Scrambling for a Choice

I can't say it's a surprise. It wasn't that long ago, just after Rob Ford was made hizzoner da mayor of Toronto, that he announced the war on cars was over. The surprising thing is that it's taken this long for the Fordists to train their sights on the scramble intersection at Dundas and Yonge. Don't forget that back in 2009 the Toronto Sun, Ford Nation's newspaper of record, classified scramble intersections as part of the war on cars - just below Pedestrian Sundays and well below speed bumps - and now that His Fordness has dealt with the pernicious threats posed by transit expansion and bike lanes, the new administration is free to focus on lesser threats to the dominance of the automobile.

If you've never crossed or seen a scramble intersection, the concept is simple: once the two cross streets have had their turn to go through the lights, every light at the intersection goes red for twenty-five seconds and pedestrians can cross in whatever direction they like. Yonge and Dundas, which in addition to being one of the many claimed locations of the center of the universe is where you'll find the Eaton Centre, the structure formerly known as Toronto Life Square, and Dundas Square, has an understandably large pedestrian presence - the Toronto Star referenced a city study that found that daily users on foot outnumbered those surrounded by wheels to the tune of 17,000.

Not that it matters, apparently. Earlier this week Denzil Minnan-Wong, the chairman of the city's public works committee and one of Ford's staunch allies, called for a surprise review of the scramble before more can be built. The fact that he tried to justify it in vaguely environmental terms - asking whether scrambles were the best way "if it takes pedestrians thirty extra seconds to cross... yet vehicles are being lined up for four or five minutes spewing all that exhaust" - just makes it even more disingenuous. Suddenly the Ford administration cares about exhaust being spewed into the air? Transit City would've provided an alternative to exhaust-spewing cars and buses throughout huge stretches of the city, you know.

But we mustn't forget the war on cars, or the fact that the Fordists' power base is in the suburbs, where cars are free to zoom along and sidewalks are those lonely strips of pavement that see about as many footprints as Tranquility Base. It's not surprising that the champions of the suburbs would champion pro-suburban ideals; nor is it surprising that they'd attempt to impose those ideals on the downtown core that came out strongly against them in the last election.

Here's hoping they get a fight on their hands.

Pedestrians cross one side of the Yonge-Dundas scramble intersection in front of a streetcar... two enemies of the car working hand-in-glove!

You know what? I'm sick and tired of it all, of the notion that the car is something precious and fragile that has to be coddled and catered to at every possible opportunity to the greatest possible degree, like some spoiled sixteen-year-old wannabe princess. I grant that traffic congestion is an important issue to address, given that so many people have no other way to get around thanks to the monumental fuckwittery that has been enshrined in North American patterns of development for the last seventy years, but the answer to that is not to give cars more perks. It's not to make the roads wider. It's to enhance other choices.

From my point of view, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for the driver on Dundas that has to wait a couple of minutes longer now than before the scramble was put in place. That driver can still make a trip in ten minutes that would take me an hour on foot - even longer out in the sprawls that were built with the assumption that modern folk have wheels riveted to their hips. Aside from spots here and there where the more person-focused layouts of the past still hold sway, today's society is built around the automobile. Rob Ford and his ilk are like those Japanese soldiers that went guerilla on Pacific islands and stayed that way for decades - the war's been over for a long time and they don't even realize it. Except that their side was the one that won.

I think the primacy of the car was rooted deep enough in the modern cityscape that we can afford a few sops to pedestrians here and there.

Photo: Buzzing the Tower

One strange thing I noticed during my time in San Francisco was how many helicopters seemed to be in the sky at any given time. While I went through the Presidio there was one Sheriff's department chopper that I could've sworn was following me at first - presumably because I lack the implants common in Americans that are used to determine how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll - but it turned out to just be doing really wide circles over the area. There was also what I believe to be a UH-60 Black Hawk doing a few passes over the Golden Gate - whether it was a training flight, a patrol, or something else entirely, I have no idea.


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They Knocked Their Block Off!

It's been in slow motion for a while, but starting tomorrow, the VCR is going to be set to fast-forward. The Royal City Record of New Westminster reported yesterday that New West's sole and solitary Blockbuster Video store will be closing its doors on Friday, just the local dimension of the closure of two hundred and fifty-two other stores across the country. Already, the video vultures are circling in anticipation of going-out-of-business deals from Zeballos to Zt. John's. That is, assuming there are any chains in Zeballos, and bearing in mind that I misspelled St. John's for the alliteration factor.

