Update: BART has announced that the BART to Oakland Airport connector will be running on Saturday, November 22. There will be a public celebration on Friday, November 21 to check out the connector and take a free ride before it opens.
Some good news for those of you who fly in and out of Oakland Airport — the BART to OAK connector is almost ready and may even be running by Thanksgiving. If it’s not ready by end of November, BART officials say it’ll be running by the holidays in December. That means HALLELUJAH! NO MORE AIRBART! Well, OK, not quite yet, but the end is in sight and that’s reason enough for me to celebrate.
According to SFGate, the California Public Utilities Commission is currently a week into a 30-day testing period of the three-car driverless connector trains, which will be pulled by cables.
Riders going to the Oakland Airport will take BART to the Coliseum Station, deboard their train, and take an escalator to the new connector. Trains will arrive at the station every four to five minutes and the ride will be about 8 1/2 minutes once onboard (instead of 15–20 minutes on the AirBART). Rides on the connector will cost $6 each way on top of the regular BART fare that you pay to get to the Coliseum Station. That’s $3 more than AirBART costs, but that extra money will be worth it if you hated waiting for the shuttle bus to arrive, or in many cases, hated waiting for it to fill up with passengers so it could leave. And you won’t have to worry about being late for your flight because of traffic.
BART hopes to announce the actual opening date next week, so stay tuned!
[Via: SFGate; photo via BART]
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