Today, Bay Area Rapid Transit formally retired the last of its original rolling stock that had been in service since the system opened in 1972. The occasion was marked by speeches from BART officials and a farewell excursion between McArthur and Fremont (where the very first train had run on September 11, 1972). I was there and rode the last train.
The hood cap of one of the original A cars
>>1992565FUCKIN NERDS!
>>1992567Your friends are FUCKIN NERDS!
>>1992466>bart>brings africans 'round town
>>1992573Kek
Representatives from the Western Railway Museum, who will be taking ownership of three cars that have been earmarked for preservation.
>>1992573Cute
Nice, thank you sar for you doing the needful. Did you get some souvenir or free gadget?
>>1992713They were auctioning off the nameplates of retired cars but I didn’t feel like waiting in line for an hour
You take too many uninteresting and bad photos
>>1992466Cool thread anon, kinda crazy how long those old trains have been around. Won't miss the old interiors though, I never felt comfortable on those plush seats imagining what type of unspeakable horrors it had experienced and absorbed.
>>1992755Imagine how many people visit the ER due to being lacerated by drug pipes stashed in the cushions each year
THEY SHOULD OF NEVER CLOSED THE KEY SYSTEM REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>>1992829forgot pic REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>>1992755i ride bart every day almost, and i dont understad why the new trains have seat cushions.it should be hard plastic seats.
Those things will be around forever.
i ride bart every day, damn i rode those old shitty trains for a long ass time. i still remeber the first time i got on one of the new ones.
>>1992466Neat
>>1992468noice
>>1992750no u
>>1992755The decline of plush seating in trains is the ultimate "this is why we can't have nice things". High trust societies like Japan still have comfy seats.
>>2007309Yep, you can't trust anyone to do anything. Even the new BART trains have cushioning but it's much thinner, and a number of times I have seen the fabric on the seats deliberately slashed, clearly with a knife or box cutter or something. I don't understand why they even added cushioning at all. They should have just put bare hard plastic seats or bench like the New York subways have.
OP here, my apologies for being MIA for a few months. Have been looking for new work and it’s taken a toll on me.Anyway, I’ll drop my remaining pics over the next few hours, days, or so.
Onboard the third-to-last train
>>2007311The new cushioning might as well not exist desu. It’s absolutely awful
>>1999290what is this
>>1992829>should of
>>2009548An episode of the 1974 Planet of the Apes TV series, which apparently was a thing that existed.
>>1992755Why do the homeless do this?
first day of operation of EMU trains on Caltrain today. it's finally happening.
>>2011895because if they can't have nice things, nobody should
>>2009655>newfag
>>1992466I think it's kind of amazing how BART began operations not even 15 years after the key system was closed, design and construction must have started less than 10 years after its closure. What an impressive waste of resources.>>2013011wow and it only cost six gorillion dollars and took 10 years amazing
>>2013071My understanding was that the Key System was pretty much allowed to die because BART was already being planned as its replacement and most of the infrastructure would have become redundant anyway.
How is riding on BART or those 1950s looking cable cars (not the super old tourist ones) these days?I lived there like 14 years ago and I was always sort of amazed at how relatively cheap and uncrowded they were despite the city being so fucking crazy even back thenthey were usually somewhat clean too, it was the stations that were public urinals
>>2013011Have they pre-banned 4chan on the Caltrain's new wifi?
>>2017435>caltrain wifi in the new trains has download speeds of 250 megabytes/secondthat's much faster than what I have at home.
>>1992466Brit here? That's the San Francisco tube right? I've never heard anything good about it.
>>1992466These old BART cars are cute and iconic. It's a massive mistake to not make newer rolling stock look almost exactly like the originals instead of that early 2000's Japanese minivan look they came up with. Tourists coming there expect the BART to look a certain way instead of generic like every other metro system.
>>2018335>Tourists coming there expect the BART to look a certain wayThis is delusional, no one cares except a few hundred transit enthusiasts.
>>2018335>Tourists coming there expect the BART to look a certain way instead of generic like every other metro system.Tourists are more worried about being assaulted by the local wildlife than what type of car they are in
>>1992830Key System Bridge Units FTW
>>2015029The Key System was one of the victims of the GM/NCL Streetcar Conspiracy. The Key System was one of the companies taken over directly by National City Lines, and then the streetcar and interurban routes were allowed to wither on the vine and eventually die by 1958.