I can't say I'm sorry about the impending collapse of the Blockbuster Canada rental empire... not that I haven't had a while to get used to it; shuttered Blockbusters seem to be everywhere these days. Still, considering the ruthless manner in which the chain came to prominence back in the 90s, driving independent video stores out of business, it's almost satisfying to see corporate karma come around in this manner. I'm upset for the workers, especially in this sort of environment; that kind of front-line customer service is one of the rapidly diminishing types of jobs that can't yet be outsourced to overseas call centers.

The disappearance of Blockbuster from the Canadian retail scene leaves a key question: what happens now? While Blockbuster didn't have a monopoly on the video rental business - there's still a Rogers Video in downtown New Westminster, if you consider Columbia Square Plaza "downtown," and smaller chains like Jumbo Video still exist in addition to the independents that survived Blockbuster's onslaught, the whole business model of video rental is under constant assault by technologies that just weren't an issue ten or twenty years ago, when the video store was king.

The Beladean Motel along King George Boulevard in Surrey has nothing to do with Blockbuster except for the fact that they're both closed and they both start with the letter "b" - but that's close enough.

For many people the answer is simple, and sometimes accompanied by the DreamWorks smugbrow - Netflix. But it's obvious immediately that that solution won't or can't work for everyone. For one, I don't like the idea of paying a subscription for a service regardless of whether or not I use it at all - $7.99 a month may not be much, but it's the principle of the thing, and it's not as if Blockbuster or Bandito Video ever charged me a fee for the privilege of being able to rent from them. But that's just small potatoes. The biggest issue with Netflix here stems from the insanely anti-competitive environment that dominates in Canadian telecommunications, which makes it easy for ISPs to gouge us. When people have to take care they don't go over their usage cap, lest they start getting dinged dollars for every extra gigabyte they pull down, it's not exactly fertile fields for a business model based on downloading.

This is just the start. It seems to me that the biggest and most apparently-dominant companies in a given industry also tend to be the most vulnerable; it's difficult for them to change their course away from that which took them to the top. Nevertheless, this pattern of change isn't going to end with Blockbuster. It's going to remake the video retail landscape. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if a growing percentage of video stores eventually settle into a pattern similar to used book stores - based around physical media in general, selling and reselling media from DVD and Blu-ray to laserdisc and Betamax, finding an exploiting a small but comfortable niche while direct downloading and grocery store rental kiosks take increasingly larger pieces of what remains of the physical market.

I suppose we'll see in a few years.

Photo: It's Always A Princess

As a popular starting point for the Alaska sightseeing route, cruise ships are frequent visitors to Vancouver's harbour in the summer months; it's common for two of those giant floating hotels to be tied up to Canada Place at the same time, and after a while you'll start to recognize the same ones coming by again and again. The Diamond Princess, operated by Princess Cruises - shocking, I know - was in port last weekend, and it was the first time I'd seen her; a more common visitor in my experience is the Island Princess.


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The Pad's Way

So, because of my own foolishness I'm forced to be making this update on an iPad - though due to Safari incomprehensibly lacking the key HTML support necessary for writing in the text box, I'm writing this text in an email - and it's a strange experience. This is the first time I've used an iPad for any length of time, and it's idiosyncrasies are significantly different from the more beefy computers I've been familiar with over the past fifteen years. Such as, for example, Autocorrect, as you can see by that "it's" up there.

Not that it's EASY to write on an iPad. That "EASY" took eight keystrokes, for example.

Which is really the crux of it, though I don't know if it extends to other tablet computers. The iPad is good for watching, for reading, for perusing - but not creating. Writing with a digital keyboard that obligates me to regress back to hunt-and-peck is a chore. From what I've seen the basic word-processing capabilities are purely nominal. I can watch YouTube videos, but neither comment on them nor see the existing comments thanks to Steve Jobs' animus against Flash, and while plenty of YouTube comments are better left unseen, removing the option entirely reduces it to essentially online television.

Put simply, the iPad seems to be a device geared for consumption, not creation, and while the concept did arise organically as a natural midpoint between computers and smartphones, I suspect that in years to come tablets such as this will be pushed ever more strongly on the population. Transhumance Space forecast a world where general-purpose computers were made illegal by 2015, and while I don't expect to see that come true I do expect to see governments and corporations alike encourage a paradigm shift in computing that just happens to make people less participatory and more pliant. Don't maintain a blog, just read the online newspapers. Don't comment online, let other people make your opinion heard. Don't think, just agree and consume.

