Mission Mission

The only catch is that you’ll have to wait until 2015 to try them out.  SFGate reports:

The cars will sport a sleek modern look, cleaner seats, digital information displays, even air conditioning that works on hot days.

Each car will have three doors to speed boarding, but will still have 60 seats, all made of an easier-to-clean material. Seats will be reconfigured with standard seating in rows at each end of the car, and seats situated more informally around standing areas and places for wheelchairs, bikes and luggage in the center.

Looks like those cranial liminal survey scans conducted on BART passengers have finally paid off!  But will they allow bikes on board during rush hour?

[Pics via SFGate]

Previously:

• BART bike parking is not secure
• Why No Bikes on BART Escalators?
• How Bikes on BART is Broken

It was like the 1996 Summer Olympics all over again, minus leotards, plus anonymous challengers, and all in an arena traveling up to 80 miles per hour. Thank you, BART gymnasts, for the best BART ride ever!

[Amazing photos via Jess]

I had my bike stolen out of 24th and Mission Street BART last Wednesday. Seen it? Hey, I know it happens. It’s my second stolen bike.

The thing is, I thought I had done everything right: I brought it in the gate, ran a cable through the wheels, and secured a newer mini Kryptonite U-lock through the frame. But when I got back everything was gone. I had to double check that I didn’t get off at the wrong station.

I think the lesson is that BART isn’t a safe place to park your bike. You may think you’re protecting your bike from outsiders, but you’re also protecting thieves. The bike parking area is in a secluded corner out of view of the operator booth, the station is noisy, and people are too hurried and desensitized to weirdos to take notice of strange activity. In retrospect, someone could take a generator and angle grinder down there while wearing a bear suit and no one would pay any attention.

There is also plenty of time for a thief to monitor the bike parking patterns. For me, I was parking it there for 8 hours every weekday as part of my commute. Someone could have easily figured out the best time to strike over the course of a few days.

I give props to the BART police for showing up quickly to take my report and offer their condolences, but unfortunately they said getting any security footage for such a large window of time and secluded corner probably wont happen. So much for vigilante justice.

I took away the following advice from them:

1. Write down the serial number of your bike. You’ll need it if your bike is ever recovered. Seriously, do it now. Put it in your phone or something.
2. Powell street BART is most secure. Due to people traffic and location of the bike area, they have had the least amount of theft there.
3. Don’t park a bike in public for more than a couple of hours if you expect to keep the bike. Get a beater.
4. Write BART about improving bike security. They don’t listen to the BART cops, they do listen to you. You can do so online here.

That being said, it could not have been easy for the thief to break my U-lock. It would have been time consuming and noisy. I offer these suggestions to BART:

1. If you haven’t already, put a security camera on the bike area.
2. Relocate bike racks to somewhere within line of sight to the operator booth.
3. Station agents should do regular scans of the station areas. Grandma can wait 5 minutes for help with which end to stick the ticket.
4. Improve hospitality towards bike commuters. Station, car, and time restrictions make it really hard to justify traveling with your bike. Caltrain figured this out to an extent. We can do better.

Best of luck out there against these savages.

[photo by Improv Everywhere via Fixed Gear Blog]

What if BART actually ran everywhere you needed to go?  Imagine getting on the train in the Mission and going to grab some spicy noodle soup from the Richmond, then taking it to Petaluma to catch a show at the Phoenix!  Or going wine-tasting in Napa without worrying about a designated driver?  That’s the idea behind this provocative BART diagram by Jake Coolidge.

And as long as we’re dreaming, let’s get rid of the carpet, extend service to 24 hours, and have a dedicated bike car too!

[via Chris Clark, Muni Diaries, 10x1]

Scope #opbart for the latest.

UPDATE: Montgomery and Powell are closed too.

This photo reminds me of a post posted and then quickly deleted by Sexpigeon a few weeks back. Luckily, somebody reblogged it before it came down:

The book pictured here is about the incomplete and possibly Quixotic attempt to standardize wayfinding signage in the New York subway. To the systematizer, the picture above is a woeful thing. To an inexperienced patron of the trains it is a stew of new-city delirium. Its opposite is the airport: consistent, coherent, bearing no particular mark of no particular maker. Airports are pretty cool, but airports most certainly are not rad, not anymore. Rad is a matrix of cuocoo passion projects and half-baked repairs to those projects. Rad ages weirdly: first poorly, then heroically.

Rad! Read on if you like. It’s long but worth it.

[via Lily]

[via Antagonist]

Reader Marcus just got in touch via a comment on our Contact us page to recommend a video he shot over the weekend. Here’s how it all started:

‎Hey Terresina, you should totally just like, stand on your skateboard and when the train stops, you’ll like, go forward.

Was it a solid hypothesis? See for yourself:

Hey 16th St. BART: if you don’t want people skateboarding on your site, don’t build a bitchin’ skate park there.

Also see exhibit A.

[via lurk.skate.sf]

[via Everything Forced]