BART

Monday evening, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition held the second of its first three scheduled "Bike Talks," a series it plans to continue to foster discussion and help shape its advocacy.

If passed by the BART Board this summer, the November ballot will have a $3 billion-plus bond on it to help BART upgrade its infrastructure, including about $400 million for new train controls and signals. BART's communications staff released some graphics to help voters understand exactly how much additional capacity that will buy, and what that will mean from a rider perspective.

BART's power surge problem, which had been frying train electronics and took some 85 cars out of service at its height, has gone away and service is more or less back to normal. Here it is from BARTs own statement:

The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) sponsored a meeting Wednesday afternoon in their Oakland office to discuss the need for a new Transbay crossing. Some 60 people attended the panel discussion, which lasted roughly two hours and looked at all imaginable challenges to developing, funding and building a second rail crossing from San Francisco to Oakland.

BART seems to be digging itself out of a month's worth of power problems and delays on the Pittsburgh/Bay Point Line. But, no doubt, it's only a matter of time before BART gets slammed again, given the age of its fleet. Indeed, its rolling stock is so old, the agency is reduced to searching for spare parts on eBay.

When BART was built in the late 1960s, it was the most advanced subway system in the world. But what was once state of the art technology is now almost obsolete and unable to cope with the ever increasing demands made on the system by booming ridership.

BART's woes continued this week, with no train service this morning at the end of the Pittsburgh Bay Point line. That meant bus bridges between Pittsburg Bay Point and North Concord. But some good news came down in the early afternoon from BART's communications department:

For years now, civil engineers have given America's aged infrastructure a "D" grade and warned that if we don't do something soon, it's simply going to fall apart.

As regular riders are aware, BART trains are quite old. Some have been running for more than 40 years, and date back to when the BART system first started operations in 1973. And although additional cars were purchased in the 1980s and 90s, the average age of a BART train is 30 years.