Pictures show an eerily empty toll plaza, an eerily empty bridge, and stuffed BART trains. Meanwhile, a car thief blew through barricades in San Francisco and led police on a chase over the closed bridge, and most people in San Francisco today completely forgot there was any problem at all, since it’s a gorgeous, sunny, warm 1st of November.

You can text the word ALERT to 45227 (which is KCBS radio) and get a text message when the Bay Bridge reopens.

Update, 3:20 pm: The 511.org site now says the bridge will be closed “through Friday,” but “if” the bridge remains closed, BART will run hourly all-night service to the East Bay tonight and Saturday night. Here’s the all-night BART details. Note that only 14 stations will be in operation overnight.

Meanwhile, a UC Berkeley engineering expert was being quoted in news reports saying the design of the first fix — which was done while crews were cleaning up from the mammoth Labor Day re-route — was “not correct” and left the span vulnerable to complete collapse in the event of an earthquake. It was nothing more than a Band-Aid, he said.

An Associated Press article quoted a driver as saying the accident yesterday had caused her to lose “so much confidence in the experts, the millions of dollars that are being spent to reconstruct and build a new bridge,” referring to the decade-long project that will eventually replace the entire cantilever section with a suspension bridge.

The failure was probably caused by continuous heavy winds this week, CalTrans said. Wind continued gusty today while a new repair was being worked on. Asked to describe what the new design was like, a CalTrans spokesman said, “Think of a big belt around a piece of wood.”

Somehow that image doesn’t comfort me.

Local photographer Thomas Hawk made a very interesting post on his website today, reporting his “unscientific survey” of what commuters were doing on his 9 a.m. BART train from MacArthur to Embarcadero this morning. He didn’t ask anyone what they were doing, relying on his own observations. Most people were “doing nothing,” he found; others he broke down into “other” and into several categories of reading. See his post for the stats.

I love the idea of noticing what others are doing, and recording it unobtrusively and reporting it. It sounds a bit creepy when put that way, but there’s nothing wrong with doing so in a public space. I’d love to see people do this exact thing from time to time: walk the length of a bus or train and compile the same stats, or different ones. It’s just as valuable and interesting to report on skirt lengths, how many people smell, or the number of people wearing glasses.

That said, it’s interesting that Hawk happened to sort his survey by media consumption, and that he expresses surprise that “so many of the people on BART were simply doing nothing (this included sleeping as well).” Of course, BART, and public transit in general, is a great place to read. I’ve sometimes gotten on a BART train and ridden all the way to the end of the line and back just to have a comfortable reading experience uninterrupted by phones, people I know, my cats, or trips to the refrigerator. But those who were sitting quietly “doing nothing” may have relished the chance to do so as much as the people who were devouring media. As someone who sits in front of a computer all day and, often, much of the evening, I find it nice to have a time where I can’t do so — this includes driving, going to the ballgame or the symphony, and yes, “doing nothing.”

By the way, I just noticed that BART has a page on its website where it collects blog and Twitter posts about BART.

When I was in Bangalore in 2007, I was struck by the utility of the ubiquitous motorized rickshaws, known locally as autocabs or just autos:

Any visitor to Asia has seen these things, since they’re in every Asian city. And they are cheap and they are everywhere. When I mentioned them to one of the panjandrums of the Bay Area public transportation scene, the executive director of one of the NGOs that lobbies for transportation policy, he was dismissive. “Oh, the tuk-tuks,” he said. “They clog up the streets, and they pollute. That’s not what we need. We need commuter rail that goes everywhere.”

Oh, fine, Mr. Bay Area Transit Boss! So I’m on my way to work in the morning. Never mind how I get to the BART station; I take a train across the bay to, say, Ashby. Now that I have alighted at your gigantor 1970s-era concrete monster BART station, I need to get to work, 2.3 miles away. It’s too far to walk. I could wait 20 minutes for a bus, and then that bus would take 20 minutes to poke along for the two miles, making my trip to work take over an hour… And that’s why I drive every day instead.

 
Yes, we need rail. It would be great, for example, if there were another BART line running through Oakland and Berkeley, with stops at the Grand Lake cinema, College and Telegraph, Sather Gate, North Gate, and the Gourmet Ghetto — call it the Yuppie line, and color it pink. It will be great when we have electrified CalTrain (target: 2015), and a bullet train from L.A. to downtown S.F. (target: 2018), and the Central Subway (target: 2016).

But then what do you do when you get to your stop? What if you have three heavy bags of groceries and live eight blocks up a hill? What if you just live three blocks from a bus line and you’re old, or injured — how do you shop? Sure, you could call a taxicab, and wait for twenty minutes, spend five dollars, and have to deal with a pissed-off driver who is mad at you because the short trip hardly registers on the meter and he’s having enough trouble today making his gate fee — if he shows up at all — and who, because he’s pissed off, won’t help you with your bags.

And why does it take twenty minutes? Because we’ll never have enough taxicabs in San Francisco — the whole issue is too political, and no mayor or public transportation commission has had the political will to fix the broken system. We have to have an alternative that works, goes door-to-door (or door-to-transit hub), won’t take two decades to put in place, and — extra benefit! — employs hundreds or thousands of people.

Take the worst part of autorickshaws: they’re smelly and noisy. Get rid of the smoky two-stroke engine, and electrify the things. On a battery, they’ve got enough juice to go 35 mph, and that’s more than enough for city driving. Maybe the driver will have to switch out the batteries once or twice during the day — fine, put battery switch-out stations all around the city in any of the hundreds of parking lots and vacant storefronts. (You’ll need the infrastructure eventually for the day when cars have the same system.)

Now, the other objection: that by being small enough to squeeze between larger vehicles, the autorickshaws contribute to traffic congestion rather than solve it. No — they’re going to be replacing cars on the road. Have you ever been to Rainbow Grocery on a busy day or evening? There are cars stretching in a line out of the parking lot, down 13th St., and sometimes around the corner onto Folsom. Since most of the people who shop at Rainbow are hippies or former hippies who would like nothing better than to grasp a green alternative, I’m betting they’d jump at the chance to take a less-polluting form of transport to shop. Multiply that by the thousands of shopping trips city residents take every day. Shit, just two days ago I drove one mile from my house in Bernal Heights to 23rd and Mission to pick up fish tacos at La Corneta. I was extremely lucky to find a parking place within a hundred yards, but if I take an autocab, there’s no need to find a parking place, no need to run my car for the two-mile trip, and now the Mission St. buses can get on their way without my car in the way. Yes, the thousands of autorickshaws would take up space on the roads. But a lot less than the taxis we have now, and a lot less than the cars they’d replace.

They’d also get cars off the road by increasing the attractiveness of large public transit systems like BART, because they allow me to get to and from transit hubs easily.

Oh, yes — I could ride a bicycle to and from BART too. But BART famously hates bicycles, banning them from the system during commute hours. I mean, hello!? CalTrain is better; they devote a car to bicycles on many trains, though the car often fills up. And I did ride a bike when I worked at that company 2.3 miles from Ashby BART — ten years ago. I’m now 52 years old; frankly, a bicycle is no longer an option for my commute.

So — I wish we had autorickshaws.

Oyster Point [map] in South San Francisco on a hazy Sunday morning. The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission has approved ferry service from Oakland to Oyster Point; service could begin as early as late 2010.

The new route is only one of several planned, using new, greener vessels, in an expansion of commute options in the next few years. (Did you know there was something called the Water Emergency Transportation Authority [WETA]?) See all the proposed routes.