Baby, you’re always on my mind.
I might bitch and moan about neurotic transit riders, but I must be the worse of them all. I just don’t wear my neuroses on my sleeve, unlike Mr. and Mrs. Chang that insist on changing seats every 2 stops. No, I’m not exaggerating, I saw it done. Wide-eyed and bushy tailed they would lug their baggage (I mean this in the literal sense of course) to different seats, making their way closer and closer to the doors. Why? I have absolutely no idea. I’ll leave it at that.
Now, when you ride transit as long as I have (four years plus), you begin to think about transit. Everything there has to do with transit. But same goes for driving and sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, you think bout traffic. Perhaps I’ll have to start a sister blog to this one as soon as I get my car out of the shop.
I say with a pretty strong confidence that I know how things work. I know where to stand when there is an eight car BART train. Or when there is a four car train. You want to know too? Become elite like I? Know where to get on the train to avoid the tourists and your Appleseed families?
BART platform 411. The yellow tiles, stay off of those. But they are fun to walk on when you have thin shoes on. Oooo texture. And in those yellow tiles, there are black tiles. Those black tiles mark approximately where the doors will be when the trains stop. 1 BART train car has 2 sets of doors. So, 2 sets of black tiles equals 1 BART car.
So, a BART station can hold up to 10 car train. So that means when a 10 car train comes, you can get on anywhere. Avoid the middle, cause that’s where most of the stations dump out their passengers after they have gone through the ticket taker. For a 9 car train, its a different story. Sometimes the train operator will go to the very front leaving a space in the back, or vice versa, so just go with your gut. Does the operator that that twinkle in his/her eye? Or are they looking pissed? Either way, you’re safe enough if you go one car back on either end. Now, for an 8 car train. What’s 10 minus 8?
Well come on Einstein, its 2. And in this case, the BART operator will stop the train in the middle of the station, leaving 1 car spot on each end, where the other cars would be had it been a 10 car train. So it goes for the rest of the train sizes. Now, I’ve rarely see a 7 car train. I see 6 often, so in that case you’d leave 2 car spots on each end. 5 train cars are common as well, and like 9, you have to guess where the operator will leave the odd spot. And hopefully you know by now where a 4 car train would sit. Yes, yes, 3 car spots on each end. I hate 4 car trains. I can’t get away from brother and sister pointing to mom and dad every stop of the way where they are at, and asking ‘Is this our stop? Is this our stop?’
<volume increase>
So now I’ve made an incredibly long entry about how to count BART trains. Told you I thought about transit too much.
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