One Book One BART, the San Francisco Bay Area’s new transit-centric book club, has much of what you’d expect if you’ve ever gathered around a living room coffee table: a title picked in advance, a lively group discussion and lots of bibliophiles. 

Yet there’s a key distinction: Members meet on a moving train, united not only by a love of memoirs and novels but also by their love of a regional transit system that has finally begun to see an uptick in ridership after years of near-empty trains. 

This season’s pick? On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.

Strangers engage in a literary discussion during BART’s first book club. | Source: Courtesy BART

Club members meet at a designated station at a designated time and board the train together, breaking into small groups for discussion so it’s easier to hear. The first read-in was such a success that the fall installment doubled the length of train time to around an hour—with members riding the Red Line end-to-end, all the way from Richmond to Daly City. Hanging onto a pole with one hand while keeping a book open with the other can be a challenge in its own right.

“It’s really nice to be around other people for whom BART is very important,” said middle school librarian John Evans, a club member since its beginning. Evans lives in the East Bay and travels mostly by BART and bike; he doesn’t own a car. 

“We already share something in common,” he added. 

For others, it’s the curation that’s most appealing. Member Susanna Chau appreciates that the One Book One BART focuses on Bay Area themes and authors—the club’s first selection was the 2022 memoir Stay True by New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, which is set in Berkeley in the 1990s. 

The first-ever BART read-in featured the memoir “Stay True” by Hua Hsu. | Source: Courtesy BART

“I’m finding this new way of connecting with my community,” said Chau, an avid reader and transit rider. 

That’s exactly what Michelle Robertson, BART’s senior marketing representative, who launched the club, has in mind. 

“The goal is community engagement and to get people excited about transit,” Robertson said. 

Last weekend’s read-in—which began at the Richmond station and ended in Daly City—featured Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s On the Rooftop. The novel takes place in San Francisco’s Fillmore district in the 1950s, and members said the discussion meandered from the book to life in the Bay Area more generally. 

The club’s next event will be on Nov. 1, when Sexton will appear in person for an author talk moderated by another Bay Area writer, Vanessa Hua, at BART headquarters in Downtown Oakland.

Evans and Chau both highlighted the diversity of the club’s members, who are of a variety of ages and from numerous backgrounds. 

“They were people you might not run into in your day-to-day,” Evans said. “But we were all connected by the book.” 

One Book One BART book club members gathered on a moving train for a moving read-in in June 2023. | Source: Courtesy BART

BART ridership took a steep dive after the pandemic, when people stopped going into the office regularly. Robertson hopes that the club will help public transit and also spotlight indie bookstores, small presses and public libraries, many of which are accessible by BART. The Bartable newsletter includes local bookstores like Moe’s Books and Revolution Books—also noting their respective BART stations—where members can pick up the selected title. 

One Book One BART is not the only creative initiative Robertson has spearheaded to get riders back onto platforms—she also runs a program with Jennifer Easton that includes short story dispensers in selected stations. Passengers can wave their hand over the machines and receive a free story printed on receipt-like paper by a Bay Area author to read on their trip. The dispensers are currently located at the Downtown Berkeley, Balboa Park, Fruitvale and Pleasant Hill stations. 

The book club activities include a raffle and giveaways of BART swag, which is highly coveted in the Bay Area, Robertson said. A holiday-themed BART sweater once sold out online in 40 minutes. It all goes to show how deep the love runs for the transit system, with its retro-futuristic trains and robotic-sounding announcements. 

“It’s so much more than just public transportation,” Evans said.  

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SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Bay Area Rapid Transit is running trains at reduced speeds due to the warm weather, the transit system announced Friday. BART trains between Orinda and Pittsburg/Bay Point stations operate at a slower rate between 12:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m

Passengers are advised to add 20 minutes to the scheduled travel time to accommodate delays.

Eastbound traffic on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was blocked

Trains between Hayward and Fremont as well as Castro Valley and Dublin/Pleasanton stations also run slower due to high temperatures. Passengers on these lines are advised to add 10 minutes to the scheduled travel time to accommodate delays.

Friday’s planned slowdown follows an incident in June 2021 when a Yellow Line BART train derailed between Pleasant Hill and Concord stations. BART later blamed high temperatures for the derailment. Temperatures in Concord that day were around 100 degrees.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A mask mandate for commuter rail passengers is back by popular demand in the San Francisco Bay Area, the region that two years ago imposed the nation’s first coronavirus stay-at-home order and now is bucking the national trend away from required face coverings.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, known as BART, had decided last week to drop its rule in line with a federal court ruling but that decision prompted an outcry, spokeswoman Alicia Trost said Friday.

“We started to immediately hear from riders in phone calls, emails, tweets, that they felt unsafe on the train if there was not a mask mandate,” BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said Friday.

BART’s board of directors decided in a meeting Thursday to temporarily restore the mask rule until at least July 18, the agency said in a statement. Children ages 2 and under as well as people with medical conditions that prevent them from wearing masks are exempt from the mandate.

The decision makes the Bay Area’s largest transit system the latest in California to bring back a mandate for face coverings after Los Angeles County restored its masking rule a week ago for all public transportation including buses, trains, subways, taxis and airports.

The reinstatement came 10 days after a federal judge in Florida ended the nation’s federal mask mandate on public transportation, freeing airlines, airports and mass transit systems to make their own decisions about mask requirements. A mix of responses has taken shape across the country that reflects the nation’s ongoing divisions over how to battle the virus.

Major airlines immediately dropped mask requirements after the decision, as did many local transit agencies around the country.

New York City, Chicago and Connecticut, however, continued to require masks for travelers.

San Francisco and Los Angeles public transit agencies initially dropped their mask requirements, but many have since flip-flopped.

Thursday’s BART board meeting was flooded by callers who voiced support for reinstating the policy in particular to protect vulnerable riders, Trost said.

BART, which connects San Francisco to its eastern and southern suburbs, is struggling to restore ridership that plummeted from pre-pandemic highs of over 400,000 weekday riders to about 130,000, according to recent data. It quickly became clear that banishing mask mandates would not help.

“We are still really trying to win back riders, and I think masks can play an important role in doing that,” Trost said.

San Francisco and the wider Bay Area have had some of the strictest pandemic regulations and compliance with the rules in the nation, starting in March 2020 when the Bay Area became the first to declare a state of emergency. Many residents have continued to wear masks in supermarkets and other indoor venues even though indoor mask mandates were largely lifted in February. Similarly, most BART riders have continued to wear masks in the past week, despite the temporary lifting of the mask rule.

BART said its police force will emphasize education-based enforcement by offering masks to riders before issuing citations up to $75 or ejecting anyone. BART officials said that police won’t use those enforcement options for the first week of the mandate.

COVID-19 infections in California have multiplied in recent weeks, following a trend seen around the country, but hospitalizations remain low in California. The Bay Area has reported a more pronounced spike in cases than elsewhere in the state with a seven-day average of 26 new cases per 100,000 residents, compared to 10.6 cases per 100,000 in California overall.

However, Los Angeles County on Friday reported more than 28 new cases per 100,000 residents. Public health officials said the county was experiencing “a high rate of transmission” and cases were steadily rising.

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