2026-08-21
Sitting in a queue under the 80 this week I counted about twenty cars ahead of me and wondered how many people that actually was. Bay Area commute cars carry about 1.3 people each, so call it 26.
Each queued car holds roughly 3.6 m of lane by 6.6 m of road, about 24 m². Twenty of them is 475 m² of asphalt, or 18 m² per person.
Standing in a loose crowd, a person takes about half a square metre. The same 26 people fit in a 3.6 m square, which is less than two parking spaces.
And for the same 21 metres of lane that holds three cars and four people, one BART car seats 60 and carries 150 when full.
The cars aren't the traffic. The empty space around each person is.