[throwaway4711]

Reminds me of this additional BART fubar, thanks to which we have no BART all the way around the bay.

Basically two self interested people on the San Mateo county board of supervisors kept the county residents from even voting on participating in the BART system! One was the head of Caltrain, fending off competition, the other a real estate developer.

NB, the Bohannon's are now mega rich real estate owners [1] in the Bay Area.

Electric trains could have been here long ago. In the late 1950s, San Mateo County was one of five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area Transit District. The district could assess taxes and issue bonds and had a round-the-Bay light-rail system planned, according to a history at the website of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).

The plan derailed, according to the BART account, because San Mateo County supervisors were "cool to the plan." They chose to exit the district in December 1961, citing the proposed system's "high costs" and the "adequate service" from Southern Pacific commuter trains, now Caltrain.

George Mader, who retired in 2010 after 45 years as Portola Valley's town planner, has another angle. The "cool to the plan" characters were two men of influence, he said in a March 11 letter to Portola Valley Mayor Ted Driscoll.

The "major problems," Mr. Mader said, were T. Louis Chess, who chaired the county Board of Supervisors and worked for Southern Pacific Railway, and David D. Bohannon, a "major player" in the county and the developer of the then-new Hillsdale Shopping Center.

BART would take shoppers away from Hillsdale and into San Francisco, "where shopping was rather good at the time," Mr. Mader said. For his part, Mr. Chess was protecting Southern Pacific. And the county voters would have had to decide on whether to join BART.

"These short-sighted and selfish people did not let the residents vote," Mr. Mader said. "A travesty!"

As for high-speed rail today, Mr. Mader suggests "a much better solution" to the route controversy: Stop it at San Jose and extend BART around the Bay using the money that would have been spent on the South Bay and Peninsula sections of a high-speed rail line.

[0]https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2011/03/29/planner-has-alte...

[1]http://www.ddbo.com/mengat-office

[wsh]

As I understand it, the Southern Pacific was concerned less with avoiding competition for its Peninsula Commute service than with ensuring that it wouldn’t ever be required to take over BART and bear its operating losses. This was long before Amtrak or the 4R Act, and railroads were still under strict economic regulation by the ICC and CPUC, so the prospect of being ordered to take over a money-losing passenger operation was a real concern.

That’s also the actual reason, or so the story goes, for BART’s non-standard 5′6″ (1676 mm) track gauge: the physical impossibility of interchange with SP’s lines was one more assurance that the SP wouldn’t be entangled with BART or its costs.