Time to Ride BART

I checked SFGate this afternoon (morning for me), and seeing the large bold centered headline with the words "blast" and "meltdown", reminiscent of how they presented the 9/11 news, my brain was wondering what disaster had occurred while I was sleeping, but when my brain caught up to the reading, it's not really that huge a disaster.

One possibly cool thing that could come out of this traffic blockage, is that lots of people might have to start taking mass transportation or working from home for a while. And maybe they'll find that it's actually pretty cool.

A year or two ago when gas prices seemed to hit a first psychological threshold, a lot of people at work suddenly bought much smaller cars and shopped around for gas mileage. It also becomes easier to work from home more frequently, because well, maybe your boss and everyone else also want to save gas money and time. More people started carpooling, including myself, and I found that it didn't take that much extra time to meet the carpool. You get beneficial conversation during the ride, or a chance to nap. The only thing I didn't like sometimes is not being the driver, but my carpool-mates were pretty safe drivers.

With all the new attention towards "green" things these days, it's interesting to think about all the elements that coincide to bring new behavioral trends into existence.

If only BART were cleaner. They have this effort going on to clean up the cars, but it seems that they haven't yet figured out that it's the filthy seats that is the biggest problem. They plan to hire more cleaners and get rid of the carpet. But those seats are uncleanable.