The Census Bureau says that about 5.1 percent of commuters in the San Francisco-Oakland urban area take the Bay Area Rapid Transit to work, compared with 10 percent who ride bus or light rail and 72 percent who go by auto. So naturally, the media predicted complete chaos if BART workers went on strike, as they threatened to do yesterday.
As it happens, last-minute negotiations helped to avert the strike, possibly because union leaders realized that public sentiment was against them. Of course, we don’t yet know what final deal was reached; historically, transit agencies cave into the unions, but this time BART is feeling such a pinch that it may not have given up too much.