I think it may be closer than we think.

Photo: Full of Cape Grace

It's an unusual day when Burrard Inlet doesn't at least have a few big transport ships or tankers chilling in its waters. Considering that Port Metro Vancouver is Canada's main Pacific gateway, with plans underway for it to capture even more of the apparently lucrative trans-Pacific shipping business, such days will probably become even more unusual as the years go on.

During a return voyage from North Vancouver the other day, the SeaBus navigated around one such ship - the Cape Grace, a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship, and there's room for plenty of cargo aboard.


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Quaff Review #15: HE'BREW Messiah Bold

Beer means different things to different people. For some, like me a couple of years ago, it was a vehicle to experience temporary lightness of being during busy times with the application of Lucky Lager, as it was the cheapest the LCBO had at the time and, therefore, the best. For others, they would want to throttle me for making such a claim, and as of late I've come more to that view. I've become more choosy about my beer, looking for new flavors and new experiences that don't end with me hugging a toilet, and whenever I arrive in a new land I look around to see what I can find in that regard.

San Francisco was good for that, once I found the sellers; it's unlike most American cities I've been to in that there don't seem to be liquor stores on every other block. At the bluntly, yet appropriately named City Beer Store in San Francisco's SoMa, I made a choice that had almost been chosen for me - HE'BREW, the Chosen Beer, produced by the Shmaltz Brewing Company in Saratoga Springs, New York. Specifically, I got a bottle of Messiah Bold: "THE BEER YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR."

I mean, seriously. How could anyone, Jewish or otherwise, pass up a pitch like that? I couldn't. So I bought the bottle, and since it was sufficiently blessed to make it from San Francisco to Vancouver in my checked baggage without disappearing, kept it in reserve for the proper day. With my rent issues resolved, I think today is that day.

The circa-1991 Diet Pepsi glass really adds something worthwhile here, I think.

First off, this beer is dark. So dark, in fact, that visually it appears identical to the Diet Pepsi that you'd expect to be filling that glass up there. It looked thick in the bottle, but in fact it poured with very little viscosity, and when it did pour it left only a whisper of a head fizzing on the surface. That in itself could make it a worthwhile component in some kind of prank on a teetotaler, assuming anyone still uses that word to describe themselves.

They'd have to be having olfactory problems, though. Messiah Bold has a fairly strong woody smell - it seemed most like oak to me, and was in fact very reminiscent of the Innis & Gunn oak aged beers, enough to make me suspect that it was brewed in a similar manner. According to the brewer's website it contains five varieties of malts as well as Warrior, Cascade, and Mt. Hood hops, though this didn't taste particularly hoppy to me.

The taste is musky - it fizzes on the tongue and there's not much of an aftertaste. It does, however, make me want to have a bowl of peanuts or pretzels at my elbow for the nibbling. It's also kosher, "certified to the strictest Orthodox standards" - and here I thought there was only kosher wine. Shows how much I know.

As for where to find this - in addition to much of the United States, which always gets the really interesting beers, HE'BREW is apparently available in Canada as well; both Alberta and British Columbia are marked on the map in blue, but only a list of Alberta wholesalers is currently available. Seeing as how Shmaltz also produces the Coney Island Craft Lagers, which I have seen available in British Columbia, I wouldn't be surprised if HE'BREW gets here soon if it hasn't already.

So do what the bottle says, and drink to life!

ANDREW'S RATING: 4/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #14: Mackinac Pale Ale
  
• #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40
  
• #12: Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale
  
• #11: La Loubécoise
  
• #10: Summer Honey Seasonal Ale
  
• #9: Earthquake High Gravity Lager
  
• #8: Route des épices
  
• #7: Sparks Plus
  
• #6: Hurricane High Gravity Lager
  
• #5: L'Indépendante
  
• #4: Antigravity Light Ale
  
• #3: Nektar
  
• #2: Innis & Gunn Original
  
• #1: Abbey Belgian Spiced Ale

Photo: Toronto's Place

Of all the places I'd expect a park to be named after Toronto, New Westminster wouldn't be one of them. And yet, there it is. Toronto Place Park is a half-acre green space at the corner of Eighth Street and Royal Avenue, dating back in its current form to 1910. It was originally supposed to be a public square, and got its name because when British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, Toronto was the "largest and oldest city of Ontario" - though I really don't see why that has much of a bearing on anything.

