Isn't everyone glad the Bay Bridge is reopened? Well, maybe not BART -- they're reporting a 13% increase in ridership over Labor Day weekend, including 10,200 riders who used the overnight service. Despite that promising-sounding 10,200, BART continues to say that it makes no financial sense to run BART 24 hours all the time; they say that it costs $300,000 to run the trains overnight, and they only made $30,000 on overnight fares this weekend. (They're making up the $270,000 from Caltrans.) Hey BART, we have a thought -- maybe if you had 24 hour service all the time, more people would use it and it wouldn't just be this weird one-off thing for one solitary weekend?
Caltrain, for its part, is reporting the highest ridership in its 140-year history and has announced a goal of going electric by 2012. This is all so they can take the trains underground and run Caltrain into downtown SF. Yay.
However, in the Caltrain bad news department, a bicyclist riding under the lowered safety arm got hit by a northbound Caltrain at around 5:30 in Redwood City today. It was probably an accident, but the coroner's investigating. In terms of the commute, Caltrain says it only caused a 15-20 minute delay, amazingly.