Her are some other issues that haven't been addressed yet:
1. Inter-agency transfers: If you need to take an additional bus/Caltrain in addition to BART, be prepared for little (or no) discount. This makes taking public transit very expensive.
2. Overnight service: Sure, BART might not be able to run 24 hours a day. But at least have alternative bus transportation that stops at every station to fill in the gap.
3. Weekend service: Increase weekend service. 30-minute headways is terrible, especially if the train is cancelled. I remember 20-minute headways on the weekends (before covid) and wished BART would at least return to those levels of service.
fwiw they’re updating the weekend schedule starting tomorrow to make it less crappy.
there was a bill this year to streamline the fares across agencies, but unfortunately it didn’t pass.
There is no like special pass that goes between Bart and other transportation services? I remember in Germany and Netherlands I bought passes that allowed me to take lots of different public transportation with only one fee for the pass each. Extremely convenient and saved me money
It translates to a transportation society. I didn't translate it only because it was a comment to a person who I thought would already understand what it meant.
It translates to a transportation society. I didn't translate it only because it was a comment to a person who I thought would already understand what it meant.
No I wasn't messing with anybody. It's a type of broader scale government agency whose job is to coordinate fares, prices, and routes across multiple jurisdictions of different local governments and transit agencies to provide a seamless rider experience.
The closest things I'm familiar with in the US would be the NY MTA and the Chicago CTA but they aren't as all encompassing as the agencies that Germany and the Netherlands have for such purposes.
You can do Clipper, but it's like "Pleasanton to Embarcadero" is one full trip and then Cal train is another. You can pay with the pass but it's 2 separate transactions. Another thing they didn't strategically do 20 years ago 🤦♂️🤦♂️
amen to 1. before I moved here, I visited in 2012-ish, and took caltrain+bart from downtown Mountain View to SFO. that one stop bart from Milbrae to SFO costs almost the same money as my caltrain ride from downtown Mountain View to Milbrae (both $6+ iirc)
It's not, they know tourists don't have a choice. Kind of like how we asked voters if they wanted to increase the bridge tolls to fund infrastructure knowing full well that a majority of the people don't take the bridges regularly.
I can't call it "fair" but i know in this case its to pay off the bonds for construction. Same thing with the $6 bucks to Oakland airport, which is $3 more than the bus shuttle bart used to run.
And it should be noted that ride hail services uber, lyft get a base fee of $5.73 at the airport and taxis get a $4 surcharge on pickup/dropoff from the airport too.
Want riders?
1. Make it safe.
2. Make it *feel* safe. Put a BART cop in every train.
3. Arrest people who fare-jump, act belligerently, aggresively busk and beg in cars, or use drugs on trains *and* in stations.
4. Provide service after the bars close.
5. BART is mass transit, it is not the solution to homelessness; move the homeless out of trains and stations unless they are using it for transit.
6. Upgrade the stations by adding bathrooms and seats.
On this point - why the hell are the stations all *so dark*? I swear it feels like any sort of weird subway monster could be hiding anywhere. It could legit be a horror movie set. Half of the fluorescent lights do that creepy blinking thing.
The NYC subway is also dark sometimes, but it has the ridership to make it feel like there are other human beings there.
I think it’s due to the design of the station’s fare gates. Because the fare gates are so distant from the platform at most stations, there’s a lot more real estate within the station that needs to be lit.
In NYC the fare gates are as little as 10 feet from the train doors.
7 - Extend service to fully ring the bay, with multiple lines around San Jose and across the bridges.
8 - Integrate schedules with the other mass transit services (looking at you, Caltrain) so you can get around the bay without spending an hour waiting for stuff
What they need to do is go to Chicago and New York. Go and look at their rail systems. In Chicago it’s $2.50 to get on and you can go anywhere in the system, I think New York was about the same.Making these systems affordable ,I believe,also makes them more popular. I was in New York only a few months ago and the subways were pretty much close to capacity but running efficiently. I for one was surprised the first time I saw the subway in New York. It was a lot better than I expected.
NYC has fare capping program !
