I have close friends who live in Oakland which is across the Bay from me. We generally meet in the city to hang out but occasionally, I make a trip out to their place. If timed right, this trip can take as little as 1.5 and at most 2 hours on a weekday by relying on the Dumbarton Express. This can be competitive with driving in the evenings. Unfortunately, even though the option exists, I find the Dumbarton Express is one of the most frustrating busses I have taken in the Bay Area because you’re usually stuck in traffic while all the single-occupancy drivers get signal priority and the DB Express is usually delayed with no real time data to let you know what is going on.

That being said, the Dumbarton Express does not run on the weekend and the same trip can take 2.5+ hours because you have to circumnavigate the Bay. Maybe this is fine and we need to accept that the travelling a large distance just takes time, but what really pisses me off is that the drive time is “just” 50 minutes.

This whole situation makes me very sad, but I think there is a way to speed up my trip using the Brompton.

First, here are what I think are the bottlenecks:

• There is no one-seat BART ride from Millbrae to Fruitvale (closest BART stop to my friends) which means I need to switch from the Red line to the Blue/Green line eventually.

• Taking the BART from Millbrae involves waiting at the platform for up to 20 minutes if I get unlucky.

• BART takes a detour to SFO.

• Timing the bus from Fruitvale to their home.

My proposed itinerary involves:

• Skipping the transfer at Millbrae and instead riding the Caltrain all the way to 4th and King.

• Biking from 4th and King to Montgomery/Embarcadero Station.

• Catching a Green or Blue line at Montgomery. These trains come every 8 minutes eliminating an extra wait from transferring from Red to Blue/Green line somewhere else on the system.

• Bike from Fruitvale to their home

I ended up trying this out few weeks ago: I got lucky and caught a blue line train that had just arrived at Montgomery, my total travel time was 1 hour and 53 minutes — A time savings of about 44 minutes. On my way back I actually missed my Caltrain connection, so I just took the BART all the way to San Bruno and then caught an Uber. Sometimes you can’t win 🥲.

Ways life could have been different:

• Caltrain was electrified: They estimate 25 minute savings end-to-end for the whole line. Estimates from San Francisco to Palo Alto are around 48 minutes for the Local train compared to 1 hour 6 minutes today, so about 18 minutes faster.

• Dumbarton Express ran on the weekend (or you know we had a 2nd rail connection over the Bay)

• Caltrain and BART met up at San Bruno instead of Millbrae. These two stations are a 15 minute walk apart. This would give riders the choice between going to SFO or straight to the city. Here is some history on this topic!