We’ve always known that getting around the Bay Area at rush hour is a mess. Freeways and surface streets from Palo Alto to Vallejo grind to a standstill, and buses and trains are packed like sardine cans. But recent events such as BART strikes and bridge upgrades have revealed just how complex the transportation network in the Bay Area can be.

A Lot of People, a Big Bay

The Bay Area, including the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo (home of our Mathnasium of Palo Alto-Menlo Park), Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, and Sonoma, and Solano, has a total population of about 7.2 million people. However, unlike other large metropolitan areas, which typically have one primary employment hub, the Bay Area has many different commuter hubs, including the Financial District of San Francisco, downtown San Jose, the tech centers of Silicon Valley and the peninsula, downtown Oakland, and more. For this reason, people are travelling both ways every morning and night, meaning that there’s no street or freeway that’s safe.

In addition, the Bay Area’s geography makes the commute even more complicated. The huge San Francisco bay is traversed by only five bridges: the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco to Marin County, the San Mateo Bridge from San Mateo to Hayward, the Dumbarton Bridge from Menlo Park to Newark on the East Bay, and the San Rafael bridge from Richmond on the north bay to San Rafael on the Marin peninsula. Mountains also make road-building hard, resulting in features such as the congested Caldecott Tunnel through the Berkeley Hills.

The Bay Area recently became the metropolitan area with the highest percentage of “mega-commuters,” people drive at least 50 miles and spend 90 minutes on their morning commute; the rate for the Bay Area was 4 times that of the United States overall!

The Options for Bay Area Commuters, and the Results

Besides taking the congested freeways such as US 101 from San Jose to San Francisco through Palo Alto or Interstate 80 through Berkeley and Emeryville, many residents take public transportation such as BART, Caltrain, or the myriad bus systems on their daily commute.

BART, the largest system in the Bay Area, consists of five lines and has an average weekday ridership of about 400,000 passengers across the East Bay, San Francisco, and the northern Peninsula. Caltrain, which runs from Gilroy to downtown San Francisco, has an average weekday ridership of about 50,000.  Interestingly, a few single Muni buses in San Francisco have daily ridership of over 30,000, such as the 38 bus from the Richmond District to downtown, which runs every minute during rush hour.

Regardless of one’s mode of transportation, commute times for the Bay Area certainly aren’t short, as the math shows. Santa Clara County residents averaged 25 minutes of commute time, with most people working within the same county. Residents of San Francisco travel 30 minutes every morning on average.

Learn more about Math Tutoring at the Mathnasium of Palo Alto-Menlo Park and how we apply math to the real world at  http://www.mathnasium.com/paloalto-menlopark