Commuting will probably get better — in a few decades
Let’s start with the bad news.
Commuting, that scourge of modern life, will not go away.
Skip forward a few decades, and the Bay Area’s clogged roads won’t magically clear. Getting to work will still take time.
But you may actually enjoy it.
And you’ll have a few options that don’t exist today — some of which could radically change the way California grows.
To start with, you probably won’t be doing the driving. Whether you’re in your own car, or in a shuttle van or bus with fellow commuters, the vehicles will drive themselves in most if not all circumstances. And they’ll be electrified, so no more choking exhaust.
Within the cities, many residents will subscribe to an automated transit service — hailable in an instant — rather than own their own cars.
The freeways will still have plenty of traffic. But it will flow more smoothly, minus the human driving habits of cutting each other off and stomping on the brakes. Rather than cursing each other, commuters will spend the time reading, working, talking, listening to music or watching something other than the next car’s bumper.
For marathon commutes along the Highway 101 corridor — say, Gilroy to San Francisco — the high-speed rail will make more sense, even if building it does seem to be taking forever.
More important, high-speed rail will connect Bay Area job centers to towns in the Central Valley, turning them into bedroom communities and spurring a new wave of economic growth in places that have suffered high unemployment for years. The same would be true of Elon Musk’s hyperloop — a system for traveling between cities at speeds topping 700 miles per hour inside sealed tubes — if it proves feasible.
Of course, none of these possibilities is certain — including the high-speed rail system, which is perpetually locked in a struggle for billions of dollars in funding.
But many transportation analysts expect some combination of them to shape future urban and suburban commutes, even as we continue using such old-school solutions as bicycles and the human foot. And there’s always a chance some radically different mode of transit — like the Volocopter, a kind of humanshlepping aerial drone — could catch on (although the thought of thousands of those filling the skies each day could make an air traffic controller blanch).
Whichever technologies pan out, commuting methods and patterns will almost certainly change, because they have to.
The Bay Area is expected to add 2 million residents by 2040, in addition to the 7.6 million already here. The likelihood of building entire new freeways is remote. Simply adding more single-occupancy cars to the existing gridlock won’t work.
“We’re not going to have a choice,” said Rod Diridon, former chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority and a director emeritus of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University. “The roads are going to be so full that we’ll either need mass transit or we’ll stay home.”
Many analysts sum up their vision of future mobility with three words: shared, autonomous and electric.
American drivers have been slow to adopt electric cars. But as concern about climate change grows worldwide — with the administration of President Trump a notable exception — several countries have already announced plans to phase out sales of vehicles burning gasoline and diesel.
Meanwhile, autonomous car technology is advancing quickly, even if cars that can drive themselves in all situations and weather remain years away. Tests of self-driving taxis and shuttles are already under way in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Once perfected, such cars could turn transportation into a service far cheaper than owning a car.
In a widely read blog post last year, John Zimmer, cofounder and president of Lyft, predicted that private car ownership within big American cities will sputter out as soon as 2025. Residents instead will subscribe to a transportation service that will bring them a vehicle on demand. He likened it to media streaming services that have rendered CDs and DVDs obsolete.
“Once this happens — once autonomous networks provide better service at a lower cost — our country will pass a tipping point,” Zimmer wrote. “And by 2025, owning a car will go the way of the DVD.”
That won’t, however, ease traffic congestion if every hailable car only carries one person at a time.
Daniel Sperling, founder of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, sees potential in “pooling” services such as UberPool, Lyft Line or Chariot — ride-hailing services that carry small numbers of people, together, at a low price. That model, he says, works not only in dense urban cores but suburban areas as well, potentially connecting the two.
“It doesn’t mean you have to have San Francisco density or Manhattan density,” said Sperling, who also serves on the California Air Resources Board, the state’s air pollution regulatory agency. “Suburbia is way more dense than you need for this to work.”
While some see ride services as a threat to traditional mass transit systems, many analysts say both will be needed — and they’ll need to work together.
Hailable, autonomous vehicles could ferry people to and from BART, Caltrain and other commuter rail systems, an idea planners call “first mile, last mile.” Anyone who takes BART from downtown San Francisco to Pittsburg or Dublin and then grabs a cab or Uber for the last few blocks to their home already does a version of it.
In the future, this might be a matter of necessity. BART, for example, can’t keep adding parking to its stations as the population grows. Riding robot taxis to a station will be far less stressful than fighting for a parking spot.
“They help mass transit work more effectively, but they don’t replace it,” Diridon said.
Commuter rail systems are likely to expand in the future, with BART scheduled to reach downtown San Jose in 2026. Then there’s the high-speed rail, the first segment of which is under construction between Bakersfield and Fresno. A pair of 13-mile-long tunnels beneath the Pacheco Pass east of Gilroy are supposed to link the Bay Area to the Central Valley and, eventually, Southern California. Service between San Francisco and Los Angeles could start in 2029, taking an estimated two hours and 40 minutes.
Though pilloried for its slow progress and soaring costs — currently estimated at $64 billion — the highspeed rail project could reshape whole communities if it comes to pass.
Already, the Bay Area’s unattainable housing prices have forced many families to flee to Tracy, Merced and Modesto, and endure brutal daily commutes through the bottleneck of the Altamont Pass. The rail system — which plans to include stops in Fresno, Madera and Merced during its first phase of construction and Modesto and Stockton in its second — would provide a faster and far more pleasant link between the two regions.
“At the end of the day, it will play an economic development role for the Central Valley,” Sperling said.
Then there’s the hyperloop, first proposed by Musk in 2013.
The still-hypothetical system would place travelers in pods surfing electromagnetic pulses inside of sealed tubes between cities. Speeds could reach 760 miles per hour. It would also cost less to build, Musk said, than the highspeed rail system, which he dismissed as “California’s Amtrak.”
As envisioned by Musk, the pods would be snug — 4.43 feet wide by 6.11 feet tall — with passengers cradled in a long row of seats accessible either by gull-wing or sliding doors. Each seat would have its own personal entertainment system, even though the passengers wouldn’t spend much time inside. A direct trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Musk estimated, would take 35 minutes. Each pod would seat 28 people, and a pod would leave each city on average every 2 minutes.
Although the idea has plenty of doubters, Musk’s SpaceX rocket company has hosted a series of competitions inviting teams of student and professional engineers to design parts of the system. And at least three startup companies are pursuing the idea, although so far, none of them has proposed building the L.A.-to-S.F. route.
“When the hyperloop is up and running, where you live and work will be redefined,” said Bibop Gresta, co-founder and chairman of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which is based in Culver City (Los Angeles County), and is building its first pod in Toulouse, France. “L.A. and San Francisco will be part of the same city, really.”