BART riders will soon find colorful, cushioned and hopefully cleaner, seats in as many as 200 railcars, but they won't be able to sit in them any later after a Friday night on the town.

BART's Board of Directors enthusiastically voted Thursday to award a contract to replace 100 of its famously filthy, blue wool seats with durable vinyl seats designed specifically for transit.

Directors didn't vote to halt plans to experiment with extending Friday service an hour later into Saturday but asked their staff to instead craft plans for better late-night bus service along BART lines. The new direction came after a study showed that starting service 20 minutes later on Saturday - to allow adequate maintenance time - would adversely affect many work-bound riders, the majority of them lower income and minority.

The new seats should start appearing in cars between April and July. BART crews will replace the seats in 100 cars. If customers like them, another 100 cars will get new seats.

"We're getting rid of the diseased seats," said director Lynette Sweet.

BART has used the cloth, cushioned seats, which are unique among transit agencies, since it started running trains in 1972. While the original idea was comfort, passengers have become increasingly discomforted by the soiled and often smelly condition of the seats that should be replaced about every three years.

BART spends about $600,000 a year dry-cleaning and repairing the wool-covered seats, said Tamara Allen, chief mechanical officer. The new seats use a vinyl material that resists tearing and scratching, have a graffiti-resistant coating and, perhaps most important, are easy to clean. They're also designed to emit few of the chemical odors. The same material is used on the Washington Metrorail system.

The new seats will feature a "Bay Area-centric" design called "Water, Waves and Wine." It features the bay, wine and the cascading Alamere Falls at Point Reyes. The seats will be jade - the color of the bay in the late evening, according to the designers - with pinot noir accents in a linear pattern inspired by the waterfall and waves.

Replacing seats in 200 cars with vinyl will cost BART about $1.9 million, cheaper than sticking with wool, Allen said, and less than the $2.6 million budgeted for the seat swap. Directors decided earlier this year to replace some of the cloth seats in response to passenger complaints, and to test materials and seat designs for the new fleet of cars BART is preparing to order.

"New seats, clean seats, cheaper than we expected," said Sweet. "What's not to like?"

Saturday-morning BART riders, and eventually the board, found plenty to dislike about a plan to run trains later into Saturday morning. The plan called for the last train to depart Embarcadero Station at 1 a.m. instead of 12:26 a.m. and stop at only 19 of its 44 stations. The experiment would cost about $1.1 million.

To accommodate BART's need to shut down service for maintenance, Saturday trains wouldn't start running until 6:30 a.m., 20 minutes later. BART proposed to run express bus service from 6 to 7 a.m. to make up for the lost rail service.

But a BART survey of early Saturday riders, required by federal civil rights law, found that about two-thirds disliked the bus plan, and said it wouldn't make up for the loss of an early BART ride. About 71 percent of the 654 riders surveyed said they were riding to work.

"You're out to support the drunks on Friday nights at the expense of the working man on Saturday morning," said one of the surveyed riders.

Bill Theile, manager of operations planning, said the board had the choice of proceeding with the later-night service and beefing up the Saturday BART service, or spending money instead on improving the existing regional late-night transit services.

Board President Bob Franklin, who championed later-night train service, said he was convinced that better late-night bus service was a more feasible option.

That service probably couldn't begin until June.