Gliding to work at 82m.p.h.

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33141, 3 February 1973, Page 11

Gliding to work at 82m.p.h.

(By

JOSEPH GLASCOTT)

SAN FRANCISCO. Sydney has the Opera House and San Francisco has B.A.R.T.—the Bay Area Rapid Transit railway. Both have lived with their pet projects for many years and suffered with them through controversy, design changes and soaring costs. The two are due for completion in 1973. Sydney’s Opera House is an architectural wonder and, as the recent experimental concert showed, acoustically it promises to be one of the finest concert halls in the world. San Francisco’s B.A.R.T. undoubtedly is the most advanced commuter railway in the world, a technological marvel which until a few years ago existed only in the world of science fiction. The first 28-mile section was opened in September and last month I rode on this line — the first city railway to be built in the United States for more than a quarter of a century.. San Francisco courageously took the lead in demonstrating to the rest of America that fast, modem railways are the solution to city commuting problems. It is the first American city to turn its back on the motor car and begin correcting the mess of congestion and pollution created by the automobile age.

B.A.R.T. is undergoing some embarrassing teething troubles which have caused merriment among its critics. But when these problems are overcome San Francisco commuters will be laughing last as they glide to work at 82 miles an hour while the motorists sit in traffic snarls on their freeways. After the dark and dusty murk of Sydney’s Wynyard

or Town Hall stations and the bedlam and grime of New York’s battered and graffiti-stheared subway, riding on B.A.R.T. is like passing through the halls of an art gallery to hear a symphony concert. The line now in operation runs along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay from Macarthur station, Oakland, through nine stations to the southern suburb of Fremont. I joined the railway at Lake Merritt, a mid-town Oakland station, under the B.A.R.T. headquarters office and control centre. Fountains and ferns It is hard to believe that the warm, light-filled surroundings of Lake Merritt are those of a subway station. Escalators take passengers below ground level to a concourse which features a large, circular, brick-paved plaza with shrubs and fems, a central pond and a splashing fountain. The plaza is lit with sunlight from a ground-level opening. The walls of the concourse and platforms are aglow with red, mosaic tiles. There is not a sign of the black, bitumen paving—the trademark of the Sydney underground. All 34 stations on the B.A.R.T. network have distinctive designs and decor. To obtain this variety, B.A.R.T. commissioned 16 architectural firms, eight landscape architects and several graphic designers and artists to design the 14 subway and 20 above-ground stations. Wherever conditions permitted the spacious stations are partly lit with a variety of skylights glass walls and sunken plazas. Under Market Street in busy downtown San Francisco and in the downtown business district of Oakland the stations are simple and businesslike, but are brightened with large areas of colourful mosaic murals,

brilliant graphic designs or bas reliefs. Works of art The works of art which decorate the station concourses and platforms were specially commissioned by B.A.R.T. Out of the central city areas the stations, with their domed skylights and rich colourings, have a more relaxed, residential look. Even the overhead stations and tracks of the B.A.R.T. system have been landscaped with lawns, trees and shrubs so that they will not be eyesores in residential and commercial areas. After absorbing the gay atmosphere of the San Francisco subway the next surprise of the B.A.R.T. stations is the absence of ticket windows, ticket collectors and station attendants. Tickets are bought from automatic wall machines and any amount of money may be invested. For example, if a passenger buys a $5O ticket the automatic turnstile machines record and subtract the cost of each train ride until the ticket is exhausted. A B.A.R.T. official explained: “We could run the stations without any staff. But we do have one attendant on hand at each station and two or three at the busy stations. “They are there mainly for appearance sake. People feel more comfortable if they see someone in a uniform about the station.” Only two soft horn blasts announce the arrival of the silver, aluminium train. The traditional train rattle and clickety-clack is missing as the cars hum along on the welded tracks. And the lone train attendant standing at the window of what would normally be the driver’s compartment is not working at controls. This train, and all the others on the B.A.R.T. system, are run by the computers housed in the control centre above Lake Merritt station. Computer controlled The computers schedule all train trips and control stopping, starting and speeds. The trains are scheduled to make 20-second stops at each station. The attendant can manually keep the automatic car doors open longer if necessary. The computers then adjust the speed of all trains to make up for the time lost. The attendant can also take over manual control in an emergency. But under manual control the trains are governed to travel at 25 m.p.h. Under computer control the B.A.R.T. trains reach speeds of 82 miles an hour. The average speed on the system, taking into account station stops, is 42 miles an hour. The carpeted carriages riding on air-cushioned suspensions give a ride as smooth as an airliner. B.A.R.T. is the first fully automated rail rapid transit system in the world. Inevitably its running-in period has encountered problems. Signalling system Americans have been told that the computer-controlled signalling system is a failure; that instead of speeding along at 82 miles an hour the trains must wait on manual phone calls between stations to clear the lines. A B.A.R.T. official said the Californian Public Utilities Commission naturally insisted on 100 per cent reliability for the stationary train detection system. He said exhaustive tests had proved 100 per cent reliability in the case of multicar trains. The official admitted that the problems had caused a public furore in San Francisco. The taxpayers had been paying and waiting so long for the B.A.R.T. trains to go into operation that any suggestion of further delays brought civic groups out in protest. A San Francisco taxpayers’ association has filed a $lOO

million lawsuit against the designers and builders of the signaling system. Compulsory link Three other lines fanning out from central San Francisco to complete the 74mile B.A.R.T. network began operating last month. The second will begin in May and the third in September. This will complete the B.A.R.T. railway which has cost $140,000 million and taken more than 20 years to build from the planning stage. Construction of the subways and tracks began in 1967, the work was financed by a $792 million bond issue and $lBl million in Federal grants as well as sales taxes and toll collections. Now San Francisco has the most modem commuter transport system in the world. As other large cities debate whether to build more and bigger expressways to further congest and pollute their streets, the people of San Francisco are riding their first, short section of rapid transit line at the rate of 13,000 trips a day. And they are speeding happily at 82 miles an hour past the lanes of crawling cars on the nearby expressway.