Cars “move people.” I don’t just mean that they take you from one place to another. They also emotionally move human beings.

I remember with great fondness the midnight drives I took in my late 20s — windows rolled down, music blasting — only to get gas or buy a Diet Coke at the mini-mart and turn around and go back home. I’m sure you have similar memories of your car as your sanctuary.

If we are to get people out of their cars and into options that cause less congestion and pollution, we must have public transit options that move people, too. Yet we have not thought — as car manufacturers have for years — about the emotive possibilities of public transit.

We must put energy, financial resources, and thought about the experiences of people who ride public transit. We have to “move” them to move them.

The Bay Area has an exciting opportunity in front of us. We are designing and constructing the last four BART stations to complete the long-envisioned ring of rail around the Bay. The four stations — Alum Rock/28th Street, Downtown San Jose, Diridon Station, and Santa Clara — will be located in the South Bay. They are scheduled to start service in late 2019.

We have a chance to build stations that move people, and we must do this for our struggle against the climate crisis. In San Francisco, 46% of our carbon emissions come from transportation, but only 6% of that comes from public transit.

Stations last a minimum of 75 years (New York’s Grand Central Terminal is 106 years old). Hundreds of millions of people will pass through those entrances and down those escalators during that time. Why not design stations that, as James Haas wrote in his book about the creation of San Francisco’s Civic Center, “influence the heart, mind and purse of the ordinary citizen?”

BART has some wonderful station delights. The mushroom seats made of stone, which radiate from black to grey to white on the Embarcadero platforms, are both functional and delightful. Coming up the escalator from the 16th Street Mission station, your heart lifts with the sweep of the tunnel as you see the David Gálvez and Jos Sances tile mural of a BART car surrounded by both ancient and modern people. These moments can be created at the new stations, too.

BART has outlined eight principles of good station design: usability, operability, safety, unity, simplicity, context, economy and flexibility. To those we must add one more: the concept of “delight,” to give the system the best possible chance of attracting public transit riders by moving them emotionally.

Delight can be created in many ways.

Take language, for instance. United Airlines starts its boarding process by suggesting if you are in late-boarding groups, you can relax rather than line up. This makes what could be perceived as being low on the pecking order distinctly more pleasant.

BART could learn from this example by placing “Welcome, Bike Riders” signs at stations rather than signage that orders “Walk Bikes” as it does next to the bike racks at Warm Springs BART.

Place is also important. BART should make each new station uniquely, delightfully, its own through local food and local permanent and temporary art installations. In 2018, BART revised its art policy to include capital funding and an annual operating budget. This improvement gives BART the flexibility to commission and maintain local beautiful art at each station.

BART should also play up the elements of transit riding you can’t get in a car.

These things include: a chance to relax while you wait at the station, ample bathrooms so you can relieve yourself, pleasant areas to eat and drink, beautiful landscaping to soothe the soul, and finally the sense of community you get as you move around the Bay Area with hundreds of thousands of other people who are also helping the environment.

Adding “delight” into the design of these last four BART stations will make it that much more likely that people will be moved by public transit and we will effectively reduce our transportation carbon emissions.

Thea Selby is the chair of the San Francisco Transit Riders, principal of marketing communications firm Next Steps Marketing, and a frequent BART passenger.