Free Republic

Blended route” for the way to San Jose—and beyond. California’s ongoing bullet train project is late, over-budget, and politically assailed everywhere from Sacramento to the White House, but the nearly $80 billion venture still (pardon the term) chugs along, as the High Speed Rail Authority board voted Tuesday for routes that will eventually connect trains to the Bay Area. Out of four route proposals, board members favored a Merced-to-San Jose connection designated Alternative Four, one that “blended configuration between San Jose and Gilroy in the existing Caltrain and Union Pacific Railroad corridors before continuing to a dedicated high-speed rail alignment...

OAKLAND (CBS SF) — A BART rider was placed under arrest Monday after the suspect was accused of pulling out two chainsaws while on a train in the East Bay, authorities confirmed. A BART commuter shot video that was posted on Twitter Monday afternoon that showed the man waving around a chainsaw on a train. The person posting the clip said it happened on a train traveling from Fremont to Richmond. BART officials admitted to KPIX 5 that they had never seen anything quite like it on the transit system. Jalina Bluford, the woman who took cell phone video of...

Watch where you sit on San Francisco Bay Area trains – it could be painful. Conductors there reportedly have taken to the trains' PA systems to warn riders about hypodermic needles being left on seats by transient drug users as San Francisco fights an uphill battle to clean up thousands of syringes discarded each month all over the city. “Please look around you for needles before you sit down. There’s at least one needle in car 1551 and there may be others. Thank you,” a conductor said Thursday, according to Buzzfeed technology reporter Caroline O’Donovan. She said the warning was...

By early Tuesday afternoon, no one but Nia Wilson’s killer could know for certain why Wilson and her sister were singled out of the crowd, stabbed in the neck, and left for dead on a BART station platform Sunday evening. But for many who mourned Wilson’s death, the evidence had already stacked up. The randomness of the attack, the rumored meeting of a white supremacy group in Oakland, and the races of a black victim and alleged white perpetrator all carried the trappings of a hate crime.

Police in the Bay Area are searching for a 27-year-old man who they say brutally stabbed two sisters at an Oakland train station Sunday night, leaving one of them dead. John Lee Cowell is accused of stabbing 18-year-old Nia Wilson and her 26-year-old sister in the neck and body around 9:30 p.m. at the MacArthur Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Oakland, according to BART police. Wilson died of her injuries at the scene, while her older sister remains in stable condition, officials said. News of the killing stoked public concern that a hate crime had been committed. Cowell is...

As BART’s ridership surged three years ago, along with the number of homeless people lingering inside its downtown San Francisco stations, the transit system doubled down on custodial work — and some of its janitors started cleaning up paywise. One system service worker, BART’s title for janitors, made a little more than $271,000 in 2015, with $162,050 of that in overtime. A year later, two other BART janitors joined him in collecting more than $100,000 in overtime pay in a year. Three years later — after the tale of the high-earning BART janitor became legend and the transit system, and...

OAKLAND (KPIX 5) – Members of the BART Board of Directors were shocked on Thursday when they saw video obtained by KPIX 5 that showed intravenous drug users blatantly shooting up in a corridor at Civic Center Station. But despite that visceral reaction, there were still questions as to what authorities with the transit system were going to do to make changes.

If you commute on Bay Area Rapid Transit, you’ve likely seen them – women with babies begging for money. The women are often seen swaying precariously on the rolling BART train, baby strapped to their chests, approaching riders with a cardboard sign, such as: “No job, 4 kids, please help for food.” Then there are also men and women who hand out packets of Kleenex along with almost identical typewritten notes. If you don’t donate, they take the Kleenex and the note back. And so they beg, around the stations, and more uncomfortably, on the trains. Are they really as...

BART resumed providing the public with daily crime logs Tuesday morning after weeks of criticism over why the agency replaced the updates with an interactive website that gave minimal details of incidents. The move by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system came a day after it released data showing a significant increase in sex crimes on its property over the first six months of the year. Last month, BART replaced the crime log with a website called CrimeMapping.com, which offered scant information on crimes that occurred throughout the system. But on Tuesday, Bevan Dufty, a BART board director, said the...

Near the end of Thursday’s BART Board of Directors meeting, the transit system’s elected leaders found themselves in the unusual position of staring at something not on the agenda: a fresh puddle of urine. BART directors usually meet twice a month in a clean, quiet, windowless board chamber in Oakland, but this time they took a field trip to Powell Street Station to view its “challenges” — homeless people sleeping in hallways, intravenous drug users, rundown conditions, dirty floors, and elevators and escalators used regularly as restrooms.

