I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about a year, and during that time, Caltrain and BART were essential for traveling, as I didn’t have a car. Just for a fun exercise, I wanted to redesign both of these logos.

Top: original logo. Bottom: my redesign.

Caltrain
My apartment was in Mountain View, so Caltrain was an incredibly useful form of transportation to get me to Palo Alto where I worked. The train traveled all the way from San Francisco to San Jose, and therefore was also handy when I needed to get to the San Jose Airport or downtown San Francisco. I rode these trains nearly every day. During the time I lived in the area, the older Japanese trains were replaced with newer Canadian ones. While the new ones don’t necessarily hold more people, they are a little more modern and feature tables and roomier sitting areas. The new train design has black and red stripes on the mostly gray body. Therefore, I wanted to bring some of those design elements to the “train” part of the mark, as well as making small tweaks to the letterforms including the removal of the i’s dot to form the front of the train’s shape.

Top: original logo. Bottom: my redesign.

Bay Area Rapid Transit
I actually only used BART a few times, but it was there when I needed it. I’m sure it would have been more useful if I actually lived in the city area. It was mostly used when I was traveling to the San Francisco Airport, and so I needed to take Caltrain to BART to the SFO station. Relatively short trip. Anyway, BART runs through the San Francisco and Oakland areas. There are four lines that run in SF: Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green. As they enter the Oakland Area, an Orange line is introduced that runs from Richmond to Fremont. As such, I designed a new BART logo that shows all the five lines’ colors. I liked the way the “ba” in the original logo is conjoined, seemingly to give the impression of subway tubes. (Whether or not this was the intention is unbeknownst to me, but I like it.) The “ba” and “BART” in the original mark seem to have little value in relation to each other as “BART” is still an acronym, and “ba” is simply a part of that. Having the lighter lines running through the colors can symbolize the tracks as well as serving the purpose of keeping the mark interesting. (As a side note, I think that if it ever would be used there should be an alternate version without the bright lines, for example: in smaller usages where it may not be as readable.)