The original MacArthur to Fremont section of the system opened Spetember 11, 1972, not 1971, as stated in this video. Richmond and Concord lines opened in 1973, not 1972, as stated in this video.
Growing up in the 70s, I remember riding BART from Fremont into the City. As a kid, it was very exciting! I always wanted to be in the first car where I could peek into the operator's cabin to see how fast we were going. I lived for the Transbay Tube and was almost peeing my pants when the speed read 80 mph and I could see the blur of the lights rushing by. Yes, the Transbay Tube is very loud but I wouldn't have it any other way. It just makes me feel like a little boy again. That BART "whine" is like music to my ears. In the 1990's I worked and lived in the City and never got used to the cold damp weather there, so many times I would my MUNI pass to get on BART at Montgomery after work to go to Oakland West. There, I would sit on the platform and read the paper or a book and bask in the warm weather while I could see across the bay as the cold damp SF fog descended on the city. When I was ready, I'd get back on the train into the city to get home. As long as I never left the BART station outside of SF, I didn't have to pay as MUNI passes included BART travel between the SF stations. So, if I entered at Montgomery and exited at any SF station, it was within the MUNI pass rules. Another thing that always fascinated me is the very different cultures between BART and MUNI. BART riders used to stand in line to the right of the black door markers on the platform to allow people to easily exit the train and for an orderly entrance into the cars. People stood on the right on the escalators so people could rush by on the left. Everything was so polite and orderly. MUNI on the other hand, was always a survival of the fittest type of culture. As a kid, MUNI used to terrify me. You had to fight your way out of the train and push your way into the train because everyone was trying to get off and on at the same time. BART isn't as orderly and polite as it used to be up to the early 2000s.
I caught this time too in the late 2000s. BART was awesome. I hope that we can make it like that again! And it looks like the BART board is realizing that people want BART to get back to normal too given that they've introduced police foot patrols, fare inspectors, and security guards/ambassadors! Let's hope that BART keeps improving like it has been for the last year!
For anyone wondering, the choice to build BART using a broad gauge of 5'6" (1676mm) was a purely practical decision to give the trains more stability in the high winds that could be encountered whilst operating on elevated viaducts. If not for this move away from 4'8½" (1435mm) standard gauge' the rolling sick would have had to been build heavier, dulling acceleration, increasing energy usage & requiring large motors & brakes.
I believe there was some politics involved with this choice as well. The powers that be didn't want to ever be forced to share rail trackage with Amtrak or Cal Train or Muni or anybody else. Can't share tracks if the track gauge is incompatible with everything else.
@@Geotpf Could you please provide a source for this claim? Because I find it quite dubious due to the incompatibilities beyond the track gauge. Amtrak/Caltrain's double decker rolling stock would almost certainly be too large for the BART Loading Gauge. While MUNI's cars would likely physically fit inside BART tunnels, the two systems have difference electrification. MUNi runs off of 600VDC Overhead Catenary given its Streetcar origins, whereas BART utilizes a 1000VDC Third Rail.
@@TheWolfHowlingDoing a little Googling and I found some mentions in a Quora thread about this. The suggestion there was to avoid freight train conflicts more than Caltrain, etc. In any case, this was never the OFFICIAL reason; more like rumors behind a bunch of different stated reasons.
9:30 IMO, Constructing the Antioch extension using standard gauge track and DMUs might have been Penny Wise but it was a Dollar Foolish solution. Should the residents on eBART ever grow weary of this forced transfer & demand that proper BART service be extended to their stations, the agencies will have to rebuild the line, widening the running rails & add the electrified third rail, and I doubt that the costs would have gone down in the meantime. Plus, there's the CapEx was to purchase the Stadler GTW trainsets & continuing OpEx of purchasing increasingly expensive Diesel fuel & maintaining the DMUs.
In essence, they thought that eBART would continue on freight track to Brentwood, but after the host railroad pulled the rug from under BART it was just too late to reconfigure the project and return to BART gauge. But there is a silver lining! BART now can expand to Brentwood and beyond on old freight track. And now BART has experience running DMUs for the also planned wBART (Western Contra Costa BART) on the Capitol Corridor right of way. Now they are well set to expand with new lines over freight tracks!
@@TohaBgood2we nedd to expand BART on the old freight right of ways with both quadruple tract that can allow BART have real express service in East County. Also, that right of way in the freeway median should be used by Amtrak and ACE to get commuters from the centeal valley to SF and the inner east bay.
