If you’re a grad student like me, then conferences present a unique budgeting challenge: how do you maneuver the world of per diems and reimbursements while trying to maintain your sanity and enjoy the city you’re visiting. Between hotels, flights, transportation, food, registration, and poster printing charges, things can get hectic quickly, especially if your university is infamous for taking months to issue reimbursements. Hopefully by this point, you’ve already figured out flights and hotels and poster printing. But there is still time to make the most of your transportation budget!
Perhaps the most expensive trip you’ll make is the trip to/from the airport to downtown San Francisco. There are several forms of transportation which will take you to SFO, but the cheapest by far (if you’re coming from downtown) is the BART. The BART is San Francisco’s metro system. A one-way trip from SFO to anywhere downtown is ~$10. (Compare this to the $34 and 40-minute Lyft ride I checked out today.)
Of course, using public transit can sometimes be intimidating, especially if you’re new to the city or if, like me, you have a dislike of germs and crowds. But don’t let that stop you. The BART is certainly not as user-friendly as the D.C. metro, but if you’re confused while in the BART station, you won’t be the only one.
- Printing Your Ticket. Once you arrive at the BART station, you will join the long queue of confused-looking people standing in front of what look like ATM’s. There are separate machines, one for tickets and one for Clipper cards. A Clipper Card is a plastic card that is reloadable and costs $3 in addition to the value you want to add. The paper tickets are non-reloadable paper tickets. And what they don’t advertise in the BART station (at least my tired brain didn’t see this stated anywhere) is that there is an additional 50¢ charge per trip that you take with a blue paper ticket. So, if you’re planning to take more than 6 trips, then the Clipper Card is the more economical choice. These machines are some of the least intuitive machines of their type I have ever used. After inserting your credit card, you then choose the amount of value to add to your ticket. (I was really hesitant to insert my credit card without having already selected the amount I wanted to add.) The automatic amount listed for each ticket is $20, but you can add or subtract in $1 increments, which isn’t immediately apparent.
- Getting Through the Gate. Once you’ve determined how much value to add to your ticket, printed it out, and collected your receipt, you can proceed to the fare gate. Paper tickets have to be inserted into a little slot. Your ticket will be sucked into the gate, but don’t worry, it will pop back out on top of the gate. As my friend and I learned the somewhat-embarrassing way, Clipper cards should NOT be inserted into the ticket slot. It won’t fit, and people may judge you. Instead, there is a circular scanner on the top of the fare gate and Clipper cards need only be placed on top of them to open the gate.
- Do NOT try to jump on the train as the doors are closing. You won’t be cut in half by the closing doors or anything like that, but you WILL be publicly shamed by the conductor. He won’t start the train until “the person who forced their way onto the train goes and tries to push the doors closed.” And he will add that “If the doors can’t be closed, this entire train will be out of service and hundreds of people will be late.” (Luckily my friend and I weren’t the ones who did this.) But the message was clear. Don’t force your way onto the BART. The trains come every 15 minutes, if not more often.
- AirTrain. The BART leaves you at Garage G. From here, you will have to take the airport train to your terminal.
Yes, calling an Uber is easier than using the BART, but where is the fun in that? If you want to be a budgeting warrior, BART is the way to go.
--Jessie Barrick