Comparison With Other Rail Transit Systems
BART, like other transit systems of the same era, endeavored to connect outlying suburbs with job centers in Oakland and San Francisco by building out lines that paralleled established commute routes of the region's freeway system. The majority of BART's service area, as measured by percentage of system length, consists of low-density suburbs. Unlike the New York City Subway or the London Underground, individual BART lines were not designed to provide frequent local service, as evidenced by the system's current maximum achievable headway of 13.33 minutes per line through the quadruple interlined section. Muni provides local light-rail and subway service within San Francisco city limits and runs with smaller headways (and therefore provides more frequent service) than BART.
BART could be characterized as a "commuter subway," since it has many characteristics of a regional commuter rail service, such as lengthy lines that extend to the far reaches of suburbia with significant distances between stations. BART also possesses some of the qualities of a metro system in the urban areas of San Francisco and downtown Oakland, where multiple lines converge, it takes on the characteristics of an urban metro, including short headways and transfer opportunities to other lines. Urban stations are as close as one-half mile (800 m) apart and have combined 2½ to 5-minute service intervals at peak times. On the whole, BART is very similar in character to the Washington Metro, which opened 4 years after BART and likewise features outdoor, far-flung suburban stations in addition to underground, closely spaced urban stations, with the latter receiving more frequent service than the former.
Read more about this topic: Bay Area Rapid Transit
Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison, rail, transit and/or systems:
“[Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?”
—Sarah M. Grimke (17921873)
“I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Old man, its four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly any bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin rail and the wornout tread.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)
“We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesnt matter so much as it seemed to doits not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesnt matter so much.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“People stress the violence. Thats the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it theres a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. Theres a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, theres a satisfaction to the game that cant be duplicated. Theres a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)