Limited Alternatives During Transbay Tube Shutdown
OAKLAND (CBS SF) - The overnight fire that shut down Bay Area Rapid Transit's Transbay Tube created major backups and left commuters with few alternatives Thursday.
Limited service was restored by 4 p.m. Thursday, with full service expected to resume by the Friday morning commute.
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For the evening commute, additional AC Transit buses will be deployed to the Transbay Terminal at Beale and Howard streets in San Francisco to transport commuters back to the East Bay, AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson said. Bus service from San Francisco is expected to begin earlier than normal, he said.
At least 20 extra AC Transit buses will be deployed from the San Francisco Transbay Temporary Terminal for the evening commute. Those buses will be designated as "special" and travel directly to the MacArthur BART in Oakland where riders will disembark.
BART riders seeking to take a bus into San Francisco should get off BART at either the MacArthur or 19th Street Oakland stations where there will be staging areas for catching transbay buses, Johnson said. AC Transit is providing ten additional buses at 19th Street Station travelling to San Francisco.
BART tickets will be honored Thursday for trips to San Francisco, Johnson said.
All buses from Oakland will go to the Transbay Terminal at Beale and Howard streets.
On the waterways, San Francisco Bay Ferry service was operating additional boats to and from Oakland and Alameda, ferry spokesman Ernesto Sanchez said.
At the Jack London Ferry Terminal in Oakland, there was enough space on the ferries to accommodate the riders who were waiting, Sanchez said. Continuous ferry service were offered throughout the day, even on routes where service normally runs only during peak commute hours.
The boats are carrying at least four times their usual passenger load, Sanchez said. Some parking lots are reportedly full or near capacity.
Adding to the headaches Thursday morning, a crash involving a motorcycle and another vehicle briefly blocked lanes on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The crash was reported at 8:33 a.m. just east of Treasure Island. The motorcyclist was transported to a hospital, CHP Sgt. John
Carman said.
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