Bay Area

Bay Area Toll Authority's (BATA) oversight committee after public hearings and discussion is recommending to the board that different peak, off-peak and weekend toll rates for autos be introduced at their big Bay Bridge and flat rate toll increases be adopted at the other six bridges. Truck tolls would more than double. And for the first time in the Bay Area tolls would be collected from carpool vehicles (mostly 3 or more occupants.)

TransCore have the contract to modernize the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) toll systems for their seven toll bridges.

San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge was closed Tuesday evening and remained closed today after steel girders and plates collapsed onto the upper deck of the two level span. The debris was part of patchwork repairs made September 5 through 7 after cracks had been discovered in the truss structure of the old span.

This old span is in process of being replaced with a new cable stayed bridge going up alongside.

Regional government in the San Francisco Bay area and the associated public toll authority are now committed to an extensive network of tolled lanes - some 1300km or 800 miles of tolled lanes to be developed out of an existing and planned high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane network at a capital cost of about $4.8b.

Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) are next week requesting proposals for a new toll system called ATCAS II to serve their seven toll bridges in the San Francisco Bay area. The existing system is called ATCAS which stands for Advanced Toll Collection and Accounting System. Advanced back then in the early 1990s meant Intel 386-based PCs running MS DOS as lane controllers, which BATA now wants replaced. (ADDITION: We worked from a slightly incomplete version of the RFP.

Illustrating what anti-toll politicians on Capitol Hill like House transport chair James Oberstar (Dem MN) are up against in trying to stem the tide of tolling, the major institutions of the San Francisco Bay Area this month have agreed, without any serious dissent, to progressively implement tolling on about 1270 lane-km (790 lane-miles) of high occupant vehicle (HOV) lanes on Bay Area expressways - or as they say over there - in the carpool lanes of area freeways.

David Halberstam was one of the best correspondents in Vietnam during the war I remember. He loved to discuss and argue, and had an enormous capacity to demonstrate a theme with examples. I remember - rather vaguely - several exchanges with him while we were both reporters in Saigon.