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10 of the Craziest Ideas to Fix the SF Bay Area's Traffic

The San Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission held a competition to see who had the best solution to help reduce commute times. Here are some of the craziest ideas from the contest.

(TNS) —— Imagine grabbing your morning brew and plopping down in a gondola for your commute across the San Francisco Bay. Or buying a seat in a flying car and zooming to work while looking down on all the suckers trapped on the Bay Area’s clogged freeways.

Well, keep on dreaming. But don’t look for these ideas to get underway anytime soon.

They are some of the proposals a regional transportation planning agency rejected in its bid for big and bold ideas to transform the Bay Area’s roads and rails.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission hosted a competition for ideas costing $1 billion or more that could reimagine the region’s strained transportation system. The reason for the contest, an MTC spokesman told the San Jose Mercury News in July, is that public agencies often get tunnel vision when it comes to thinking about what’s possible. They’re constrained by what’s politically feasible, the funding available and what’s achievable in the short-term.

Hundreds of individuals, organizations and advocacy groups answered the call, submitting more than 500 proposals that were each reviewed by a panel of experts. The MTC had initially intended to select only 10 finalists, but added two more, announcing 12 finalists last week.

But some of the ideas left on the cutting-room floor were too outlandish, too futuristic or too cool to ignore. Here are 10 of them:

  • Gondolas across the bay: Gondolas, like ski-lifts, would connect the East Bay counties of Alameda and Contra Costa with the North and South bays. They would connect to the SMART trains in Marin County and Amtrak, along with other transit systems and park-and-ride facilities. A separate proposal suggested using similar gondolas to connect Oakland’s flatland communities of Fruitvale and East Oakland with neighborhoods in the Oakland hills.
  • Flying cars, planes or pods: A fleet of electric and autonomous flying vehicles, regulated and operated by a public agency, would shuttle passengers across the region, serving dense destinations that otherwise create tons of traffic. And the trips would be affordable, according to the proposal.
  • Autonomous pods: At a given station, passengers board a pod. The pod attaches to a bus, switching out with another already attached to the bus, reducing the time it takes to board or debark a bus. Presumably, if no one wanted to get off at that station, there would be room to add another pod. When passengers disembark, the pods “shoot off the bus and park (themselves) at the station.” Simple, right?
  • A different kind of autonomous pod: Well, these are more like little shuttles, but the idea is ultra-light-weight vehicles powered by solar energy. They would use a network of elevated, bidirectional guideways operating autonomously and on-demand to complement BART and provide service in areas BART doesn’t reach.
  • Freeway Ferry: Why add a deck to crowded freeways when trucks can hold several cars on two levels already? That’s the thinking behind the Freeway Ferry. You load up onto a specially-designed truck trailer at designated stations and instead of grinding your teeth in traffic, you can hop on your work laptop (with Wi-Fi provided on board, of course) or even watch TV (with video screens that drop down in front of windshields, for example).
  • The “California Carma” conveyor belt: Moving sidewalks at airports speed up traffic, so why not moving roadways? The “California Carma” conveyor system would allow motorists to queue at on-ramps and then ride onto the freeway conveyor, somehow — and this part has not been worked out — signalling when it’s time to reach an exit.
  • Detachable BART cars: It’s not easy for BART to have express routes, since trains can’t pass each other. Enter detachable BART cars. The front car would turn into an express car, decoupling from the remainder of the train and skipping the next stop. It would eventually catch up to the next train in line and couple to the rear. Passengers seeking express service would then walk to the front car, which would again decouple and skip the next stop. We’re just not sure, though, how passengers will manage to move between packed cars during peak commute times.
  • Bay Area Central Highway: There’s no room to add extra lanes on freeways in the built-out Bay Area, but there’s plenty of room on the bay itself. One entrant proposed a floating roadway connecting the Bay Bridge to San Jose right down the center of the bay. No more building raised roadways that cause noise, rain down pollution and cast shadows on people’s petunia gardens.
  • Hyperloop: Duh! (With Elon Musk taking a break as chairman of Tesla’s board, he’ll have plenty of time to develop his high-speed rail network.)
  • Hydrofoil ferries: This is not exactly futuristic, or outlandish; we’re just surprised it isn’t already in place. More fuel efficient than typical ferries, hydrofoil ferries skim the water’s surface. The boats would need to connect to transit, shared bikes, scooters or some other service to get people from the water’s edge to work or home. We especially liked the idea in conjunction with a separate proposal suggesting small vessels that could be called on demand. Think Uber or Lyft for ferries crisscrossing the bay.
So, what did win? The 12 finalists were split into two categories: ones that would increase the number of commuters on roads or rails and ideas that make the existing highways and byways more efficient. These ideas will be vetted for inclusion in the Bay Area’s next long-range transportation plan, a document the MTC uses to determine which projects should be funded.

“We received so many promising, outside-the-box ideas that would not just improve existing projects but also help expand the limits of what may be possible over the course of the next generation,” said Jake Mackenzie, the MTC chairman and a Rohnert Park city councilmember.

Projects included adding transit-only lanes on all Bay Area bridges, a regional express bus network that crosses county lines, a complete overhaul of Interstate 80 with metering ramps and tolling, completing the Bay Trail to create a pedestrian and bicycle path ringing the bay, adding train service between the SMART trains in Marin County and the Richmond BART and Amtrak station, and a bicycle “superhighway” network that connects to protected bikeways in city centers.

Other winning ideas included a standardized fare structure for all of the Bay Area’s more than two dozen train, ferry and bus agencies; making transit free for everyone; increasing the carpool lane restrictions to up to four people per vehicle; implementing a per-mile tolling system with prices rising as traffic congestion gets worse; creating reversible lanes on freeways during crush-load commutes; and requiring truck deliveries during evening and nighttime hours.

©2018 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.