cross San Francisco Bay. That would be the Key System, an interurban railway which ran on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, which is not the Golden Gate Bridge, and serves far more traffic. Unfortunately, the Key System closed in the late 1950s, and this left a major hole in the transportation network in the Bay Area, particularly its ability to connect suburbanites to Oakland and Oakland to San Francisco. As it turns out though, plans for BART were already on the drawing board before the Key System closed, and the new, much more modern system first opened in 1972, in the era of the other large late 20th century U.S. rail systems, the DC Metro and MARTA. The system's initial design was clearly inspired by a desire to create something that felt space-age, and that can be seen through both the design, the infrastructure, and that of the trains. It may come as a surprise that BART was planned to be much larger than what actually got initially built, and some connections, such as the one north of San Francisco Bay, still haven't been built. While the BART system did have significant signaling and rolling stock problems in its early years, the system grew beyond them, and by the mid-2010s was moving nearly half a million riders per day. The network has expanded several times throughout the decades, and now encompasses 50 stations across the Bay Area. To truly understand BART, you should know that it isn't really a traditional subway, and instead shares features of an RER and Espan-style system. Most stations are widely spaced apart, trains are larger and faster than a typical subway, and service is less intensive than you would expect on a subway as well. The system is also fully grade separated, meaning it's completely isolated from roadways and pedestrians. Now that you understand the basics, let's take a look at BART's physical infrastructure. Like the DC Metro, BART operates a heavily interlined service, and so I'll start by explaining the basic physical infrastructure, and then I'll dive into service patterns. Probably the most important single piece of infrastructure on the BART network is the Transbay Tube. The tube is a two-tube, two-track tunnel which links the BART system under San Francisco Bay, the bay that puts the bay in Bay Area. The Transbay Tube was built using immersed tunneling technology, which is commonly seen in places like the Netherlands. Essentially, the steel structure was assembled off-site in segments, before being transported to the construction site by barge, and then lowered to the floor of the bay. Starting east of the Transbay Tube, we have what is one of my favorite parts of the BART system, elevated track. It's quite interesting how much of BART runs elevated, especially given the large trains that we'll talk about later, and what's even more surprising is the single-pillar guideway design used on much of the system. The elevated track I'm referring to connects the Transbay Tube through West Oakland and onto Oakland's core, which has a complex subway junction underneath it that enables some really cool stuff. I'll discuss this later, as you'll appreciate it more when you see the service pattern. To the north of Oakland's core, there's a short shared track section that turns into branches on the surface, in the center of Interstate 980 and State Route 24. The branch to the northwest connects Richmond and Berkeley, home of the famous UC Berkeley. The segment heading through Berkeley is underground, though the tracks north to Richmond are largely elevated with some surface sections. The branch to the northeast runs through and under the hills northeast of Oakland, with service connecting to the tiny city of Arunda amongst the hills, before continuing east to serve Walnut Creek, north to Concord, and then east to Pittsburgh and Antioch. This line spends much of its time in the median of highways, and much of the rest of its time on elevated guideways, embankments, and surface level tracks. To the south of Oakland's core, there is a multi-station shared track section until Bayfair, almost entirely on elevated guideways. South of Bayfair, the trains once again diverge onto two branches. The branch to the east travels through the hills east of Hayward, entirely on the surface in the median of Interstate 580, on a surprisingly windy alignment to Dublin and Pleasanton. The branch to the south travels mostly along freight railway right of ways through Union City, Fremont, and then into North St. Jose. The stations from South Fremont to Barrius and North St. Jose all open to the late 2010s, and Warm Spring's South Fremont station is just across a freight railway yard from Tesla's massive Fremont factory, formally hosted Toyota NGM. The last section of tracks we really need to talk about are those west of the Transbay Tube. West of the Tube, Bart runs in a tunnel under Market Street in Central San Francisco, serving some of the system's busiest stations and the super-dense core of San Francisco's business district. The tunnels then turn south to travel under Mission Street through the Mission District, and then work their way back to Interstate 280, which tracks run adjacent to Intel's just south of Daly City station, where the tracks diverge to mostly follow old railway right of ways to Millbury and San Francisco International Airport. Now, before we look at the services Bart offers on its rail network, I'm going to quickly tell you about this video's sponsor, Squarespace. I recently launched my new website with Squarespace, and I was surprised at how easily I was able to put it together and not sacrifice on any functionality or aesthetics, especially compared to coding one from scratch like I did before. I particularly love the built-in blogging tools offered by Squarespace, as well as the powerful email campaigns I can create in the future to better connect with all of you, and the in-depth analytics tools that give insightful feedback on how this site is performing are pretty awesome. Start building your online brand for free by heading to Squarespace.com, and when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash RM Transit to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. With the various lines of the system detailed, let's take a look at the service pattern. Bart operates a total of five regular services. The Blue Service and the Green Service run from Daly City in the west to Bay Fair, where they diverge to Dublin Pleasanton and Fremont San Jose respectively. The