MetroRiderLA

And should we? Would any of you use it?

Copied from their press release:

Earn rewards while you ride
10.30.2007

Apply for your BART Rider Rewards MasterCard®, issued by Chase, and start earning points redeemable for something you use every day, BART tickets.

The BART Rider Rewards MasterCard® works just like an airline frequent flyer card, only better! Cardholders have the opportunity to earn points redeemable for BART tickets.

BART is the first major urban public transportation agency in the country to provide customers with a program like this.

OUTSTANDING BENEFITS FOR CARDHOLDERS
The BART Rider Rewards MasterCard® allows cardholders to earn points faster than most other rewards cards. Cardholders earn five points for each dollar spent on eligible BART purchases: at BART ticket vending machines, tickets purchased online through bart.gov, linking the BART Rider Rewards MasterCard® to a BART EZ Rider smart card, and reserved parking permit purchases made at bart.gov/parking.

In addition, cardholders can earn two points per dollar on purchases made at qualifying entertainment locations and one point per dollar on all other purchases.

* Points can be redeemed for BART tickets or cash.
* 2,500 points earns a $25 BART ticket
* 4,500 points earns a $48 BART ticket
* 6,000 points earns a $64 BART ticket
* 5,000 points earns a check for $50
* 10,000 points earns a check for $100

There is no annual fee.

APPLYING FOR THE CARD IS EASY
Just apply for the card by using Chase’s online application or call Chase at 1-866-482-8180.

Whew! What a trip it has been. A four-day vacation in the Bay Area led to a bumper crop of material for MetroRiderLA, allowing for a 10-part miniseries. It was a joy to write; hopefully MetroReaders enjoyed reading the series.

Exploring San Francisco and Santa Rosa was tremendous fun. Four days was not enough to see and experience all of what just these two cities had to offer. Even an extended vacation would still show a mere fraction of all what the Bay Area has to offer.

With dozens of bus systems, three urban rail services, several commuter and tourist ferries and three busy train services, the Bay Area shows Elhay where Southern California what we are supposed to need. Right?

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[Note: The entry's time was set too early and it was released incomplete. The time is reset to reflect the complete version.]

BART is a two-rail monorail.

The thesis is cold but succinct, but its simplicity is apt for a rapid transit system that is more complex, more complicated and more burdensome than it has to be. Even BART’s successes and strong points must be couched with qualifiers that almost cancel out its merits. BART is a true regional network serving four counties, but it’s a special district that has prerogatives different from — and usually in conflict with — the communities it serves. BART’s ridership demonstrates its success, but expanding service using its proprietary equipment — from its broad gauge to the one-of-a-kind cars and automated control system — is unnecessarily expensive. BART can command a premium price for service and boasts a remarkable farebox recovery of over 50 percent, but the logic behind the prices is twisted to incomprehensibility (demonstrated below). BART is often held up as a model for how a comprehensive mass transit system should be built in the future, but the farsighted designs of space-age planning are now considered archaic and impractical.

Might as well build the guideway as a monorail at this point. BART has much in common with monorails — way too much. BART, with two rails, is working proof of the folly of monorails. BART was conceived and designed by engineers with no reference to other disciplines and dynamics of passenger transportation. It was very much a product of the then-contemporary fashion of the scientific community: The past is a closed door, and the future begins today. Everything about BART seems to emit an aura of public transportation of, by and for people with utter disdain for it. It’s a train meant to make all other vehicle before it be eaten, digested and defecated by history. The engineers and planners were given free rein to reinvent the wheel and the stone age while they were at it. Rights of way were plentiful, but the new cars could not run on them, so virgin guideways were built. The Transbay Tube is a testament to ingenuity, but it replaced an equally effective and comprehensive streetcar system that ran above the water on the Bay Bridge. Plus, the whole point of the wider gauge was so the trains could cross the Golden Gate Bridge, which was later ruled to be impossible physically and politically — Marin County opted out of the BART district when it had the chance in 1962 and even four decades later maintains the Bay Area’s worst public transit. The district itself reflected a “the good is the enemy of the perfect, but the good-enough is the enemy of the good” compromise, where a new agency was created because none of the existing systems at the time would merge or cooperate to bring BART to fruition. So a separate entity was created parallel to available bus and train systems, but the prerogatives of BART and transit agency managers were different and in direct conflict.

