Original Image: Flickr user CbCastro Used under Creative Commons license.
Improve public transportation on the Coast: more frequent buses, free or cheaper transfers, better weekend service, service continuing later at night.
– Patricia McKowen
San Mateo County residents need to be able to get to work.
Current bus service is inadequate and leaves people stranded for us to 5 hours because it doesn’t run at night. The bus ride from north to south is two hours. When the bus doesn’t start until 5 am in the north, a person can’t get to work until 7 am in the south.
Higher paying jobs are 9-5, lower paying jobs, the jobs that support us all, can be any time, day or night. These are service jobs, and many start much, much earlier. Yet, low paid workers who desperately need to work more than one job, cannot get to 2nd and 3rd jobs.
Also, people going out at night are stranded if they don’t catch the midnight bus. This encourages drunk driving.
We basically only have one street in San Mateo County for north-south transport. Can’t we cover El Camino at least every 30 minutes?
-Dana Callen
Original Photo: Flickr user rutio. Used under Creative Commons license.
Charge solo commuters to use the express “carpool” lane and use that money to help fund SamTrans and Caltrain. – Elizabeth Lasensky
The VTA Express Lane project in Santa Clara County already follows a similar model.
Assembly Bill 2032 directs that revenue from express lanes operations be reinvested in projects and services that provide traffic congestion relief in the express lanes corridor. This will include operation and maintenance of the express lanes and expanding public transit service within the corridor. This may allow funds collected to be invested in SamTrans and other transportation within the county.
Original Photo: Flickr user crderivative. Used under Creative Commons license.
Install bus shelters that provide shelter from the weather, not advertising space.
Recently many of the bus shelters which had provided shelter from summer hot afternoon sun and winter rain and wind, we removed and replaced with more open shelters which provided illuminated billboards for advertising, but which do not provide protection from weather.
Since a rider has to wait for up to an hour, sometimes more, for a bus, don’t they deserve some protection? It gets pretty rough out there. The old shelters should have been kept in place which would have increased the number of shelters. – Dana Callen