☆ A journey into BART's underside—and what it teaches us

Opp Now co-founder Christopher Escher takes a ride on BART, only to realize he's wandered into an anarchic, intimidating environment where regular citizens feel powerless to respond to menacing behavior. An Opp Now exclusive. 

Halfway through my journey to Oakland, I realized I had lost it.

My nerve. My gumption. My cojones.  

Call it what you will, but I realized that I had been undone.

Here's the scene:

I'm taking BART to SF from San Jose's shiny new train station in the Berryessa neighborhood. It's 4.00 P.M. on a blustery Tuesday. Easy to park in the basically vacant garage, only three of us waiting on the windswept platform.

Berryessa is the end of the line for BART, so you would think that lots of people would be getting off as the 10-car train arrives. But it's only a trickle, so the rest of us board near-empty trains. 

Walking into my car, you notice it right away: the sweet pot smell—lots of it. There's a group of three guys in their mid-twenties at the end of the car who look like they've been living rough: long, stringy, matted blonde hair, carrying a lot of their belongings with them, and that glassy-eyed, high look. I figure they are just yo-yoing up and down the East Bay to stay warm and dry on this inclement February afternoon.

All of the new passengers sit down at the other end of the car.

By the time we reach Hayward, the car only has two more passengers. My brain is trying to calculate: What is the cost per passenger per ride on this system? (FWIW: I figure it's north of $50 subsidy/ride; no wonder BART is going broke.)

After South Hayward, the biggest of three dudes walks up to the big system map, which every BART train car has. Looks at it. Pulls out a big magic marker—the kind that consultants use when they're taking notes on butcher paper in tech team-building sessions. And then slowly, deliberately, completely defaces the map with his pen. He draws curlicues, flowers, sexual parts, breasts. I think a volcano. 

For a minute, I consider intervening and saying, "Hey, dude, that's not cool." So I look around to my few fellow passengers for their support. But they all shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes, suggesting, "This happens all the time. I'm not gonna do anything."

I pause, consider—and do nothing. 

And that's when I feel it: I have begun crossing my own private Rubicon—into wimpiness. 

Two hours later, on the way home, at the West Oakland station, another group of yo-yo-ers joins the near-empty, Berryessa-bound train. Smell of pot, personal belongings, etc. Not to be outdone by my northbound Rivera, around Fremont, one of them stands up, drops his trou, and takes a big long leak right there in the middle of the BART train. 

After he relieves himself, his friends have a laugh, gather their stuff, and vamoose into the next car. I look around for the other riders, and they're all gone, too. It's just me, all alone, in this big empty BART car—a silver metallic beast slouching its way towards San Jose, as little rivulets of pee slowly work their way down the center aisle towards me. Rubicon, indeed. 

When I talk to my wife and friends about the experience, they all say: "Hey, you did right. They could have beat you up. Maybe they were high. Maybe they had a knife or a gun." And most commonly: "Why were you taking BART anyways? Just drive."

I hear all that, but I am not assuaged. I realize that I have become numbed, incapacitated, intimidated. Five, 10, 15 years ago, I would've stood up and made a stand. I would've thought: It's my responsibility to push back on this sort of public behavior. It's my job to be part of the solution, not an enabler. I am not an island, I am part of the whole—all that. 

But last Tuesday, I didn't. Maybe I've just been beaten down by the passionate intensity of Woke journalists telling me my discomfort is just white patriarchal privilege. Maybe I'm numb, have just seen too much. Maybe I'm just weakened by a culture that looks to government to solve every social ill.

End result: I need a U-turn. I need to rediscover conviction, community, and citizenship. Because if everyone acts as gutlessly as I did last Tuesday on BART, we will only have ourselves to blame when we notice, far too late, that our neighborhoods, our county, our proud Bay Area, have gone off the rails.

For more on how the homelessness crisis is cutting into BART's ridership and finances, see this from the excellent S.F. Standard.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity

Image by Wikimedia Commons