AC Transit

From Free net encyclopedia

AC Transit (in full, Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District) is a regional bus agency serving parts of Alameda County and Contra Costa County in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. In addition, AC Transit runs "Transbay" routes across the San Francisco Bay to the city of San Francisco, and selected areas in San Mateo County and Santa Clara County.

Image:ACBus1.jpg AC Transit is constituted as a special district under California law. It is governed by seven elected members (five from geographic wards and two at-large). It is not a part of the Alameda or Contra Costa county governments, although the initials "AC" are often mistaken to mean "Alameda County."

The district is the successor to the Key System.

1 Bus Service
2 Vehicles
3 Funding
4 External links

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Bus Service

Currently, AC Transit serves cities including Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, El Cerrito, Kensington, Albany, Richmond, El Sobrante, Pinole, San Pablo, Hayward, Piedmont, Castro Valley and Fremont. Most routes connect with regional train service, primarily BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), in addition to ACE and the Capitol Corridor. AC Transit also connects with Oakland International Airport and the University of California, Berkeley (where students have consistently voted to tax themselves, so their student ID works as an unlimited bus pass, even during the summer months).

While most AC Transit service consists of local lines throughout the East Bay, the district also provides many transbay lines. Most of these run across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to connect communities as distant as El Sobrante and Newark with San Francisco's Transbay Terminal (formerly the terminus of the Key System).

Bus service is also provided across the bridges to the south. In 2003, the district introduced a San Mateo-Hayward Bridge route, Line M, to connect the BART stations of Castro Valley and Hayward with Foster City and San Mateo's Hillsdale Boulevard. A second San Mateo-Hayward Bridge route, Line MA, was added in 2006. Across the Dumbarton Bridge, AC Transit operates, under contract with a consortium of transit agenicies (including AC Transit itself as well as BART, SamTrans, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, and Union City Transit), the Dumbarton Express, a series of bus lines connecting the Union City BART station with East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Stanford University. Additionally, the district in 2004 began another Dumbarton Bridge route, Line U, a commute-hour service linking Stanford with ACE trains and the Fremont BART station.

In 2003, AC Transit created a new bus rapid transit line called the "72R Rapid" transit line on San Pablo Avenue. Between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m., buses run at a 12-minute frequency with stops 2/3 mile apart. The line uses no timepoints and instead allows buses to travel along the route as fast as traffic allows. Following the success of this experiment, similar lines elsewhere in the region are in planning.

Beginning December 10, 2005, the district began supplementing BART service by participating in the All-Nighter Network, which does not run between midnight and 5 AM, with Line 800, providing hourly bus service to stations on BART's Richmond line.

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Vehicles

Also in 2003, AC Transit upgraded its bus infrastructure with new low-floor buses from Van Hool and satellite tracking units on all vehicles. GPS tracking units fix the position of the vehicle, and a private radio network sends updates to headquarters every 3 to 16 minutes. Vehicles on selected lines can be viewed from AC Transit's NextBus passenger information system.

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Funding

As with almost all U.S. transit services, service is government-subsidized. In 2003, AC Transit responded to budget cuts in California by reducing and eliminating many bus routes.

In 2004 voters in the AC Transit district, along with voters in other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area approved Regional Measure 2, which provides regional transportation projects (including AC Transit) with $125 million of additional yearly revenues. Additionally, 2/3 of the voters approved Measure BB, a parcel tax specifically supporting AC Transit.

In April 2005, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission was sued for underfunding of AC Transit in favor of suburban rail transit serving wealthier populations, such as BART and Caltrain. Those services had undergone expansions in recent years, while AC Transit had been forced to cut services and raise fares.

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