Sorry to have to beg to differ, but BART has been a major factor in sprawl in the East Bay, especially in the areas to the east of the hills, Concord and Walnut Creek being good examples. When BART got there in the very early seventies these areas were much more "open" then they are today. BART is an expensive, high speed, high capacity system which encourages long distance commuting, thus encouraging subdivision growth in outlying areas. And many BART customers still drive to suburban stations, undermining BART's claim to reducing auto traffic.

BART is just one glaring instance of a scheme being peddled as environmental but which when implemented turns out to be developmental. That is exactly what the HSR being run to Palmdale is all about. If you think about the ramifications about coordinating or linking rail to air you eventually recognize the primary interest is in making it possible to build new, large airports distant from urban destinations.

What the corporate and development interests want for the future is profoundly different from what I want. What I seek is an improvement of what we already have. Better transportation in a same sized California with the same size population. Corporate California has a Las Vegas mentality: build it bizarre, garish and wasteful, but it out of crap, implode it in a few years, then start all over again, only bigger and more bombastic.

I am burned out on "green", which I see as being co-opted by corporate interests as a means of continuing the folly of unlimited population growth. "Green" turns out to be nanny-stating harassment - the public can't buy any alkyd paint but the corporate connected can get exemptions for everything. I used to consider myself an environmentalist but when fanatics want to make it illegal to own any pet other than a dog or cat they have gone over the deep end imho.

At the other send of the scale from the developers are the "phony enviros" who want things to stay pleasantly the same, but only for the wealthy few. That would be Marin County and SMART, a system so marginal and ineffectual that it will not endanger the demographic status quo. Marin is the road block to connecting the North Bay by rail directly to San Francisco. A building inspector I talked to who used to work in Marin summed up the attitude as something like: you can't do anything with your property but I can do anything I want with mine.