Looking at the BART map - 2 questions

[mayorhaggar]

Originally Posted by NekkidFish

So, just to clarify ... if I am looking for homes out in the Walnut Creek area ... or even out to Pittsburg (which I'm not) ... I would refer to those areas as in the 'Bay Area'?

Thanks!! Jules

Locals would say those places are in the East Bay. Before I moved to the Bay Area I'd never heard of all the smaller regional terms like North Bay, East Bay, etc.

This will help since it defines where the different parts of the Bay Area are:

San Francisco Bay Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And this is useful enough I guess:

[NekkidFish]

Thanks Mayor!

HUGz! Jules

[ttocs99]

Originally Posted by NekkidFish

Yes, I'm finding that.

I keep going back to the Walnut Creek area in my search, only based on what people on here say about that area ... and the size of homes for our budget.

You can't go wrong with Walnut Creek, I loved every minute of my 7 years living there. Just an amazing town. The Downtown area is awesome, great restaurants, shops, pretty much every store you can think of. They even have an Apple Store and a Tiffany's, not many Bay Area towns can claim that.

[NekkidFish]

Originally Posted by ttocs99

You can't go wrong with Walnut Creek, I loved every minute of my 7 years living there. Just an amazing town. The Downtown area is awesome, great restaurants, shops, pretty much every store you can think of. They even have an Apple Store and a Tiffany's, not many Bay Area towns can claim that.

Okay, the Tiffany's store I can see, but an Apple store? Really? I thought they were in every town and city?

Thanks so much for your input! Hopefully that will be our home town soon.

HUGz! Jules

[edsg25]

Originally Posted by mayorhaggar

If schools aren't an issue I'd look at Concord, it has nice areas and can be a lot cheaper than Walnut Creek or Pleasant Hill. If schools are an issue, then honestly there aren't any cheaper places than Walnut Creek or Dublin that aren't a really long and inconvenient commute from San Francisco. To widen your search and give you more options, look at these towns for good school districts: Dublin, Pleasanton, Castro Valley, Orinda, Lafayette, Pleasant Hill, Alameda, Fremont, and Albany. None of them are really cheaper than Walnut Creek but some are about the same and at least you'll have more listings to look at. If schools aren't an issue, look at El Cerrito, Hercules, Pinole, San Leandro, parts of Oakland, maybe parts of Pittsburg (though Pittsburg is a long BART ride...)

Also it's San Francisco, not San Fran, nobody calls it that. And San Francisco is its own small city, if you move to the burbs then you are moving to a separate town. The wider area is called the Bay Area, and it's made up of smaller regions like the North Bay, East Bay, Peninsula, and South Bay. I'm not being prickly, just pointing this out because it will make it easier to figure out the area geographically, and when you ask questions people will understand you better. Saying "I'm moving to San Francisco, and I want to live in Walnut Creek" is kind of like saying you want to move to New York City and live in New Jersey.

Excellent observations, mayor. The Bay Area may be unique in the way you described it. I don't think that any metro area in the nation breaks down into sub-regions more than the Bay Area does. Indeed, there is nothing that comes close to the very geography and topography of the Bay Area. No other metro area comes close to having a huge body of water right smack in its center with in the way that San Francisco Bay does for the Bay Area. The closest I can come to in this regard would be Tampa Bay and it's not even in the same league when it comes to separation.

Other metropolitan areas can get by with the name of their cities: Metropolitan Los Angeles, Metropolitan New York, Metropolitan Chicago, etc. Even ones that have two cities can go with the city names: the Twin cities are the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and the Metroplex is the Dallas-Fort Worth Area.

But there is no Metropolitan San Francisco or San Francisco Area. I would say that even the concept of "suburb" becomes muted in the Bay Area. You aren't really a suburb anywhere, just part of a subregion. Mill Valley isn't suburban, it's Marin. San Bruno isn't suburban, it's the Peninsula. Alameda isn't suburban, it's east bay. College towns like Berkeley isn't suburban, but East Bay and Palo Alto not suburban but Silicon Valley.

One can't come close to understanding BART without understanding the uniqueness of the Bay Area. I don't think there is another major rapid transit system out there that is less focused on bringing the periphery to the core or least convened with blanketing its major city with coverage the way that BART does.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Ever seen this map?

System Map