So, the BART board had a meeting last night. They all said "hooray" to a contract to provide new vinyl seats to replace those nasty-ass blue wool seats that carry the lice and contagions of yesteryear in their folds. "We're getting rid of the diseased seats," said BART director Lynette Sweet, except the contract will only be for 200 rail cars, starting with just 100 of them — like everything else around here, we have to make sure that everyone likes them before the other 100 get installed. As for the design of the new seat cushions, we're a little scared: It's called "Water, Waves and Wine." "It features the bay, wine and the cascading Alamere Falls at Point Reyes. The seats will be jade — the color of the bay in the late evening, according to the designers — with pinot noir accents in a linear pattern inspired by the waterfall and waves."

The pricetag for the seat upgrade, which is only going to cover about a third of the fleet of rail cars, is $1.9 million, less than the $2.6 million budgeted. Look for the new seats to make their first appearance in April.

BART-seats-concept-a.jpg
As for the Friday "late-night" service experiment — which would add just one extra train departing Embarcadero station at 1:00 a.m. — this continued to face opposition, with even its strongest proponents now coming around to the idea of beefing up late-night bus service instead. The issue, as you'll recall, is that BART maintenance crews insist on an exact number of hours for their overnight work, which they apparently cannot budge on, and the extra train at night means that service must start 20 minutes later on Saturday mornings, at 6:30 a.m., adversely affecting low-income people who commute at that hour. The 654 riders that BART surveyed during this morning hour were mostly against the compromise.

It remains mind-boggling to us that BART's maintenance crews can't give up that 20 minutes -- let alone an hour, once a week -- but perhaps we just don't understand the incredibly strict, time-sensitive work they're doing every Friday night.

[Chron]
[ABC 7]

PREVIOUSLY: BART May Have Figured Out Late-Night Friday Service
BART Still Pussy-Footing Around the Late-Night Service Thing

Unfortunately, futuristic and snazzy new cars like this are probably decades away.