Look, we love BART. It's carpeted and quiet, it allows one to escape from Berkeley with the greatest of ease, and (more importantly) it isn't Muni. The first Bay Area Rapid Transit trains began operating for commuters in 1972 on the Oakland-Fremont line between the MacArthur and Fremont stations. As Oakland Tribune reports, "Service on the Richmond line began in January 1973, followed by Concord in May 1973. The Transbay Tube between Oakland and San Francisco opened in August 1973, and the Transbay crossing to Daly City opened in September 1974."

But you know where BART doesn't go? Los Gatos. Or Santa Rosa. Or the Outer Richmond. Cartoprager Jake Coolidge, if you recall, came across a proposed fantasy BART system that would have seen our transit system stretched into nine counties.

Back in 2001, Coolidge wrote:

My Master’s thesis research explored the unlikely second wave of rapid transit planning that occurred at mid-century in the United States. One of those plans, from 1956, proposed a massive rapid transit system for the nine counties of the Bay Area. This transit diagram imagines what the Bay Area Rapid Transit system might have looked like had that vision ever come to fruition. Of course, the chances of this system being built were less than slim. But the response to this map on blogs including Ten Times One, Laughing Squid, Muni Diaries, and Mission Mission make it clear that it the dream, for some of us, is a tantalizing one.

Sigh. What could have been but never was.

Update: Some have confused this map as BART's original plan. This, sadly, isn't the case. These are merely proposed ideas — ideas of a dreamier life where one could take BART to wine country and then ride home in a fume blanc-induced blackout.