SGwylan's
Transportation PageSGwylan's
Transportation PageOn September 17, 1985, my mother lost her fight with cancer at the age of 52. I was working full time, but had stopped attending college with essentially one course remaining to gain my AA degree, largely because the instructor for the course was someone I couldn't stand to be in the same room with for three hours a week. However, I decided that getting a degree was important and used the insurance money I received at my mother's death to enroll at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California a year later.
I am an insulin-dependent diabetic which, unbeknownst to me at the time, was not reacting well to the pressure of working, the idea of going to school again, and dealing with the aftermath of my mother's death. Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is a common problem with diabetics, but less common is something known as hypoglycemic unawareness. Usually sufferers can recognize hypoglycemia through symptoms such as feeling a little shaky, dizzy or numbness, but HGU sufferers don't notice these symptoms, or not until it's too late.
Someone with severe hypoglycemia can appear awake and functional, but the brain isn't functioning properly and the person may have no idea what he's doing, nor remember what he did afterwards... similar to being extremely drunk. Often someone with severe hypoglycemia will become quite insistent about things (from insisting that one is fine to more bizarre things - a great book written many years ago (I've forgotten the author) called The Peripatetic Diabetic relates a story of the diabetic skiing with her companion in Switzerland when she suddenly stopped, turned around and started walking, insisting she was going to walk home).
Starting about a month before school started, I started suffering HGU. Several days before classes started, I had to take English and Mathematics placement examinations. Attempting to focus on an exam made HGU even worse. Sometime in the middle of the first exam, hypoglycemia hit, and I have a vague recollection of drawing pretty designs on the Scantron card the rest of the test. During the break between tests I went in search of food, but the cafeteria was closed, so I went to my car.
At some point I must have decided to drive. I don't remember doing so, or how I got where I did. In the end, I was driving down a one-way street the wrong way, sideswiped a few cars and came to a halt. My first memory was in the ambulance after they gave me glucose. Fortunately, nobody was injured.
Needlessly to say, the California Department of Motor Vehicles takes a dim view to behavior like that and suspended my driver's license indefinitely and I became dependent upon public transportation to get around. Interestingly, my last HGU episode occurred the day before my last final exam prior to graduating from CND with my Bachelors Degree in 1991. I could probably get my drivers license back, but haven't felt compelled to do so. Here's why....
First, public transit in the San Francisco Bay Area is reasonably good for most purposes. That's not to say it's perfect, or suitable for everybody, or that there isn't lots of room for improvement, but it's not too bad. Secondly, my total transportation budget is about $75 per month, including the occasional taxi when I miss the last bus. 15 years ago when I drove, my gasoline expenses were more than that (though, granted, I tended to travel farther) and that doesn't even count insurance, car payments, repairs and so on!
There's a certain element of suiting one's lifestyle to transit rather than trying to suit transit to one's lifestyle. Over the years I've learned to be fairly realistic about transit: that it will be delayed at times, but that you can't count on it if you want to catch that bus or train. I've learned to always have reading material or other things to do while I'm on or waiting for pubic transit, and to have alternatives in mind if things don't work out as planned. In general, I've become more relaxed, period.
Meanwhile, I do my best to keep abreast of local transportation issues and to advocate for better public transit, such as through organizations like BayRail Alliance, the ba.transportation newsgroup, and places like the BATN (Bay Area Transportation News) BayRail transportation meeting calendar Yahoo! Groups.
For
anyone wanting to know more about Bay Area transportation, the
Transit Info website was invaluable, but was replaced by the
MTC-designed 511.org website, which looks fancier, but is
more difficult to use..
In
September 2002, I was part of a team
that organized a public forum at San Jose State University on plans for
California's High Speed Rail project, which was quite informative if a
little sparsely attended. In late 2003, Bay Rail Alliance (formerly
Peninsula Rail 2000) will celebrate its 20th anniversary and I've
volunteered to help with the festivities there as well.
Of
course, now I'm more interested in public transportation in the
Portland, Oregon area, served by Tri-Met, but I haven't had any recent
experience with them yet, so I have nothing to say....
A good transit system is one which is reliable, fast, inexpensive to use, build and maintain, and has some built-in redundancy. Where multiple systems are involved, timely and convenient connections are essential. This is why I'm in favor of the following proposed Bay Area transit projects:
Caltrain electrification (at roughly $700 million)
The Transbay Transit Terminal redesign (at roughly $1 billion, though much could be covered without public funding)
The downtown extension of Caltrain to the TTT (at roughly $800 million)
California High Speed Rail project (roughly $30 billion, but would offset the need for more funds to extend/add runways at several California airports by diverting "local" air traffic to HSR)
And why I'm against the following projects:
The BART extension to San Jose/Santa Clara (currently estimated at $4 billion, but likely closer to double that)
The SF Bay ferry project in its ultimate form which, in other than a very few exceptions, are likely to have terminals poorly served by transit connections or be near the places people actually want to go, unlike Sydney, Australia which has a very nice - and useful - ferry transportation system.
More public transportation links will appear here....
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