Nice little park though.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Tunnel Visions: Bay Area Rapid Transit

Every once in a while, Acts of Minor Treason hops out of New Westminster, lands in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and looks at different ways of getting around on two rails, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.


Generally speaking, public transit systems operate in the background of life. Aside from a few freaks and weirdos like me, people tend not to take much note of them beyond knowing how to use them to get from point to point. In much the same way as the electrical infrastructure or the water supply system, they tend to be an invisible but necessary component of the modern city, remarked upon at length only when there's a perceived problem. It can be argued that a well-run transit system is one that stays out of the headlines.

There's that, and then there's BART (pronounced "bart"). That's Bay Area Rapid Transit, the regional rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Unlike other transit systems, which make big news when trains get derailed or budgets get cut, in the recent past BART has had the dubious privilege of wide-ranging media coverage as a result of shootings by its police force and attacks against its website and the shutdown of cell phone coverage to frustrate protests. It stands apart from the crowd.

My experience with the system wasn't enough for me to really understand how well the system's run, since it's not nearly as friendly to hop-on, hop-off travel as most city transit systems - I had to plan out my BART journeys to a degree that I've never experienced before while riding rapid transit. Still, it was enough to demonstrate the degree to which BART stands apart from the other systems you'll find across North America. Created to replace the privately-run Key System, an interurban streetcar system that served the cities of the East Bay into the 1940s and rattled across the Bay Bridge into the 1950s, today's BART almost seems like a product of a 1970s view of the future.

System

A ten-car train departs Rockridge Station, running in the center median of California State Route 24.

While BART calls itself a rapid transit network, it's really a combination of urban rapid transit and suburban commuter rail. This sort of setup is fairly common in central Europe, known in German as an S-Bahn but relatively rare outside that area. It can be argued to not even be anchored on San Francisco itself; its headquarters are in Oakland, and one of its lines serves the East Bay exclusively. It also provides the only rapid transit access to and from San Francisco International Airport, through a station connected directly to the International Terminal.

Five lines presently make up the BART system. Rather than named after a specific color or route, they're identified by their respective termini in a manner slightly reminiscent of GO Transit's convention. The Pittsburg/Bay Point-SFO/Millbrae line, for example, runs between Pittsburg/Bay Point in the north west and San Francisco International Airport and Millbrae in the south, and while it's colored yellow on maps you won't hear an official source refer to it as the "Yellow Line." With the notable exception of Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge - which was included in initial network plans, only to arouse popular opposition and fear that service would spur sprawl development - BART service extends across most of the Bay Area, and plans are in place for the lines that currently terminate at Fremont to be extended south to San Jose and Silicon Valley... but this isn't planned to happen until 2025, so don't hold your breath.

Most of the BART system seems to consist of at-grade trackage, either in its own right-of-way or in highway medians, though I did observe some elevated portions around Colma and in western Oakland. The main exception is in San Francisco itself, where it runs almost entirely underground; there are additional underground segment such as the Berkeley Hills Tunnel on the Pittsburg/Bay Point-SFO/Millbrae line, which I did not travel through as it is known to penetrate the Hayward Fault and I was unwilling to tempt fate, considering there's apparently slight-but-nonzero chance that a train inside the tunnel during a sufficiently powerful earthquake could be torn apart. Besides, I was busy in San Francisco anyway.

The network's key underground segment, though, isn't under that much ground at all. The Transbay Tube, which is nearly six kilometers long and takes trains four and a half minutes to travel through¹, is an immersed tube on the floor of San Francisco Bay that connects downtown San Francisco to Oakland. As it carries four out of five BART lines, the Transbay Tube is the system's biggest bottleneck - my departure from San Francisco coincided with weekend track maintenance in the Tube, which shut down one set of tracks entirely and resulted in significant delays and complicated train redirections. It's sufficiently different from the remainder of BART's subway network that there's a section devoted just to it on the emergency evacuation instruction posters inside the trains.

