A better way to transfer between Muni and BART

The awesome Mr Eric Sir has a great idea for easier BART-to-Muni or Muni-to-BART transfers:

See? We eliminate two flights of stairs and save up to 5 minutes or so.

So what’s the rub, why didn’t they build the station like this in the first place?

It seems there simply isn’t enough room to have all the extra faregates and ticket machines we’d need on the station platforms. Or at least, it USED to be that way.

But now that we have Clipper, couldn’t we make do with less? All you’d have to do is exit Muni and tag on to Bart. Or in the other direction, tag off Bart and on to Muni.

Muni trains already have Clipper machines inside the train, and it’s a proof-of-payment system, so gates aren’t really needed. Bart could just have a couple faregates at the platform level. It wouldn’t have to take up too much space.

Wethinks this should be on a list of shovel-ready, high-priority stimulus jobs. You listening, Mr. Prez?

Above ossum grafik by Mr Eric Sir.

2 comments

  • david vartanoff

    check out the stairs at Civic Center. All that needs to be done is cut out the bars and install transyacht readers.
    That station was designed for the potential transfers.

  • Scott

    Agreed, there are lots of stations where you pass within 4 feet or less of the muni platform on the bart stairs, and a tag could sign you out of bart and into muni (or the reverse), but I’m sure they’d find some way to mess it up even though the gates don’t really need to be any bigger than a doorway. You could jump from one system to the other since they’re so close.

    I’ve often wondered about why you had to waste time going up and back down a level. The other thing is that most of the platform length on the muni level goes unused, anyway, because they run pathetic 1 and 2 car trains. I see no reason they couldn’t use some of this space as a corral entrance/exit between muni and bart if they didn’t have room for the gates on the stairways.

Leave a Reply to Scott Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *