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Retro-Future Neon BART Excitement

January 18, 2010

Eric Fischer’s scanner has captured five SF-Marin transit options in 1970 neon excitement, including:

  • BART under the Golden Gate Bridge and down Geary
  • a BART tube from Sausalito to Columbus Ave with one Marin routing option through San Rafael, the other through San Anseimo.  (That would have been one looong tunnel.)
  • an exclusive busway over the GGB
  • a BART bridge from Richmond to San Rafael, and a busway over the GGB

(The colors are real, though I did adjust the black levels for added blogging excitement.)

Here’s a blowup of the numbers.  Awesome. Can you imagine what a blog from the 70s would look like?

Sadly there are not enough vibrant colors visible to the human eye to get past five. 6 is into the ultraviolet and 7 starts emitting x-rays.

Through exhaustive Internet research, I have uncovered a video representing the BART plans described above:

All I can say is if Pointer Sisters had gotten behind the 70s BART expansion we’d be riding it to Santa Cruz today, never mind Marin and the South Bay.

6 Comments leave one →
  1. Ramón permalink
    January 18, 2010 6:29 pm

    Another “World of Tomorrow” that we’ll never see. :-(

  2. January 18, 2010 11:41 pm

    You laugh about blowing up the numbers, but in the original document they devote an *entire page* before each map to its number, blown up to the full height of the page!

  3. January 19, 2010 12:02 pm

    That Pointer Sisters video is one of my favorite memories from childhood.

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