Listening: Sun Arcs, by Blue Lake
Playing: The Last of Us Part II (somewhere on the road to the aquarium)
I do some of my best thinking on trains. Always have; there’s something comforting and romantic about riding the rails, something that puts me in the right kind of headspace to Have Some Thoughts About Things. Even on Amtrak, even on a rush-hour express MTA train1.
Back when we were both in college, my friend
2 once wrote a poem about us taking a Metro North train to New York while we were riding it. It’s one of my favorite memories of traveling with someone:I was remembering all this as I was watching Vincent Woo’s film Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride.
It’s both a love letter to the everyday miracle that is the Bay Area Rapid Transit and a brief history of how exactly it came to be. Tunnel Vision is essentially a real-time journey on one train line, filmed from a GoPro Woo stuck to the front of a train.
“Picture this: you’re a Bay Area teenager, and your parents have grudgingly conceded that in order to go to summer school to study for the SATs, you’ve got to be allowed to take BART on your own,” Woo begins. “The landscape whizzes by, as if you’re gliding through space like some kind of no-clipping ghost. Still, one thing bothers you,” he says. “You can only see to the side. Even though lots of interesting stuff happens inside the BART cars, you still wish you could see what’s in front of you.”
Tunnel Vision is just that: a view from the front of the train. It’s what BART’s train operators see, day in and day out. But it’s not a perspective that the rest of us have ready access to. I ride BART about once a year, when I visit my parents in Northern California; it’s always pretty neat. Trains generally show up on time, and it makes getting around the Bay pretty painless — unlike, say, driving a car.
Woo peppers his film with interviews — with a senator, with a train operator — and one of his points is how incredible it is that this thing got built at all. And he’s right. Between a lack of political will for big infrastructure projects and the sheer amount of red tape something like that has to get through to even break ground, it’s not something that could ever happen today.
Which I find depressing. BART’s the kind of thing that’s an unambiguous good for the people who live in the Bay Area. It’s also just like any number of other projects around the country that would benefit everyone in a community but will never get through a committee. Because making any kind of progress in this country requires you to convince people who are ideologically opposed to progress that change can be a good thing3.
All that said, Woo’s ride on BART was a nice reminder that good things can sometimes happen. Even if those things are infeasible today.
As always,
Bijan
P.S. If you live in WV, NM, LA, WS, IA, MN, MT, FL, CO, AL, CT, IN, DE, HI, SC, VA, KS, VT, MS, NH, OK, IL, ID, or RI, get in touch with your senator and tell them to stop supporting the misleadingly named “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA) — it’s a draconian bill that’ll royally fuck up the internet. Techdirt has a bunch of good writeups on the whole thing that you can read right here.
Fun lore: one minor reason I was excited to move to New York was that I’d get to ride the trains all the time.
See also: the opposition to congestion pricing in New York.
God I love BART. I used to be able to fall asleep in SF and wake up between Orinda and Walnut Creek, where I usually got off. A true superpower. And then I did it again last year, ten years after last regularly commuting on the train. I was impressed with myself.
And we should be impressed with trains! BART for all its shortcomings is impressive. A kind of technological sublime, but also a civic and social one. Falling in love on public transit, yes. Falling in love with public transit, yes.
Remember when the BART social media editor melted down and reminded people that the train might work better if the Bay had grown more densely, or if taxes had helped keep maintenance up to snuff? Good times.