As it turns out it doesn’t actually cost that much on regular transit, there’s an AIRPORT SURCHARGE because it’s an “airport train”.
No wonder Americans don’t use public transit, even when the system exists it’s ridiculously difficult and expensive to use.
In case anyone is wondering, a one way trip from Oakland International Airport to the Civic Center station in San Francisco (the stop next to City Hall and the city’s largest open air fent market) is exactly $12.65.
The trip from Oakland to Civic Center is “just” $5.20, but like OP said, there’s a fuckass stupid airport surcharge for the last half mile or so.
Isn’t the idea of such a surcharge to encourage an alternate transit mode?
Apparently they believe they don’t have enough taxis clogging the entrance? Every driver trying to reach my local airport should thank me for taking the airport shuttle.
I don’t know if I used the right term by saying “surcharge”. They built an extraordinarily expensive trolley line from BART to the airport about ten years back and are charging high fees to cover expenses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Airport_Connector
The San Francisco Airport, on the other hand, has an actual surcharge - the main BART line goes direct to SFO but they charge like $5 extra. But SFO also has the same surcharge on taxis and rideshares :/
‘Extraordinarily expensive’ doesn’t begin to describe the boondoggle that is the OAK airport connector. Local bus service and basic BART maintenance got eviscerated to pay for the $500 million construction cost (BART lost a Federal civil rights lawsuit over this). Prior to the connector, BART ran a dedicated shuttle bus every ten minutes to the airport. That bus was actually faster than the connector and made a small profit despite the tiny $2 fare.
Damn, I just rode the connector and really enjoyed it. Nice engineering in it’s mechanisms too.
But I did note how it’s only got two trains on the whole system…
But look on the bright side, I bet some politically connected contractors in Oakland made a whole lot of money off building it. That’s called investing in the local economy 😆
Very little of this project made it into the local economy (33,469 construction hours, which equates to 22 full-time jobs).
And yes…some politically-connected mafia types who are far far away from Oakland did make bank on this.