I love the Berryessa station, it's very luxurious and modern. It is a satisfying ride past the Great Mall and Tesla Factory plus after Warm Springs there is something I call mini Trans-Lake a tube that goes under Lake Liz and it doesn't disturb the park goers too. Delays happened because of shoddy materials as said by NBC Bay Area. Don't even get me started on how angry I was when I heard about it.
Dude, thank you for this series. I’m excited to go through all this, and watch and learn about the other transit options in the Bay Area. Seriously giving me so much knowledge 😭😭
I have not ridden BART or Washington METRO in a long while. Both had carpeting. And I remember the cloth seats on BART. It does sound gross in today's mindset, but I don't remember anything bad. I've seen far dirtier airplane carpets than I ever did on the two systems. And it helped with the noise. I have not ridden on either since the carpets were removed, but all the videos with the vinyl flooring, there's a harshness and echo that was never there before.
Great succinct video! I hope that one day BART will encircle the Bay... And run under the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County which is technically feasible but you know... politics...
Interesting info about Gauge---I've never heard the BART gauge referred to as INDIAN GAUGE, until this video. Any reference I saw to gauging was BROAD GAUGE.
Great overview! Always a treat to see one of your videos pop up! BART is quite the expansive subject. I don't know how you'll cover all those crazy TOD projects all over the place, especially the semi-obscure planned stuff. But I look forward to watching it!
I’ve been riding bart two days a week for the past few months from Berryessa to Oakland. It’s been working out well. It allows me to avoid driving on 880 and 680 which are really jammed up in the afternoon. My major complaint is the Berryessa station is too far from the freeway. I take 101 from home and it’s like up to 7-10 minutes of city street driving to get to the station. Also I wish they could do something faster to stop fare evasion. I see it all the time.
Propulsion detail on the original cars (for those wondering): Each of the 4 axels on each car were powered by a 1,000W 250hp DC motor (each car had a total of 1,000hp). A full consist of 10 cars was 10,000hp, slightly over 700 feet long, and could run well over 100mph if not governed by the BART's max 80mph limitation. It was the new full system in the country using block chain ATC. Good documentary.
you mention your dislike for highway median stations.. I find the most pleasant station on the system to be Lafayette despite it being in the 24 median, it's surprisingly quiet (even more so than del norte a few blocks away from the 80), and I don't know how they do it, but I wish they'd do the same at MacArthur and (god willing) Rockridge as those stations are a bit hellish to wait at for more than a couple minutes
~12:30 you say something about tighter turns -- the wider gauge is for increased stability. The narrower the gauge of a track, the tighter the turns can be, which is why narrow gauge is often used in mountains or river valleys, so wide gauge really does the opposite. If you think about it in terms of distance between wheels, on a wider gauge, a turn of a certain radius will more greatly affect the distance a wheel has to travel around a curve compared to the other. There are some interesting videos about it that you could watch
Pitt Center and Bay Point are just as bad imo. Orinda gets a slight pass with the freeway being split by it's parking lot, so not as much traffic noise around
Believe me, rockridge and Lafayette are good ststions that are walkable and confortable compared to a light rail line found in LA thst runs along a freeway median.
Some corrections, Colma and Daly City are in San Mateo county, so BART did have a presence there originally, at least the Daly City bit, Colma came a bit later, the expansion into a little chunk of San Mateo county (still the vast majority of it is unBARTed) was largely pushed by the desire to get BART to SFO which while San Francisco owns the land where the airport is it is not in San Francisco it's in San Mateo County, South San Francisco/Millbrae (SSF is not part of SF regardless of the naming). This push to SFO created the Tanforan station which was originally thought would be useful to bolster customers to the mall of the same name that is literally right next to the station... well malls do malls thing and that's looking to be redeveloped but it could still be useful if they redevelop the way they say with biotech industry + housing, the Millbrae station is actually a useful station and exactly for the reasons that are mentioned that it hooks up with a Caltrain station, but I don't think BART is going any further south on the peninsula the linking with the Caltrain station pretty much gives transit opportunities down the peninsula all the way past San Jose, while it would be nice to have BART complete the loop at the bottom of the bay that's never happening. Also the names on the outside of the trains do not show the next station, they show the "last" station" name so you know which line to take (in addition to the colored square).
