William Cline’s Reviews > BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System > Status Update

This guy included comparison photos of downtown San Francisco pre- and post-BART, but couldn't bother to put, you know dates in the caption. Come on, now.

BART ran service for less than a year before suffering its first labor strike, halting service for a month.

It took just two weeks from the start of service for BART passengers to start getting hassled by the mentally ill: “[A] line supervisor [reported] that a man on the platform at the 12 Street–Oakland City Center Station kept throwing coins on the floor and screaming something about how the I-Chung would determine where BART fit into the universe and if the next train was going to arrive on time.”

“At the Powell Street Station, a pedestrian tunnel was supposedly hollowed out that went all the way down to Mission Street. According to lore, this tunnel was intended to provide an underground walkway to the future Yerba Buena Gardens, but it was sealed up and never used.”

Gee, if only someone would write a comprehensive history of BART and uncover the truth of this “lore.” ಠ_ಠ

That slow, squeaky curve between West Oakland and Lake Merritt is because Oakland's then-mayor, John Houlihan, didn't want to relocate a popular hardware store. (The hardware store went bankrupt a few years later, and the mayor went to prison on an unrelated embezzlement charge.) THANKS JOHN.

A station was planned for Albany, but Albany was afraid of the loss of property tax from the land occupied by the station. They asked BART to put the station elsewhere; BART put it in El Cerrito Plaza instead. LOL your loss, Albany.

Oakland wanted a station in Jack London Square, but the BART board rejected it because it would add too much cost and slow SF–Oakland travel time.