BART strike looms

Bay Area Rapid Transit's (BART) union employees are set to go on strike at 12:01 a.m. next Wednesday unless a new contract can be agreed upon with managers. The current contracts expire at 12:01 a.m. Friday.

UC Berkeley researchers conducted a study last year to determine the impact of a service interruption of BART which carries about 320,000 passengers most weekdays.

The morning commute on the westbound Bay Bridge could create backups stretching 26 miles, with cars driving as slowly as 9 mph, the report said.

"The mess on the freeways would spill over to city streets, and that makes things even worse. In many cases, drivers would likely spend one to two hours on city streets just to get to the freeway, crawling at speeds as low as two miles per hour,"” Jorge Laval, a PhD graduate student in civil engineering and lead author of the report, said at the time the report was released.

While it's the Bay Area's socialistic mentality to support labor in contract negociations like this, it will be interesting to see if the public will back the underworked and overpaid BART employees.

The average full- time BART union employee, they say, receives a total fringe benefits package worth $31,719 a year on top of their average annual base salary of $67,865 for a total average annual compensation of $99,584.

Not a bad gig.