About 70 percent of the people reported were black. Which, according to the East Bay Express, is proof positive the app was racist, because how could anyone imagine black people break the law more than white people or Asian people? Surely anyone who has seen the movie Fruitvale Station, based on the killing of Oscar Grant at a BART station, knows that white cops are always picking on black people for no reason what so ever; and that is also why so many black people are arrested, convicted, sent to prison, released and from prison, and return to prison in...

In the last three months, there have been at least three robberies on BART involving groups of teenagers. “I think people are genuinely concerned — they are fearful about the stories that have come out about the recent attacks, the assaults, the thefts,” said Debora Allen, who is a member of the BART Board of Directors. April 22: Forty to sixty kids boarded a train at the Coliseum stop and robbed seven passengers, beating up two; June 28: A group of four kids assaulted a passenger and made off with a cell phone at Dublin; and June 30: A woman...

Regardless of whether government tolerates broken windows or broken turnstiles, it always leads to broken heads in the end Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) passengers discovered what happens when government ignores the “Broken Windows” theory of policing in favor of the left’s “Let It All Hang Out” philosophy. “Broken Windows,” introduced by James Wilson and George Kelling, held that a community starts to deteriorate when political leadership de–emphasizes enforcement of “quality of life” ordinances.

The "weekend cops" beat is not the most glorious job in journalism, but it is the easiest. All you have to do is check into the newsroom, grab a portable scanner, go to breakfast, visit the cop shop, ask a few questions, check the police blotter, eat lunch, scribble a few paragraphs about a car accident, then meet your fellow scribes for an after-work libation. But you do have to do one thing. Always listen to the police scanner. Every newspaper has its own horror story. The one related to me during my first turn on the cop beat in...

BART police are beefing up patrols at Oakland stations after dozens of juveniles terrorized riders Saturday night when they invaded the Coliseum Station and commandeered a train car, forcing passengers to hand over bags and cell phones and leaving at least two with head injuries. The incident — the first of its kind in recent memory — occurred around 9:30 p.m. Saturday. Witnesses told police that 40 to 60 juveniles flooded the station, jumped the fare gates and rushed to the second-story train platform. Some of the robbers apparently held open the doors of a Dublin-bound train car while others...

A recent string of robberies on BART trains took a frightening turn when dozens of juveniles swarmed an Oakland station over the weekend and commandeered a train car, forcing passengers to hand over bags and cell phones and leaving at least two with head injuries, witnesses told the transit agency. The incident — the first of its kind in recent memory — occurred around 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Coliseum Station. According to a police summary, witnesses said 50 to 60 juveniles flooded the station, jumped the fare gates and rushed to the second-story train platform. Some of the robbers apparently...

BART, whose trains carry riders between a number of Bay Area sanctuary cities, will consider adopting its own policy protecting undocumented immigrants from the federal government. The BART board decided to consider a measure proposed Thursday by directors Nick Josefowitz of San Francisco and Lateefah Simon of Oakland. “Recent studies indicate that there are over 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in the Bay Area. Many of these immigrants ride BART every day,” Josefowitz said, adding that they should feel safe aboard BART.

Last November, a nonprofit called Transparent California reported that a BART janitor named Liang Zhao Zhang made $271,000 in a single year — over $162,000 of that in the form of overtime. Now, a KTVU investigation into Zhang's hours and pay revealed that he disappears into a storage closet at the Powell St. station, sometimes for hours a day. In order to observe how Zhang spent his sometimes 17-hour work day, KTVU requested surveillance video from BART. On it, they saw Zhang entering a storage closet twice in one day, once for 54 minutes and again for 90 minutes later...

https://twitter.com/stephansonic "some guy with a machete just attacked a guy in the civic center @SFBART station by the market & 7th entrance"

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – San Franciscans will have the opportunity Monday morning to write supportive notes to each other in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president. The so-called Wall of Empathy will be available above ground at the 16th Street Mission, 24th Street Mission and Montgomery Street BART stations from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. “In the wake of Tuesday’s election results, many of us have been experiencing grief and shock in various forms,” event organizers Muriel MacDonald, Tamilla Mir and Melissa Goldman said in a statement. “The racist, sexist, xenophobic rhetoric that was a hallmark...