Red and Yellow services both travel from San Francisco International Airport to MacArthur, with the Red Service making an intermediate stop at Millbury after departing SFO. In MacArthur, the services diverge with the Red Service traveling to Richmond and the Yellow Service traveling to Antioch. The final service is the Orange Service, which runs from Richmond to Oakland and then south to Fremont and San Jose. This service is pretty cool because it utilizes spare capacity that exists because of the constrained capacity west of Oakland being split between the four Eastern branches. I discuss capacity dynamics like this in my video on Cross River Rail in Brisbane. Now, about that junction under Oakland. This junction is a complex set of tracks that connects three barred corridors together on two different levels. The first level carries northbound trains from the Transbay Tube through the city center to points north across two different tracks. Trains also feed into this first level from the south. On the lower level, a single track carries trains from the northern reaches of the system towards the Transbay Tube and the south. Tracks on this level also allow trains from the south to head directly to the Transbay Tube. Across the junction and its adjacent special tracks, there are three main stations. 12th Street, Oakland City Center, 19th Street Oakland and MacArthur. 12th Street, Oakland City Center and 19th Street Oakland have the same basic design with an island platform for northbound trains and a side platform for southbound trains. On the other hand, MacArthur is a massive dual platform station in the median of Interstate 980. This arrangement allows passengers to make cross-platform transfers at the three stations between the two northern and two southern directions of travel from Oakland. You can learn more about cross-platform transfers in my recent Fundamentals video. Now, this junction is really complex and it's one of Bart's bottlenecks. While connections between tracks are grade separated, the high number of trains traveling on different routings means that disruptions can cripple the system. As it turns out, there's also confusing track work between Milbury and San Francisco International Airport at the system's western extent. When Bart was extended south of Daly City in the early 2000s, instead of taking the more expensive and in my opinion, better approach of tunneling under SFO and then turning west to serve Milbury with the station at SFO spanning the terminal circle, both stations were put on separate branches with connecting tracks allowing trains to travel directly from Milbury to the airport. This means that currently, service is essentially divided between the direct service to SFO from the city center and service which by some timetabling wizardry runs from SFO to Milbury and then reverses out to continue to the core. Fortunately, Milbury somewhat makes up for this by being a genuinely nice station with cross-platform transfers between Bart and Caltrain. Milbury is also a critical transfer point for passengers trying to get to the city center from Caltrain stations as that system has yet to be extended to downtown San Francisco. Bart also has two smaller connector lines which I'll briefly discuss. The first of these lines is the Oakland airport line. This line runs from Coliseum station south of Oakland city center which is served by the orange, green and blue lines to its terminal station at Oakland International Airport. The line is easy to write off because as it turns out it's really just a people mover that uses the same cable-based technology from ski lift maker Doppelmayr as people movers at Toronto and Mexico city's airports. Bart system has a few unique features though. For one, the Bart system features an underground section which requires a large tunnel profile akin to what you'd see on a monorail. The Bart system also features several trains which circulate by disconnecting and reconnecting to multiple cables throughout the system. Bart also had another short connector line that you've actually already seen but it wasn't me who lied, I swear. Bart somewhat frustratingly shows the line which extends the yellow line service from Pittsburgh Bay Point to Antioch as a single seat ride extension. As it turns out, to ride beyond Pittsburgh Bay Point station riders stay on the train which travels to a transfer station to the east where a timed cross-platform transfer is available to the connector line known as E-Bart. This station is unique in that it's only accessible via trains, which means that it's one of the few rapid transit stations out there that you can't just walk up to. The E-Bart system itself continues in a similar way to standard Bart along the state route four median to Antioch with service provided by admittedly lovely Statler GTW diesel multiple unit trains. Similar to but smaller than the flirts being used in Dallas, Fort Worth and Ottawa. All right, time to dive into the future of Bart. The second phase of the Silicon Valley Bart extension that gave us Milpitas station and Barius and North San Jose station is already moving forward with an extension through downtown San Jose to Santa Clara. Currently, the plan is to use a massive single-bore tunnel with most of the downsides and few of the upsides of the planning approach taken in the similar Barcelona Line 9 and 10 project. Between massive parking garages at stations, single entrances, poor connectivity, a redundant connection to Santa Clara and board tunneling under mostly extremely low densities, the project has a little room for improvement, especially given its cost is already said to be nearly $10 billion enough to build a moderately large light metro system in many places. Now, for better or for worse, clearly downtown San Jose and Deirdre would benefit from connectivity to Bart and this project would mean a full circle of high quality rail around the bay which currently exists but relies on VTA's light rail network. Beyond the San Jose extension, a number of other extensions make sense. Extending the blue service from Dublin and Pleasanton to Livermore would be natural and likely not too expensive while extending proper Bart to Antioch would also probably be much the same. Massive plans are also being pondered regarding a second Transbay Tube and Newtrak and Oakland and San Francisco but honestly that's several entire videos by itself. If you'd like to see them, leave a comment. Suffice to say, between the desire to