September 10 2023 was the last scheduled run of the Legacy Fleet train on the Red Line as a 10-Car Set to Richmond Station. I was worried about not seeing them again after I took a ride during that time until 4 days later when I saw one that came back from the dead on the Green Line (It was an 8-Car Set). Over the past few weeks or months prior to Late February 2024, I ran into some of the Legacy Fleet trains that are filling in for the Fleet of the Future trains that are unable to run in scheduled service including the part when I ended up riding Rohr A Car 1164 multiple times. 1164 is one of the 3 Bart Legacy Fleet train cars that’ll be preserved at the Western Railway Museum along with Rohr B car 1834 & Alstom C1 Car 329. Not to mention the Rohr A & B Cars originally have the Westinghouse DC Chopper Control (Just like the C Cars) until Adtranz/Bombardier refurbished them between 1998 & 2002 (Adtranz was bought out by Bombardier in 2001) as well as retrofitted them with IGBT VVVF.
Nice video. You could have mentioned that the BART to the Oakland Airport went ahead of other projects like the AC Transit BRT route that were long programmed by the MTC-
Great video! Man... What could have been if bart had looped the bay and connected to SMART. Let me know if you need any footage around the bay. May be able to assist.
San Mateo pulling out really fucked over the future of BART. The state should have overruled the citizens and plowed right through. Now we're paying for it many times over and it's seriously a horrible decision regarding the state of transit in the bay.
To be fair, BART was replacing the Key System and the interurbans that the Bay Area used to have. The Bay always had excellent rail transit and was an innovator in terms of passenger rail.
FYI the more common door count I see is door per side. As the vast majority of systems only lets you use door on one side at a time that is the much more important measure than total number of passenger doors.
I saw the original BART Map multiple times, seems like an urban pipe dream compared to now and yes the C-train is a lot older than BART with the OG name Peninsular commute. Milbrae and below don't want the BART to impede with their existing train. The system we know as Caltrain is over 150 years old. Started with Iron horse like steam trains, then went through a plethora of older steam locomotives then F units then Gp9s then to the locomotives we know now. Second of all the Peninsular commute went to Monterey before 1971 and now they are trying to replace the abandoned Monterey/Santa Cruz section with a light rail.
Not quite. BART didn't build some of the originally planned sections but they did build some sections that weren't on the original plan at all. Overall, we got nearly as expansive a system as was planned but not necessarily with the exact same lines. And in some places other systems were built up to BART's level (or beyond) to offer essentially the same services. Caltrain is now being electrified and will match BART's old 15-minute frequencies. That makes Caltrain little more than just another BART line with transfers to other BART lines at both ends and at Millbrae. Muni Metro stepped up to become a quasi light metro with the Market St subway extending all the way to West Portal and now a second north-south subway completing the picture in SF. What VTA light rail is adding is these days is mostly elevated or grade separated making it as fast as a regular subway/metro everywhere but that one awkward downtown section. So yes, we didn't exactly the same lines that were on the original BART map, but we got overall a much larger and better electric rail system in the end. And the new extensions and service enhancements will only make this system more useful in the coming years.
@@TohaBgood2 also want to add the light rail proposed in Monterey and Santa Cruz is proposed by their respective transit agencies. I like the idea of light rail in Monterey because it may connect both tourists and locals alike
@@Cupertinorail Yep! That will be incredible, especially after Caltrain speeds up to 110 mph! You'll be able to get from Santa Cruz or Monterey to SF in under 1.5 hours by electric-ish rail! My only (minor) gripe is they're not planning on running the Monterey and SC trains over the Pajaro-Watsonville mainline rail section so that you can seamlessly travel from Monterey to Santa Cruz. If only they could make that through-running possible! It would be a completely different ballgame for transit in the whole region! Like a mini-BART S-bahn just for SC and Monterey. I'd even settle for a DMU line like SMART if they were to somehow make it through-run! But maybe this can be added later as a commuter option.
@@TohaBgood2 They go back and forth on whether SC and M will be connected or not. My hunch is that Monterey will end up following Santa Cruz's lead and connect them.
@@TohaBgood2 yes a dmu would be dope for Monterey but I have a hunch they might buy used trams or railcars. San Jose VTA trams get old in the 2030s and new vehicles cost a lot of money. The Monterey county government wants their tram to be open by then too.
