San Bruno B.A.R.T.

  BART rider Elaine Findley is angry and she doesn't care who knows it.

  "I'm really, really frustrated with BART," the Richmond resident said this week at BART's Ashby station in Berkeley. "Are we being punished for going to work at a certain time?"

  Findley, who rides BART to Ashby and transfers to a shuttle bus four days a week, was referring to a BART proposal to introduce higher fares and parking fees during rush hour as soaring ridership threatens to strain the system at peak commute times.

  BART riders - the mild-mannered, the meek and the militant - almost all agreed that this is, to put it mildly, a bad idea.

  Leaping to his feet from a seat on the platform bench, John Busher of Berkeley said, "No. People ride during commute hours not because they want to, but because they have to."

  Boarding a train at the Pleasant Hill station, Kelly Martinez added, "The economy is in terrible shape. For most people, the foremost thing is keeping a job. If it costs more to get to work, it'll be even rougher on them."

  High gas prices, traffic jams and concerns about the environment have driven commuters to BART stations in record numbers. Just a week earlier, BART hit an all-time ridership high of about 405,000 passengers thanks to commuters and the Raiders and Giants both playing home games on Sept. 8.

  BART is averaging 370,000 riders per day, about 15,000 more than a year ago, which would seem to be cause for celebration.

  However, the system seems to have snatched a public-relations defeat with consideration of "congestion pricing," or charging more during peak demand periods.

  Joe Habich of El Cerrito was waiting for a train into San Francisco at the MacArthur station in Oakland on Monday.

  "They finally got what they wanted - increased ridership," Habich said. "And now they're going to shoot themselves in the foot."

  Surging ridership is moving the system toward capacity faster than a BART train hurtling through the Transbay Tube, engineers say. Congestion pricing is possibly the best way to get riders to take trains later or earlier than rush hour, according to consultant Jeffrey Tumlin, who told the BART board last week, "It is very effective."

  Actual commuters differ. Strongly.

  "I have to be at work at a certain time, five days a week. I can't spread it out," said Brendan Fitzgerald of Emeryville, who takes the Emery Go Round shuttle bus to the MacArthur station, where he catches BART into San Francisco.

  Fitzgerald, a recruiter for a hospital staffing agency, works 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays.

  "If I had the choice, I would go at noncommute hours, but I have to be at work to cover a certain time period. I understand the demands of my workplace," said Cathy Torres, who commutes from Daly City to work at UC Berkeley as a public health practice coordinator.

  "Those who would benefit (from congestion pricing) would be those who can afford to flex their time - the higher-paid workers," Torres said. "Those who are 9-to-5, minimum-wage workers would have to pay the higher rate. They have no choice."

  Saili Kulkarni of Oakland is one of those who have no choice. The special education teacher at Garfield Elementary in Fremont rides her bike to the MacArthur BART station, then takes the train to work.

  "It's not fair. It's biased against the people commuting in the morning," Kulkarni said.

  The system chokes up worst at the Embarcadero and Montgomery stations in San Francisco, where commuters - many of them from the East Bay - flood the stations' escalators, staircases, elevators and platforms.

  The two-year surge in ridership may soon bring these stations to capacity limits, planners fear.

  However, on Monday morning about 8 a.m., the Montgomery station, while crowded, didn't seem out of control. Well-defined lines of commuters moved up the escalators after getting off inbound trains.

  Kimberly Wong of Oakland said she is generally a fan of BART, but not of the new plan.

  "It's definitely not a good idea," said Wong, who regularly takes the train to Concord.

  Some commuters said they feared a possible surcharge would discourage commuters from taking BART.

  "I wouldn't want it to make people get back in their cars. That would be terrible," said Sarah Brann of Berkeley, who works as a court reporter in San Francisco.

  Planners say congestion pricing works well for some big-city commuter-rail systems, including the Metro in Washington, D.C. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, has had different peak and off-peak fares since its system opened in 1976.

  "If you're used to it being like that from the beginning, it's not like something new. It's not like we imposed it on people," said Taryn McNeil, a WMATA spokeswoman.

  BART would probably score more points with the public if it provided discounts for off-peak travel rather than surcharges for peak commutes, commuters said.

  "Incentives are far more likely to succeed than penalties," Torres said.

E-mail Janis Mara at jmara@bayareanewsgroup.com.