Public Transportation: Wish Fulfillment and Reality in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The San Francisco Bay area has long had an ambivalent relationship with the automobile. In 1949, just as the postwar love affair with the automobile was starting, there was movement in the state legislature to create a Rapid Transit Commission for the Bay area. In 1957, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District was started. San Franciscans sought to differentiate their city from its sibling Los Angeles. They have long disdained its pattern of development, dedicating large fractions of the available land to driving, storing and maintaining the automobile. There are still 75 miles of track. One station has been added, Embarcadero, the first after the transbay tube in San Francisco. Several miles of track were placed below grade in Berkeley. Many of its projects are financed through revenue bonds instead of Congressional appropriations. Agencies which have to return to a legislature or the bond market for funds for several projects tend to be better at cost estimating both because of a learning-by-doing phenomenon and a need to establish credibility with the legislature. A Metropolitan Transportation Commission was created by the state legislature in 1970 with power to deny permission to any public multicounty transit system which uses an exclusive right-of- way and to approve all applications for federal grants to transit systems in the area.