SF Bay Area: Few options for BART riders who aren't S.F.-bound
When BART went on strike in July, Patrick Sanders' options for getting to work vanished. Sanders, 45, a corporate chef who lives in North Oakland and works in Pleasant Hill, doesn't own a car and commutes on BART. He tried without success to find public transportation that would get him to work by 6 a.m. Except for BART, it doesn't exist.
So Sanders took the advice of transportation officials and tried to find a carpool. No luck. Still not ready to surrender, he tried to make his own casual carpool, standing by the side of Broadway, near the Highway 24 on-ramp with a sign reading "Walnut Creek." But no one stopped for him. Sanders called his boss and told him he wouldn't make it in to work. He did the same on the second day of the strike.
Finally, with no other options and not wanting to continue calling in stranded, Sanders rented a car and drove to work during the final three days of the strike.
While more than half of the 400,000 trips taken on BART each weekday pass through the Transbay Tube, with most beginning or ending in downtown San Francisco, tens of thousands of commuters like Sanders travel elsewhere on the system: from Walnut Creek to Berkeley, Oakland to Fremont, San Francisco to Pleasanton.
Regional transportation officials have plans, admittedly inadequate, to provide a modicum of service if BART shuts down again Monday. But those plans, which include 200 charter buses from several BART stations, bigger transbay buses and more ferries from the East Bay, focus almost entirely on hauling commuters to and from San Francisco.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Few-options-for-BART-riders-who-aren-t-S-F-bound-4891337.php