extend Caltrain and possibly high-speed rail across the bay provide more Bart capacity and build connecting services in both Oakland and San Francisco, there are a lot of potential factors to consider. Another major improvement actually being realized is the installation of modern CBTC from Hitachi across Bart's network. While this project is still in its early stages, it'll enable an additional six trains per hour to pass through the Transbay Tube at peak periods, significantly boosting capacity to 30 trains per hour. There are significant synergies between this project and some rolling stock ones so now's the moment you've been waiting for, let's talk trains. Bart's train fleet is super interesting and consists of three models. The original barcars were built by Rohr who you may recall built the earliest cars used on the Washington Metro that I didn't explain video on a while back. These cars are known as the A and B series with the A cars featuring the iconic angled front fascia and asymmetric driver's window and the B cars acting as intermediate cars only. Much like on the Washington Metro, the trains featured very generous transverse seats that are much more like business class on an airport than what you would usually expect to see on mass transit. The A and B cars were complimented by the C cars which came into service in the late 1980s and were manufactured by Alstom. The C cars featured a uniform flat front fascia which allowed them to operate as either intermediate or end cars on trains. With the original fleet growing old, Bart placed a large order for a new fleet of cars set to replace the existing fleet known as the D and E cars or the fleet of the future if you're into marketing speak. These trains manufactured by Bombardier have a number of improvements over the older cars and have allowed the progressive decommissioning of those cars as more trains are delivered. For one, unlike the older cars, which unusually for a metro featured only two doors on each side, the newer cars features three doors on both sides, significantly increasing capacity for passengers to board and de-board trains, critical for achieving two minute headways with the new signaling system. The new trains also feature far better lighting, more traditional seating and far more room for standing, wheelchairs and for those with bikes. Like other trains in the Bart fleet, you can actually travel from car to car unlike in many subway systems, but they don't feature open gangways, which is a bit of a let down. Bart is connected to a number of other rail transit systems. These include the VTA light rail at Milpitas, Caltrin at Milbury and Muni at Balboa Park and Barcadero, Montgomery Street, Powell Street and Civic Center, UN Plaza. Now, what you all came here for the unique features of Bart. I'll try to fire these off rapid fire because wow, there are a lot. For one, Bart's trains are giant. Platforms are built to handle 10 car trains that are 210 meters long and 3.2 meters wide. Such trains are significantly bigger than trains on Crossrail, which themselves are known for being really huge. The trains also run at a somewhat unusual voltage of 1000 volts DC and on the same broad gauge used in India. I talked a lot about wheel profiles in a recent video, so check that out for more on Bart. Bart trains also, unlike typical subway trains, can travel well over 120 kilometers per hour or 75 miles per hour with in-service speeds often as high as 110 kilometers per hour or about 68 miles per hour. As it turns out, Bart's tunnel on Market Street in San Francisco has two levels. The upper level is used by Muni trains while the lower level serves Bart. Unfortunately, over the years, Bart has often been noted for its problems with infrequent service, with headways sometimes as high as every half hour or more. A lack of fair integration with connecting local transit is also a major problem, exacerbated by the poor historical development of station areas. While massive office complexes completely saturate the bay area, rather than having such massive trip generators locate themselves at rail stations, they're often miles away. And worse still, Bart stations have massive amounts of parking, including parkades, though one parkated coma station is a bit cool as it was constructed over a rail yard. Nerdy, I know. This parking obsession is a little less surprising when you consider that Bart operates largely in highway medians or paralleling highways throughout the bay area. Unfortunately, Bart also suffers from high operations and maintenance costs, owing to the unusual trains and infrastructure and the extreme price of doing business in the bay area. Fortunately, Bart also has a lot of great elements. For one, the system is highly automated, enabling high frequencies when schedules call for them. The system was also designed to be resilient to earthquakes and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake that damaged the bay bridge tested this. While the bay bridge was out of commission for some time, bar trains were up and running only a few hours after the earthquake. Bart also has been starting to redeem itself with regard to development in recent years, with significant new TOD being constructed around several stations, such as Warm Springs, South Fremont. While this is super good, I'd like to see more office-based oriented development that would likely drive more trips. And as it turns out, Bart was actually pretty innovative with its regional metro model that's likely influenced a lot of other systems. Another system I feel like is following in Bart's footsteps is the Montreal Rem, which has a number of features that make it similar to Bart, including a major water crossing, a regional scale service, wide station spacings, a substantial city center tunnel, and high top speeds. That said, to me, it feels like the Rem is a much more refined system. It uses standard gauge trains and electrification. It's fully automated and features platform screen doors at every station, and it opts for smaller trains forcing higher frequencies as a result. So that's Bart. For all of its problems, it has solid bones. It has a large network with significant coverage of one of the most important economic regions in the world. Massive trains that can move an incredible number of people and substantial potential for redevelopment and system expansion. If that potential is realized, Bart could once again be one of the world's great transit systems. Thanks for watching.