I have to complain, I've ridden BART in San Francisco for three years and had no idea I could have signed up for wifi. I wish I'd noticed the network on my phone and looked into it, but of course looking for wifi on BART never occurred to me (to save battery life I have "search for networks" turned off). I ride the train almost every day and I've never seen a notice at a station about the network. If only 16,000 people of several million in the BART service area signed up, then apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of wifi-enabled commuters never heard of this either.

And now they'll be expected to pay as much per month for a daily hour of the Internet as they do for constant access at work and home.

As a layperson, the only reasons I can see for BART to set such a high price point are a misunderstanding about the economics or a desire to keep usage at a low, manageable level.

I suspect I should be glad that there's wifi at all, at any price, but frankly $30 a month makes this "public service" a toy for highly paid commuters rather than an intensely useful public tool for all the area's travelers. I hope against hope that the daily and hourly fees aren't high enough to remind me of AOL-by-the-hour. To think we've reached a point where the privately owned cafes give away wireless, and the publicly owned transit charges for it.