BART

I gotta say: overall I like BART.

For those not of the San Francisco Bay Area, "BART" stands for "Bay Area Rapid Transit". The name is a bit of a joke at times (it's often not all that "rapid" and has moments when it's not even "transit").

It's an aging rail system that is in dire need of upgraded equipment and expansion of capacity.

This week had more than one snag in it, including a perfect storm of debris across the tracks, some jackass walking on the tracks, a power outage in a station (crippling one of the lines), and - best of all - a crack in the tracks of a main station. Not a small crack, mind you. A good six to twelve inches of track was missing from the footage I saw.

That was not a fun day to commute.

The bummer with the Bay Area is that public transit is a bit limited. Oh, there's the AC Transit buses, I suppose. And there's the odd ferry, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live near one. And there's CalTrain, for the Peninsula dwellers as well as Muni for the San Francisco dwellers.

But BART is the main lifeline of public transit for the greater Bay Area.

We're supposed to get new cars for the trains in a couple of years. I wonder how disastrous the increasingly-crowded trains will be by then?