Anyway, It is very important to point out that a Verkehrsverbund is a political construct, and that a Verkehrsverbund requires the political will to create a viable transit system, independent of the kind and number of operators.

One Verkehrsverbund I know pretty well (ZVV; Zürich, Switzerladn) comprises around 40 operators, including the Swiss Federal Railways, the Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich (transit of the city of Zürich), but also cableways and the car ferry across Lake Zürich.

Schedules are coordinated under the umbrella of the Verkehrsverbund; the operators don’t have that much freedom over their schedules. The base is an hourly interval on weekdays and mainly saturdays; less on sundays, but the core lines have 30 minutes or 15 minutes intervals, coordinated at nodes, allowing a fast transfer between different operators and transportation modes.

Ticketing is based on zone fares; a ticket gives you the permission to use any mean of transportation within the specified zones for the specified time… a rather simple concept.

The Verkehrsverbund collects the fares, and, together with the payments from the towns, distributes it to the operators. This ensures a fair distribution of the fares.

As said, building up such a system requires the political will, and it might be an advantage of the Swiss political structures that it allows for long-term projects.

Not knowing much about the political structures around the Bay area, it might be rather difficult to build up a Verkehrsverbund. However, from the above descriptions, it appears as if it were rather useful to implement such a system.

A more sophisticated payment system would seem to have the potential to make fare integration more feasible. We’ll see.

The second biggest is the failure to do run-through services at Penn Station, which unnecessarily limits the capacity of the station. This is an *old* failure; they didn’t do run-through services back when the whole mess was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now, trains which run on both third rail DC and overhead AC are used fairly regularly in London, so it’s not like they couldn’t buy them.

i think it doesn’t really matter to riders whether or not the trains are compatible with each other’s tracks — yes, this would provide better flexibility in routes and operations, but the more important thing is that their “user experience” is consistent the whole way.

BART made a bad decision by going with wide-gauge 5′ 6″ rails, instead of the standard, which comes with cheaper equipment and higher flexibility with other tracks around the bay area. i would propose that in the future, BART lines be built with standard gauge rails, and could even have different trainsets. as long as you still call it BART and have the same fare structure, no one will care.

NJ Transit uses catenary, LIRR uses third rail. So you’d either have to extend catenary out onto the Island or third rail into New Jersey. Both railroads, the LIRR past Jamaica and NJ Transit past Newark, branch out.
Lets say NJT and the MTA decide to run trains between New Brunswick and Mineola. That’s great if you want to get from Queens Village to Rahway. Not so great if you want to get from Lynbrook to Maplewood.

You can get from select Metro North stations to select NJ Transit stations – on Amtrak. I doubt many people do it because it’s expensive. . . any way to dig up numbers on that?

if we are too concerned with a giant transit merger in the bay area, which I think could be done with the proper oversight, what would be more practical and important would be MTA’s taking a larger role in mandating a more uniform user experience across all agencies… this would mostly mean a normalization of fare structures, which translink would help with, but more importantly, consistent information graphics and branding on par with the famous roundel of the london tube.

Yes, it’d be nice not to have to sit there for those two minutes, but it sure beats changing trains. I used to have a commute that involved taking a Long Island Rail Road train to Penn Station and transferring to a New Jersey Transit train. I could make the transfer in under five minutes if I had my ticket ahead of time, but I had to give it at least fifteen minutes just to be safe. Even then, there were times when the LIRR train was running so late that I missed the NJ Transit train – and of course there’s no guaranteed connection. Fortunately there was redundant bus service, so I didn’t have to wait an hour for the next train.