BART is also unique in that it's almost exclusively a rail operator - the only exception is AirBART, a shuttlebus service that connects to Oakland International Airport. Aside from that, depending on where your destination is you may end up transferring from BART onto San Francico's Muni, AC Transit in the East Bay, Golden Gate Transit for journeys into Marin, and so on. Transfers to the Muni Metro are easy within downtown San Francisco, as the two agencies share the four northernmost stations of the Market Street Subway.

Two partially-used BART tickets... there's $0.70 US I'll never see again.

Where BART gets difficult, and presents ample opportunities to trip up the unwary, is in its fares. Unlike every other transit system I've ever used, there are no time-based passes available; you can't get an unlimited-use weekly, monthly, or even day pass. The closest it comes for the general public is the BART Blue High Value Ticket, which gives a 6.25% discount on the ticket price - as they're only available in $45 and $60 denominations, though, they're clearly geared toward the regular commuter riders.

BART fare media is available in two forms - the new Clipper smartcard, similar to the Los Angeles TAP card or the Presto card in the Greater Toronto Area, which is accepted by multiple Bay Area transit agencies - and physical tickets, and for visitors to the Bay Area the latter is what you're going to be dealing with. Though some stations have collectors on staff, generally you're going to be getting your ticket from a ticket vending machine. They're fairly straightforward, once you get the hang of them - you just specify the value of ticket you want, insert your payment, and it will print you a fresh ticket with a magnetic strip and the stored value printed on. As you travel through the system, you feed your ticket into the faregate readers at the departure and arrival stations and its stored value is adjusted accordingly. Once it hits zero, the faregate will open but the machine won't return your ticket, and you'll just have to get another one. The TVMs all have fare calculation tables attached so you can tell exactly how much it'll cost go anywhere from where you are. Planning out routes in advance with the fare calculator means you don't have any partially-loaded tickets left over, but it likewise restricts your freedom to tool around the system.

All BART ticket vending machines accept cash, and specialized machines take debit or credit and debit cards as well - there'll usually be at least a couple at every station, but unless a sign has been affixed (which isn't guaranteed) there's no way to tell which is which from a distance, like if you're lined up waiting to use it. What the machines don't tell you is that there are hard-coded restrictions for using credit cards. Any given credit card can only be used to purchase BART tickets twice in a twenty-four hour period; if you attempt to run it a third time, the machine will flash the message "BART Limits Exceeded," spit out a receipt for the cancelled transaction, and return to the main menu with no further explanation. This happened to me at Colma Station, which fortunately was one of the stations that had a collector on duty who was able to explain just what the hell the deal was. According to her, the restriction was put in place because BART has, in the past, experienced issues with people using stolen credit cards to buy tickets. So I can understand the policy; I just wish there had been some warning about it.²

This is another good reason to either plan out your journey ahead of time or pay cash.

Stations

The main surface structure at Downtown Berkeley Station in Berkeley, California.

BART service began in 1972, and so its station conveniently sidestepped the whole "twentieth-century prison bathroom" aesthetic you'll find so easily from Toronto to San Francisco and New York to Chicago. Architectural styles vary from the concrete brutalism of Glen Park to the windows-and-waterfalls of San Francisco International Airport to 24th St. Mission, which reminded me of Vermont/Beverly on the Red Line subway in Los Angeles. There aren't many of them, either, which is indicative of its nature as a regional rapid transit system - as of this writing there are only forty-four stations for one hundred and sixty-seven kilometers of track.

Depending on where you are, BART stations vary substantially in terms of their function. While the San Francisco stations are indistinguishable from urban subways, the suburban stations strongly cater to the commuter population - one such example is Colma Station, where the actual "station" is dwarfed by the attached parking garage. In the four shared Market Street Subway stations, the BART platforms are installed below the Muni Metro platforms, giving BART commuters temporary glimpses of the San Francisco trains rumbling in and out.

While public art isn't ubiquitous in the system, it does have a presence, such as a mural at MacArthur of what resembled a "bubbly peacock."³ Aside from the shared Market Street Subway stations, BART stations don't tend to follow the same design aside from a preference toward center platforms. They may look like they're poorly lit when you're looking out of a train's windows, but this isn't actually the case - the windows just tend to be foggy. On the whole, from the crennelated concrete walls at Balboa Park to high-ceilinged, almost hangar-like ambience at Ashby, the varying station designs lend some welcome aesthetics to the system.