BART also recently introduced anime mascots in an effort to attract younger ridership. Irregardless of my opinion on anime, it’s certainly an interesting campaign, and one that might only work somewhere like the Bay. Epic video, can’t wait to see the rest.
Honestly they should’ve just built the yellow line extension with full Bart tracks. They’re already thinking of extending those tracks to Brentwood and maybe even one day stockton. 🤷♀️ but then I guess it would be the longest “subway” service ever lol
@@shubdotclub Regional rail systems are not subways. They travel far outside of the cities they serve. BART serves tree major cities, a dozen midsize ones, and a twenty more small ones. And this on an area that's the same size as about half a Netherlands. That's not how subways/metros work. That's an S-bahn.
@@TohaBgood2 I apologize, but the quotes I put around "subway" implies irony, though it did not seem like it was conveyed properly. I am aware of what BART is, people here sometimes call it colloquially a subway because in SF it is subterranean for most stations :)
A 30th street station would be awesome. They’re planning to build a station in south Fremont called Irvington as an infill, and I’ll talk about that in a future video of this series
@@todgod another in "central" milpitas called calaveras as well, yes? I also heard rumblings of an albany-area station a few years back which given the density around there it'd be pretty dang good
I just wanted to say thst even though freeway-median stations are not the greatest! I find Rockdrige to be a good example of a center median stations. By the way, BART has astonishing views regarless of the time of the day!
santa clara county backed out if bart saying it was financially unviable abd they could do better, then founded VTA. turns out bart is one if the most cost effective in the US while vta was ranked 3rd worst on the continent
Dude! I rode the upholstered and carpeted cars before things went south, sometime after 2000. It was nice. That people are such pigs we can’t have carpets is the problem.
It's not just that people are "pigs". The carpets and wool seats were just not a good idea to begin with. This type of interior design was supposed to look "bougie" for the time - "the future of rapid transit". But it just didn't work out. Carpets and wool seats are insanely expensive to keep clean. It's a pointless expense that was not justifiable. I am glad that BART had the sense to drop it. They were just wasting money trying to keep all that ridiculous textile crap clean. It was always going to be an insurmountable task. But that's fine. BART was deliberately built as a very experimental system that was chock full of innovations. Many of those did not pan out, but a surprisingly large percentage did and then spread to other systems all around the world. Pretty much everyone adopted BART's automatic train control and it became the de-facto world standard for a few decades. Everyone adopted BART's magstripe ticketing system. Everyone adopted the fin gates. A ton of copycat "regional subway" systems were built following BART's lead. The cloth seats and carpets not working out did not hamper BART's ability to revolutionize rapid rail.
@@TohaBgood2 You’re wrong. It worked for what, 30 years? When I moved to SF in 1994 the wool upholstery and carpets were in place and well maintained. The cars looked nice, appealing. Things went south rapidly around 2000. Quite quickly sears got stains and stained carpets didn’t seem to get cleaned. Cuts to maintenance? The cars still looked good with the black hard floors but by then eating and drinking on the trains were too common and tasteful upholstery was unable to hold up. As it is, the bug juice green plastic seats in the new cars are already showing the black filth. People eat seeds and think it’s okay to toss the shells on the floor. They bring meals aboard and leave the bowls, the cups and remaining sauce and starch on the floor. For some reason you seem inclined to accept this slovenly behavior rather than demanding people grow up and stop trashing public spaces
@@Gryphonisle It didn't work from the very beginning. The carpets got dirty within the first year and they couldn't clean them up fast enough. There is a reason why all the metros/subways have water-washable interiors. BART is 100x cleaner since they switched to waterproof interiors that they just pressure wash on a regular basis! The cars actually smell clean every day in the morning! It's a fantastic improvement.
I've been riding since the 1980s and I really miss the sofa seats which are far more comfortable then the new hard seats. I have a tendency to nap. Nothing wrong with getting rid of the carpeted floors but I wish the new cars' seats were softer. I think the problem is related with the increase in fare evasion which brought in the anti-social types who break the rules and are looking for trouble.
Why on god's green earth would you get hyped about the old A/B cars? I for one am glad they're gone. They stank, they were always dark, and they were stuffy if you were going from the East Bay to SF. The new cars are really good for health reasons. I have bad lungs I much prefer the new ones. They don't stink.