Sir Peter Hall cited BART as one of five examples in “Great Planning Disasters”, published in 1980. Almost 30 years later, BART is 104 miles and has a weekday ridership of over 300,000. That’s a catastrophic success.

Go, go gadget bahn.

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Twilight descends on the Bay Area Diaries. The penultimate journey was admittedly brief, and was done primarily to get another stamp on the Bay Area Diaries’s multimodal Sanfran passport. Metaphorically speaking. (A literal passport does exist; it’s sold by Muni in 1- 3- and 7-day increments and gives a discount on Ghirardelli chocolate.)

For the third time, the scene is Fourth and King streets. The arrival to and departure from Sanfran was via Megabus. The second time was returning to the glass sliver station for afternoon voyage on “Old Ironsides”, the 145-years-young and still-useful-to-society rail corridor known today as Caltrain.

What is the dream and ambition of BART planners and foamers — getting the space-age train to circle the Bay — old-fashioned 19th-century technology said, “Thanks, but no thanks. Now let us get back to work.” Caltrain, handling the western flank, makes the San Francisco-to-San Jose leg spoken for.

The future is here and now, and has been under the Bay Area’s nose for seven generations. Between the Bay Area’s two largest cities, Caltrain goes everywhere. And stops everywhere, too. The abundance of stations make Caltrain slow going. The Baby Bullet, which is the focus of this entry, pulls out all the stops — well, most of them — and makes a rush hour commute between the two cities a contender.

On paper, anyway. The January 17 journey on Train 362 was very fast. Then again, this trip didn’t cover anything south of Millbrae. Had there been more time, this 10-part miniseries would have been a Greek epic, with the transit odyssey including entries on the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s bus and barren light rail and the ruins of the once vast samTrans duchy. Any transit agency rebellious enough to begin its name without capitalization is worth a write-up.

All aboard for this quickie commuter expedition.

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The Bay Area Diaries takes a noticeable departure from the usual quality and tone brought to the entry on Muni’s bus operations.

The Diaries, and L.A.-oriented Ride Reports published on MetroRiderLA, takes pride in copious attention to the fundamental details of the ride. What time did the bus arrive, what was the number and make of the bus, what line is ridden and how many passengers were aboard. The pedantry’s message: We care.

There will be no effort to maintain that level of detail for Muni buses. Muni earned heaps of well-deserved scorn from San Franciscans for management and operations that seemed to have been mailed in — by Pony Express. If a transit agency, through concerted inaction or lazy inaction, could treat its riders this way, the Bay Area Diaries’ feedback loop senses that it can act the same way with its readers. And will.

Fortunately, this entry is going to be lightly patronized since it’s about buses and most people couldn’t give a crap about them in the first place. Rail’s another matter. That attracts a lot of attention and very passionate viewpoints, so commentary must tread with caution. Muni buses, though, get the tritest of all literary and discussion devices: A Top 10 list. Unroll your eyes for a second and click below for MetroRiderLA’s Complete Muni bus Info and Rider’s Guide.

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The Bay Area Diaries is over the hump of the blog entry arc, and the focus is now on transit services within the city of San Francisco. Ahem, The City of San Francisco.

Since Part VI deals with San Francisco proper, and rail in particular, expect more people to start showing an interest in the series. San Francisco Municipal Railway’s three rail services get some play: Muni Metro, the F Market line and, of course, the cable cars. All this and a celebrity appearance.

This $11 Muni passport is free with the click of the “continue reading” button.

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