Comments on: Public Transportation: Part II

By: adamahata

adamahata — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:32:45 +0000

Sorry for the delay Steve! if you’re still looking for an answer: You can only use your Bart card on Bart. While Muni pass can be used on Bart in the “city”, you’ll need to buy a Bart ticket anytime you cross the bay).

By: adamahata

adamahata — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:30:32 +0000

My apologies Melissa, no insult intended. I did not mean to imply the environment or surroundings were similar to New Jersey, just how to think about the distance (physically and emotionally) Berkeley is from San Francisco. While Berkeley’s tenor may be more accurately aligned with Brooklyn, the super long bridge spanning the bay (that you can’t ride your bike across) and the need to take the BART (i.e. the Path) vs. a Muni (i.e. MTA) draws a closer parallel to the garden state.

By: melissa kingman

melissa kingman — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:23:40 +0000

I resent you comparing Berkeley to NJ. That is a major insult…

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:01:47 +0000

What I want to know is, if I get a $45 muni pass and decide that I am going to go out of the city, can I use my muni pass to pay, plus pay the difference from the last station stop (embargadero sp?) to where I get off, say, Rockridge.

Or am I confined to having to use a Bart ONLY pass. I take Bart to work every day from the city to Lafayette. Its $8.90 per day round trip for me, still cheaper by FAR than owning a car, insurance, parking, gas, payments, maintenance, etc. But It would be nice to kind of figure out a way to save a few bucks on Bart.

By: peggyluwho

peggyluwho — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:20:41 +0000

There’s a handy fare chart stuck to every machine that has one-way and round-trip fares listed for every destination station.

How is that hard?

By: adamahata

adamahata — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:49:02 +0000

Sorry Peggy Lu, but I must strenuously object. Buying a ticket for the BART is NOT like buying a Metro card.

NY subway rides all cost the same amount regardless of where you are departing and where you want to go. With the BART, you need a magic decoder ring, golden plates and an advanced degree at a two-year college to decipher the rate table.

You then need to enroll in a three-hour course at a local technical school to successfully navigate the electronic BART machine thingy.

In my experience, you sort of just guess how much the fare will be and then hope for the best!

By: peggyluwho

peggyluwho — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:10:13 +0000

Oh, and paying fares. . . you buy a ticket in the station before you go through the gate based on your destination . . . just like buying a Metro Card for the New York Subway.

By: peggyluwho

peggyluwho — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:56:16 +0000

Muni passes ARE available online – https://services.sfgov.org/mtacards/

You can also get them at the TransBay Terminal.

Yeah – New York Subways are better than ours.

BART’s predominant demographic is not people living in Oakland or Berkeley. It’s actually mostly people who live in Walnut Creek/Pleasant Hill/Concord. It’s the yellow line. That is the New Jersey you speak of.

Oakland/Berkeley . . . Yeah, I guess we’re like a borough. We’re not that far away. It’s 15 minutes from downtown SF to downtown Oakland. On BART.

By: adamahata

adamahata — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:13:02 +0000

It IS a bizarro land! Yesterday I saw a woman tap-dancing on a piece of wood on the street corner. Weird.

By: Noel

Noel — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:56:10 +0000

After my incessant complaining about moving back to the “city” Brendan gave me the link to your site. My background in a nutshell: I lived in oak/berk/sf 88-98, then I moved to The City (yes the one with those four other buroughs), and unfortunately I moved back to sf in may 2008.

Re: BART. It’s pure insanity when Californians claim that “New York subways are soooo dirty” yet in the same breath they dare say how great they believe BART is. Carpet…at least the good old MTA can hose down the interiors of their trains. There’s nothing to be done about those foul smelling, flithy, germ infested fabric seats and carpets found in BART trains.

It never ceases to amaze me how Northern Californians try to tout their ‘public transportation’. It’s pretty evident that not too many of them ever got out of the confines of California nor their cars.

Next topic: CABS…actually I better not, otherwise I’ll go on and on, this is after all just a comment on your blog.

Thanks for posting your observations, at least now I know I’m not the only person out here who feels like I’ve moved into some bizarro world that has no concept of effective public transportation.