Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
Brittney Gilbert over at the awesome CBS5 Eye on Blogs snapped this picture on BART. She noticed the tattoo on her subject:
His tattoo says Shit in cursive with a teardrop dotting the i.
Hmm.
Send us your BART stories or photos at bartdiaries@gmail.com. And be sure and tag your Flickr photos to the BART Photos group.
Photo by Flickr user susan magnolia
Update (7:52 a.m.): The Bay Bridge is open to car traffic, according to CBS 5.
Original post: This just in from Mac, who doesn’t seem to think this unexpected day of no Bay Bridge has started off too well.
It’s 5.45am, and the platform at El Cerrito plaza is unusually busy. I hopped the first sf train (8 cars), and there are 4 open seats after I sit, and we’re not even in berk yet. Bart announced that despite the bridge remaining closed for un unexpected extra day, it won’t be running extra trains today. The bridge carries 250,000 cars per day. BART’s suggestion to commuters on KRON news last night was to telecommute (aka ‘snow day’). Newsflash to Bart: People don’t commute in for jollies, they commute because they have to. And today looks to be especially unpleasant.
Let us know how your commute is going today: bartdiaries@gmail.com.
Zennie Abraham of The Blog Report With Zennie62 found this old photo of himself and his friend Lars on the then-new BART back in 1975. He ventured that he and his young friend might be going to San Francisco for the sole purpose of riding the brand-new underground tube.
From his post on SFGate:
BART was new then. It opened in 1972 and transbay service (under the San Francisco Bay from Oakland to San Francisco) started in 1974. What was neat about BART at that time was everything was automatic: the doors opened and the train didn’t even have the human operators that are in each one today; it was supposed to be ran by computer. As I recall, the problems didn’t start mounting up until 1976. But even with that it was a smooth almost soundless ride; the tracks have worn so much that such an experience is a thing of the past.
Ah, old school BART. I love that these kids were stylin’ big time.
Photo by itsolivia from the nascent BART Photos Flickr pool
So cool. And that’ll teach this San Franciscan to visit MacArthur for more than just a train-transfer.
Be sure to check out the new BART Photos group on Flickr, where you can add all your wonderful imagery. We’ll use the photos from time to time the same way we do on Muni Diaries, and we’ll always give the photographer credit.
Also, keep those BART diaries coming: bartdiaries@gmail.com.
Happy Thursday, and happy commuting!
Photo by Flickr user levi mpls
The good folks over at Tenderblog alerted us to this post on Going Underground, a London Tube blog. It’s about a group of riders in Boston who’ve banded together to raise public awareness of what they call “Man-Sitting,” or the practice of taking up more than your allotted seat on the train or bus. More power to ya, Bostonians!
Photo by Devin
Several months back, BART replaced all the cameras in Embarcadero station. I have no idea why — there were tons of cameras in that station already. “Replaced” isn’t the right word, of course, because they didn’t remove the old ones, just installed dozens more, often pointing at the same things. At a guess, the new ones don’t work yet and they won’t remove the old ones until that’s corrected. Or, knowing BART’s ability to do technological upgrades, the new ones will never work properly, so they’ll all stay up, gathering dust and grime and preventing no crime or disorder at all. At a wild guess, the only reasons Embarcadero is so richly endowed with cameras are (a) it’s full of tourists getting their pockets picked, and (b) part of the station is underneath the Federal Reserve Bank, engendering a sort of mutually reinforcing bureaucratic paranoia.