Bay Area Transit Officials Prepare for Possible Strike

Nervous transit officials Friday prepared alternate plans to ease the commuter chaos from a threatened strike by Bay Area Rapid Transit unions.

Meanwhile, negotiations continued, despite overwhelming votes by two unions Thursday night to reject the latest contract offer. A strike, slated to begin at midnight today if negotiations fail, could strand as many as 275,000 BART riders Monday morning.

“It sure is getting down to the wire,” Anne Milner, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Municipal Railway, said Friday.

Her agency was one of several designing contingency plans to pick up some of the riders. The plans would include adding buses to transport passengers to and from BART stations in San Francisco. Other agencies, except AC Transit, which carries about 14,000 riders across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge each day, plan to take similar action.

A strike could cause the biggest traffic nightmare in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which knocked out service on the Bay Bridge for weeks.

BART picked up the slack in that case. This time, officials predict massive amounts of rush hour traffic on the already jammed bridge.

“There really isn’t much you can do in the Bay Area,” said Jim Drago, a Caltrans spokesman. “There really aren’t any alternate routes.”

On Thursday, 90% of Service Employees International Union Local 790 voted to reject the contract, while the vote by Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Local 1555 was 97% against, said SEIU spokesman Bill Lloyd.