BART To Join 21st Century

One of everyone's least favorite things about BART is the lack of information provided when things go down. At the station, those little screens saying when and which BART is coming never actually let's people know if there's a problem. And on the platforms and on the trains, the announcement about what's up either is inaudible or sounds like one of those teachers in the "Peanuts" cartoons. So get this, BART actually is doing something about it.

We love when public transportation officials have a light bulb go off over their heads.

The first thing they want to do is to train the train operators to make their announcements more audible and more frequent. Second on the agenda is fixing the speaker system so even if the drivers give clear and frequent announcements, people can hear them.

But the main thing they're talking about doing is adding video screens to both trains and platforms that give the latest BART news. What they will also show is the million-dollar question (literally) as BART is hoping they can run ads as a way of raising money for all this. After all, buying a whole bunch of video screens and putting them everywhere isn't the cheapest thing. Right now, BART has been accepting offers for video screens to be put on platforms but not in the trains.

We, of course, think this is a fabulous idea and would like to point out that we've seen those types of video screens in Tokyo. Ten years ago.