Late one night in 2009 after the trains had stopped, a multimedia producer for BART walked the tracks with a flashlight searching for a tiny square box. Cheryl Stalter had set out to record a fresh point of view of a ride on the Bay Area transit system, attaching a camera to the front of a train car before it left the yard in Richmond. But the primitive setup by a single employee with a creative vision — just one GoPro on a clamp — barely made it out of the gate.
“I had it for a minute,” Stalter recalled to SFGATE on Wednesday. “It got to 12th Street before I lost it.” She hiked out the next night after the trains halted in search of the camera, eventually finding it on the tracks.
It would take 16 years for Stalter’s idea to record a continuous BART ride to officially come to fruition. Although some BART employees had actively advocated for filming rides, referencing counterparts like the Chicago Transit Authority that have done it for years, their cause was always denied due to security concerns…