They're not necessarily designed well, though. At Balboa Park, where the Muni Metro's J Church and K Ingleside lines loop for journeys back to downtown San Francisco, it seems as if BART specifically designed the station to ignore the Muni presence. Unlike in the shared Market Street Subway stations there's no signage indicating where to transfer to Muni trains, even though the loop is immediately adjacent to the station building.

As BART tends to run exceedingly long trains, with ten-car consists fairly common even in off-peak hours, the stations are accordingly large. This can become a problem for people who aren't familiar with the BART system, as while there are platform-level system maps, schedules, and information, there are only a few on any given platform; thus, you might find it only to realize the train that just left was the one you should have boarded, and it'll be fifteen minutes until the next one shows up. Plus, that assumes the map will be accurate when you find it - I found one at Embarcadero Station that, rather having been replaced with an updated version, just had stickers affixed noting that the 820 night bus line had been eliminated as of December 28, 2008.

There are also a surprising number of payphones on the platforms. I suppose they represent a vulnerable underbelly in the event that BART again suspends cell phone service within its stations.

Equipment

An aerodynamic A2 car brings up the rear of a train at Colma Station.

If I had to describe BART cars in one word? Angle-y. If they weren't so spacious, they'd put me in the mind of London Underground 1973 Stock trains. As it is, they seem like they're wider than they are high due to their angled walls - I suppose it may be to make the trains feel more open and less like a traditional subway, which would be particularly important when you've got two thousand people crammed into a crush-loaded ten-car train. There's plenty of room for standing passengers, and most of the seats are arranged in pairs of two, with armrests - no benches like on the Mark I SkyTrains, but no single seats either. The windows enhance the feeling of openness in the trains - since there's no roof-line advertising strip, the windows are able to fill all the wall space from the centerline to the roof. Advertisements in general aren't too common on BART trains, limited to the front and back ends of the individual cars - the remainder of the wall space is taken up by windows, route maps, and emergency evacuation instruction posters.

The most striking aspect of BART's rolling stock is by no means universal, but in the world of rapid transit it stands apart - some of its cars have carpeted floors. While I understand this was fairly common back in the day, most rapid transit operators have switched to using floor surfaces that are easier to clean. It's not every day you'll encounter a BART car with carpeted floors; my only encounter came at the very beginning, on the train I boarded to head into San Francisco from the airport. Still, it set a tone that was a bit "higher-class" - like this isn't just some subway.

It certainly stands apart from Muni. Graffiti is specifically prohibited on BART, and while there was some in evidence here and there was far less than on Muni, where every last LRV seemed to have its windows vandalized. The seats were comfortable as well, but whenever I sat down I couldn't help but thinking about the studies that had been conducted a couple of months previously that had discovered a vast array of antiseptic-resistant bacteria and molds clinging to the fabric. Not that it kept me from sitting down, though - subway surfing is a difficult art to master, particularly when you're unfamiliar with the idiosyncracies of a new system with unfamiliar rolling stock. Considering that BART trains aren't automated - even though they could be, apparently - rides won't necessarily always be smooth.

Ease of Access and Ease of Use

These fare gates control access to the BART platforms at Montgomery Station.

So there I was in 24th St. Mission Station, waiting for a train that would take me to Ashby Station in Berkeley so I could check out a bookstore I heard about in the area. A Dublin/Pleasanton train arrives and I let it go, because that definitely doesn't go where I need to. A Pittsburg/Bay Point train shows up and I get on because that takes me where I need to go, right? It's not until the train departs MacArthur and I'm seeing surroundings I didn't see on my original trip into Berkeley that I realize I'm on the wrong train! That's no good. For me, it underscored the importance of knowing exactly where the various lines split off from each other. Either of the lines going to Richmond would have worked for me. Considering that I was carefully planning out my route so as to not leave any money left over, though, I don't know what would have happened if a BART Police officer had inspected my fare while I was waiting for a train to get me out of Rockridge.

Even when you're aware, though, it can be difficult to make sure you're on the right train. The best way is to look at the screens on the station platforms and listen to the highly mechanical synthesized voices that announce the destination of the next incoming train. Some drivers will announce what line you're riding during station stops, but then again some won't. Rollsigns are right out; BART trains have only a single rollsign, a small digital screen on the front car, and even if the train is going slow enough to read it's hard enough to read that there's really no point at all in it being there. Why they don't have window rollsigns on each individual car, as on the Chicago 'L' or the Los Angeles Metro Rail, I have no idea.

