BART Mocks Trump On Twitter To Raise Awareness About Bond Measure
OAKLAND (KPIX 5) – You may have noticed Bay Area Rapid Transit's Twitter account sounded a lot like the Republican candidate for President Sunday night, that was the goal.
BART Spokesman Taylor Huckaby came up with the idea of tweeting pictures of Donald Trump and mocking his way of speaking.
Tweets read, "We're going to build a better BART and Metro Los Angeles is going to pay for it," as well as "I know everything about running a railroad. The most. Infrastructure is a MESS. Heard of Measure RR? SAD!"
All included the hashtags #debate and #TheBARToftheDeal.
"People are on their phones reading Twitter and talking about the debate," Huckaby said. "We wanted to capitalize on all those eyeballs."
The idea worked. By the end of the night the Trump-like tweets had 515,000 impressions. Some found the tweets entertaining, others were offended. One woman responded "I get the joke but why trivialize a racist insult? Would you joke w/trumptapes content?"
The idea behind these tweets was to draw attention to another item on the November ballot, the BART bond measure. It would require two-thirds of San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa county voters to approve a $3.5 billion plan that would make improvements to the aging BART system. The money would come from newly-imposed property taxes.
"The bones of BART are decaying because most of BART was not built to last longer than about 45 years we're on the 44th year. It's kind of like having a roof on your house, you can patch it over time but eventually, you have to take equity out of the house to replace the entire thing," Huckaby said.
