San Francisco commuters had a miserable time last week as striking workers closed BART, the area's subway system, forcing people onto inadequate bus lines and already choked highways. At the heart of the dispute were important issues affecting the future of life in the Bay Area but newspaper coverage ignored this and focused on angry citizens instead. PNS associate editor David Bacon is a former union organizer who writes widely on labor and immigration.

SAN FRANCISCO -- It may take two to tango, but one can have a labor-management dispute.

At least that appeared to be the view behind dozens of stories in San Francisco area daily newspapers on the recent week-long strike that shut down BART, the Bay Area's subway service which normally carries over 250,000 passengers a day. Almost without exception, these accounts ignored the causes of the dispute.

In covering the UPS strike, the media explored the issues by talking to the strikers themselves. In contrast, stories about the BART dispute focused endlessly on commuter distress over their loss of train service.

So while BART picketers explained the forces leading to the strike, the media quoted understandably angry commuters who blamed "overpaid workers" for holding the entire area hostage so they could get a raise they didn't deserve.

To be sure, the issues in the BART strike were more complicated than those involved at UPS. But they were issues well worth exploring, as they have a great deal to do with the future of public transit in this area.

BART workers are paid from funds in the system's operating budget, which also covers repairs to the system. In recent years, the district has held the lid on that budget -- even transferring money into other categories, like new construction, which has mushroomed in recent years. Lines have been extended, particularly into Contra Costa county, some 40 miles east of San Francisco, where two new stations have opened in the past year and more are planned.

Extensions are enormously expensive. Like the gorilla in the closet, they have absorbed most of the money in the system, and are poised to grab even more.

These new stations are in upper-middle-class communities. Meanwhile, elevators and escalators are regularly out of service at urban stations in downtown Oakland, San Francisco, and Richmond, making BART extremely frustrating for seniors and the disabled.

Builders make large profits from these extensions. Without BART service -- as the strike dramatically demonstrated -- the only way to get from these vast new housing tracts to the city is the freeway. There are no alternative public transit systems.

So it comes as no surprise that, as rank and file strikers pointed out repeatedly, some 40 percent of the donations given to candidates for BART's board of directors come from construction companies. Margaret Pryor, BART board president, has been charged by the state's Fair Political Practices Commission with election fundraising violations.

Thus there is powerful continuing pressure to keep BART 's construction budget growing while the district holds the line on operating budget -- a sure-fire formula for continuing tension between management and workers.

Strikers were also concerned with the two-tier wage system, with workers laboring side by side at significantly different rates of pay -- again, a predictable source of bitterness.

In calling for an end to this, BART workers were certainly defending a widely-accepted principle of equal pay for equal work. The management response -- that it saves money -- showed more loyalty to construction plans than to their own work force.

The unions involved must share some of the blame. They made little effort to take their case to the public before or during the strike, a failure that is particularly significant because there was a chance to form an alliance with commuters to defend the BART operating budget.

The strike is over now, but the underlying economic conflicts remain. The settlement will surely lead to another fare increase and this -- in the wake of the bitterness engendered by the strike and exacerbated by media coverage -- make a worker-commuter alliance very unlikely indeed.

But BART riders and BART workers have more in common with each other than they do with the system's managers -- and only an alliance between them can keep BART running well, at affordable fares -- let alone save the Bay Area from another strike.