Being part of the largest BART Ridership to date..

As someone who unexpectedly spent the 1st full night of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge closure at my friends place in Berkeley, i had no idea what to expect when i got off my plane at SFO that arrived from LAX, and board my usual 10-car Pittsburg/Bay Point train to MacArthur (with a small side stop at Powell St to load my Disabled Translink card) and then transfer to a Richmond Train for Downtown Berkeley station. One way of putting it, controlled chaos. The cars in the middle were standing room only, while as usual the cars on either end of the trains were empty. Somehow i think the true regular riders on BART know where to sit. Now i only come up to the Bay Area a couple times a year, yet i know every single aspect of the transit systems here like the back of my hand. So when riding also the next day, i saw more people riding transit for the first time, then regular commuters like myself. In other cities, i dont label myself as a tourist rider and such, i label myself as a commuter like everyone else, just trying to get from one place to another. I expected much worse on the 2nd day of my visit, but nope, just a usual back up into the city under the transbay tube. 5 min delay cause 3 trains are ahead of you to "land" at Embarcadero Sta. is really nothing to cry over about. BART IMO runs like an Air Traffic Control system, albeit on a smaller scale and such. A couple things that id like to see get done rather soon are, making sure that the add-value feature for Translink cards are installed in the current BART Ticket Vending Machine's before 2Q of FY10, also looking to keep the EZ-Rider Smart Card program BART has, intact. For those riders who do not take any other transit than BART, it appears they are doing just that, by keeping the Parking Feature, and adding stand-alone validators to stations that have parking. All in all, this, and other changes will make riding more of a breeze than anything else. I was proud to be part of the 480,000+ riders who took BART over the first 2 days of the Bay Bridge closure. In a next blog installment, im going to talk about my return to Seattle after a 5 and a half year hiatus, and riding their new Light Rail called Central Link. I also have plans on tackling the CTA, Pace and Metra in further entries. Also, of course my current mode of transportation around my home, San Diego MTS.