You Better Stand

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is in my eyes one of the greatest things in the Bay Area. It makes travel easier and it is better for our environment. The thirty minute trip to go to San Francisco on BART is much easier than to wait in traffic and pay for the bridge toll if you drive your car. BART is so easy just to hop on and get where you need to go in the Bay Area. But now when you ride on BART you may want to stand instead of sitting in the blue clothed seats they provide. They have been doing research on the seats and they have found bacteria infested in them.

Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Ms. Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.

My idea about what they should do about the seats is make plastic seats that are easy to clean. If you make plastic seats, they would be able to wipe off the germs with a handy wipe. The trains should have paper towels and some sort of sanitizer offered to their riders so they don't have to worry about what they are sitting on. If they keep the old seats, we will have even bigger problems with more and more people standing in the trains, not wanting to sit in the germ infested area. Also at night, the cleaners of the trains could just wipe them down if they didn't want to hand out towels and sanitizer. Either way there has to be a change to the seats because these bacterias could be harmful to many of the 330,000 daily commuters.