There are no automatic station announcements on BART trains. That job is left up to the operator, who might call out the next station but then again they might not. Whether it's because the speakers in your individual car are busted or because they just don't feel like it is up for debate. Still, it feels unnecessarily unfriendly, and just because they were able to get away with it in the 1980s doesn't mean that it should continue to be that way today. That's the sort of thing I expect from penny-ante operations like Barrie Transit; BART is one of the largest rapid transit providers in the United States.

Not everything is as obvious as it could be. Take the stations outside San Francisco: at Downtown Berkeley, I came across a couple of machines that said "Take Only One When Leaving Station" but were otherwise unmarked. What it gave me was a BART to Bus transfer, a timestamped slip that can be redeemed for a round-trip single zone ride on AC Transit or Santa Clara VTA buses. It was another of the small but constant reminders that BART was tightly focused toward the use of locals, rather than people who had no experience with the system. At least that's what it seemed like to me.

As a regional transit system, and one that's substantially geared toward commuters, headways on BART are rather larger than on other systems; while this doesn't matter much in San Francisco or Oakland, it can be something to reckon with when you're going to somewhere more outlying like San Francisco International Airport - SFO/Millbrae trains arrive only once every fifteen minutes outside of the height of weekday rush hours. Though the platform information screens do give updates on how long it'll be until the next trains arrive, sometimes the information seems more like a suggestion or a guess; I can't think of any other way that the arrival times for Daly City-bound trains could be updated from 20/40 minutes to 15/19 minutes over the course of five minutes.

Conclusion

A southbound train blurs its way out of Balboa Park Station.

Despite its hybrid urban-suburban nature, or perhaps because of it, BART is one of the most well-used rapid transit systems in the United States; in the first quarter of 2011 it boasted an average weekday ridership of 357,800, behind powerhouses like the Chicago 'L' and New York Subway but well ahead of the Los Angeles network and even the Muni Metro. If considered against commuter rail networks, BART beats them all - with 354,300 weekday riders, the Long Island Rail Road comes close but not close enough. Nevertheless, it underscores the degree to which public transit is still an underdog in the States; in that same quarter the SkyTrain claimed a ridership of 349,300, with Metro Vancouver's population of 2.1 million next to the more than three million people who live in San Francisco, Alameda County, and Contra Costa County.

At its heart, I feel like BART is a system that doesn't encourage exploration. I know that the reason cities and regions build public transit networks is for people to get to point A to point B, but that shouldn't be the be-all and end-all of their existence. I would have liked to be able to hop on and off BART from one side of the Bay to the other, getting a view that wasn't confined to just San Francisco, but a fare structure geared toward long-distance commuting suburbanites made that difficult at best.

I get the impression that there are plenty of difficulties on BART. One of the first things I saw on entering San Francisco International Airport Station were information sheets in English, Chinese, and Spanish detailing "Your Rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," which "requires that no person in the United States, on the grounds of race, color or national origin be excluded from, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." It was even more jarring than those announcements about how gambling is prohibited on the Chicago 'L' - I saw them and could only think "what the hell has gone on that they feel it necessary to have to state this front and center?"

Problems, no doubt.

¹ This is an approximate figure, timed off my wristwatch, that does not include full approaches; timing began when the train descended into the tunnel surrounded by shipping containers in the Port of Oakland, and ended on the train's arrival at Embarcadero Station.

² It is extremely possible that there were such warnings and I never noticed them, but if that's the case, I did not notice them for the entirety of my time in the Bay Area.

³ Quoting exactly from my notebook here.

Previous Tunnel Visions

• San Francisco's Muni Metro
  
• Phoenix's Metro Light Rail
  
• The Kenosha Electric Railway
  
• Vancouver's SkyTrain
  
• The Toronto Subway and RT
  
• The Los Angeles County Metro Rail
  
• The Chicago 'L'
  
• The Montreal Metro

Photo: The Sign Says Rocks

I couldn't resist taking this photo for one reason - it was a seagull sitting on top of a sign with words, or rather one word. This was down at Second Beach on English Bay during a low tide, which exposed dozens of sealife-encrusted, thoroughly green rocks strewn about on the waterlogged sand. When the tide is in they'd all be invisible beneath the waves roaring in, and those rocks aren't among the things I'd like to stumble upon while treading through the surf.

Or, alternatively, it could just be read as "Seagull Rocks." Because sometimes seagulls do rock.

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