How San Francisco Is Designing Its Metro Train of the Future

On September 11, 1972, crowds lined up for hours to be the first passengers aboard the sleek and high-tech trains of the new San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system. In the lead-up to the opening, newspapers had envisioned a gleaming future for train travel in America. One wire report asked readers to imagine "traveling 30 miles in 20 minutes, relaxing in a soft lounge chair, reading a newspaper during the smooth ride." One headline announced "Transit System for Space Age." The new BART trains lived up to that visionary billing: the spaceship silver, the hexagonal shape of the cars, and the plush aqua interiors had a sci-fi sort of feel, like this was the kind of train that would someday whisk you across cities on the moon.

A full 42 years later, those same exact train cars are still on the tracks, and they don't feel so futuristic anymore. A lot more people are riding BART today than during the system's early years. Average weekday ridership is now about 400,000, up from just over 100,000 in the late 1970s. And though the 1972-vintage trains have undergone remodeling and the system has been augmented with a few dozen newer trains, the overall state of BART trains is old, crusty, and cramped. "We have old cars," says Aaron Weinstein, the agency's chief marketing officer. "Our fleet is one of the oldest in the nation."