>>2015029That would have been incredibly stupid, BART is barely more efficient than the Key System, and if anything you could have joined the bridge railway with new subway tunnels on the Oakland side to convert it to full heavy rail and it would have been much cheaper than BART.But apparently it is true that they were quite bent on getting the trains off the bridge so they could split up road traffic onto the upper and lower decks. Which is still pretty ridiculous, they could have just had three lanes in each direction on the upper and lower decks, and then two segregated bus lanes on the upper deck, which would have worked better than the six lanes on top and three bus and truck lanes on the bottom. tl;dr auto lobby was too powerful
>>2018715>GM/NCL Streetcar Conspirac
>>2015042I'm assuming you're referring to the MUNI historic street cars that run from fisherman's' wharf down market (https://www.streetcar.org/)? They're super ez to ride just tap clipper and it costs the same as any other muni fare. >it was the stations that were public urinalssame as it ever was
>>2017553>SF tubegod I wish we only had 1 transit system, instead we have picrel. BART is more like an S bahn connecting commuters into downtown whereas MUNI is how to actually get around the city
>>2021253>>2017553forgot picture but here's the total map of bay area transit and the like 20+ agencies we have
Departing MacArthur
>>2023704>MacArthurBased that's where the best korean food in the bay area is. Also cool keeping the thread alive, I wish there were more threads about bay area transit
>>2023717> I wish there were more threads about bay area transitPeople on 4chan hate the Bay Area. I use BART nearly every single day and have for many years. It’s going to be sad when it likely goes bankrupt and shuts down within a few years because of all the utterly useless tech faggots doing their utterly worthless jobs from home that will cause BART ridership to never recover. Doesn’t matter the new faregates, more cops, they could never have a single homeless or drug addict or criminal on the trains ever again. BART could become a spotless beacon of public transit with no crime, no fare evasion, perfectly clean and safe, and ridership will still never come back because the tech faggots ruined it just like how they ruined the rest of this region.
>>2023808Why scapegoat productive people for the problems that criminals and criminal-enabling politicians and their policies have caused?
>>2023809I don’t know what you’re referring to. Before Covid ridership was like half a million a day. Now it’s half that. How are criminals and politicians causing that?
>>2023811>I don’t know what you’re referring to.I think you do
>>2023817No I really don’t. Covid exposed that BART at its core was always just a work commute subway system. Once work commuting substantially disappeared due to working from home, ridership completely tanked. It’s recovering somewhat, but it will never come close to what it was before Covid. The Bay Area could go full republican and institute draconian policies for Bart with fare enforcement, policing, substantial jail time and fines for any homeless drug addicts found in the system. Bart could become the safest and cleanest subway in the world. And it will still never recover ridership because the Bay Area is a car culture who works from home at their worthless tech jobs.
>>2023817>le black peopleYea undeniable that crime and junkies caused a lot of issues and drove people away from bart, but in the past year riders have been feeling safer and there's been far less crime/squalor both in my experience and as measured by surveys and crime reports>>2023833Agree that in the bay specifically work from home is a serious issue for transit systems; caltrain and bart both suffered nasty ridership drops while more local systems like MUNI recovered strongly. I do think we're heading in a good direction though with more transit oriented development near stations that will feed people into the network organically (although 40% of the population are convinced that building a condo in a 10 mile radius from their home is equivalent to a nuclear holocaust). Also, at least with caltrain, leadership has seen the writing on the wall and is going hard on outreach to youth, elderly, and leisure riders to try and diversify their ridership base
>>2023843MUNI recovered strongly because it’s in the only extremely densely populated city in the region and is at almost every single street corner in San Francisco so you can get pretty much anywhere in the city you want to go. It’s not fair to compare it to Bart which stretches from Richmond to San Jose, Dublin to San Francisco. It hits almost every big city in the east bay but people still don’t really use it as leisure transport because these cities are too big and you would have to add a bicycle, or Uber, or carpool to the end of the Bart trip to get where you’re trying to go.I actually probably ride Bart the most of anyone you’ll ever find in the Bay Area. I don’t have a car so I use it to get all over and use my bike with it as well. I ride on weekday commute hours, I’ve ridden regularly on weeknights after 9pm, I’ve ridden regularly on weekends. It will really piss me off if/when Bart shuts down, and it’s going to be single handedly because of the tech faggots. Although I think it is pretty fitting. The tech industry is what ruined this entire region anyway and sucked all the soul and character and community of of the region, now they have also ruined the only great public service it has.
>>2023845i regularly take bart but ill be driving a lot more instead now that theyre curbing fare evasion. public transit should be cheaper than driving
