In Sergio Aldana’s eyes, too many people in the Bay Area are afraid of using public transportation.
It’s one of the reasons he designed a BART train Lego set that has a small, but real chance of being sold commercially.
Aldana, a 19-year-old student at Contra Costa College, first designed the set for his nine-year-old brother.
“My little brother is really into trains, and I didn’t really get into Lego designing until then,” he said. “My brother pushed me to do it and I said I’d try it and messed around with a program for a month.”
He used Lego-designing software from BrickLink to build the BART train, and after several revisions, he decided to promote his creation on the official Lego Ideas page. Creators can share their designs on the page, and if a given set receives enough votes from the public, it has the chance of being mass-produced and sold commercially.
Aldana first needed to reach 100 votes within two months to open up a one-year window where he will need 10,000 votes to get the set made. He first uploaded the project to Lego Ideas in mid-November, and crossed the 100-vote mark just last week, a mark he never expected to hit.
“I’ve gotten so much positive feedback and I didn’t think I’d get that far,” he said. “Even people that don’t seem to know much about BART seem to gravitate towards it.”
If the BART train set really catches fire and racks up over 10,000 votes over the course of 2020, a designer would reach out to Aldana and work with him on bringing the product to market. The designer would have final say on what the product ultimately looks like, and Aldana would receive royalties equaling one percent of net sales.
He isn’t sure what he would do with the money should he reach 10,000 votes, a milestone he is a long, long way away from hitting.
“I’m helping my family out now with a lot of financial struggles, as people are struggling in the middle class of the Bay Area,” he said. “But I’d love to donate to transportation organizations to help them out with promoting taking public transportation.”
Aldana used the Del Norte BART station in El Cerrito growing up, and believes Bay Area residents don’t properly value public transportation.
“It’s really convenient as opposed to a drive, the Bay Area is crowded enough with cars on the road,” he said. “I like how BART has been around for 50 years and it’s still the same BART everyone uses. It’s been serving the Bay Area for so long.”
He hopes his Lego set inspires children to ask their parents about public transportation, just as it inspired his younger brother.
“It’d be amazing if parents would say, ‘I’ll show my kid more about how the train system works now that he’s obsessed with this Lego set,’” he said. “That’s the goal.”
for #in-transit, when it’s up!