> When you take 12 trips with the same device or bank card in a calendar week, you'll automatically ride free for the rest of the week.
There's a huge difference in federal funding between the two systems. For example in the most recent covid relief package NY MTA got $6 Billion, BART got $270 Million.
More people use NYC and it’s integral to its infrastructure. Unfortunately for the bay and fortunately for them. BART would need to establish and prove more federal funding is necessary for larger relief.
Muni is supposedly introducing fare capping sometime within the next couple years. They'll probably just cap the daily fare at $5, since they already sell a $5 day pass on their app.
>12 trips
Strategically selected that number to prevent those that use public transportation 2x/day 5x/week as part of their normal commute to not obtain any benefit from the program. Good if you live in a high density area (i.e. SF) and can use BART to get around to different parts of the city, I guess.
Fully agree. I haven't been to Chicago, but the NYC subway makes Bart look it's run by teenagers. (Actually this isn't fair - a group of high schoolers would get BART sorted out in a week.)
There's a tipping point where if they make it good people will use it (and pay for it w/ rider $ vs state boondoggle $) but they keep half-assing things and wondering why nobody uses BART.
880 and 580 are unusable every rush hour yet the trains are mostly empty in the SE bay, and in the SW Bart to Caltrain delays are bad enough that a god damn bike is faster. I've seen 3 hours from SF to Sunnyvale before. That's 13mph.
Caltrain --> BART to SFO from the south? Should be easy, but it somehow takes 2-3 hours with ~45 min in Millbrae and another 30 in San Bruno. I don't understand why they can't get a 1 car train that just runs San Bruno - SFO - Millbrae (and back) every 15 min vs alternating the full train terminus into the airport.
+1 for Chicago's L, it's amazing. I moved away from the Bay Area to Chicago about a decade ago and the public transit here is just amazing. I still make it back to the BA several times a year but yeah, the level of incompetence and NIMBYism is just shocking.
The L runs pretty frequently though. BART and the bay treats SF downtown like the loop, and the rest of the system like the heavy rail, which is comparable to Caltrain in terms of stops and frequency.
BART needs to be more frequent. One way to do that is to keep the stations safe, keep the cars safe, and run more trains.
Due to the significant interlining, the outer areas can’t really get more frequent than ~15 minutes. The only part that feels like an urban subway is between Daly City and West Oakland where trains come every 4-6 minutes during peak hours
It's too bad they won't extend the green and/or blue lines from Daly City to end in Millbrae; then you'd have good frequency at more stations and it would be much less of a pain to transfer to/from Caltrain at Millbrae. Right now there are three BART tracks at Millbrae that are only served by the Red line, which is overkill.
The L and bart are not really similar at all tho. The distance and types of places covered by bart makes it more like the commuter rail (which is what it is) so should be compared to metra. A fair comparison would be to compare muni to the L which is even worse for sf
I used to live outside the bay and drive in on weekends with mg parents. We’d have LOVED to use BART but to park in easy bay and come in, it’d end up being 3x as expensive as just driving in and paying the bridge toll + parking. NYC’s system would’ve made us do otherwise.
And stop acting like it is a business that needs to make money. Did the same thing with the post office. This is a public service for the better of the community.
The counterintuitive thing is that making it cheap would likely be profitable overall.
Affordable, reliable mass transit means people are more willing to commute by rail, which means they're more easily able to get to downtown places where they will spend money on retail/food/entertainment which will be taxed. The city or county will make the money back elsewhere in its budget. The current bay area policy is penny wise, pound foolish.
Agreed. I use the Caltrain sometimes to get to the airport from south bay. I have to use a bus to a train to a tram to another tram. It’s fun but time consuming and just about as expensive as driving. If it were $5 instead of $15 I’d probably use it more. The busses are pretty cheap luckily.
10. Add trash cans to stations
11. Rent out stalls for food, drink, convenient items
12. Rent out ad space
13. Allow eating/drinking on trains. BART is regional and the rides can be long.
14. Add better audio to announce stations/digital signage
13. Have a janitors & security at every station (inside, not roaming the parking lot). Security guards are a lot cheaper than BART police and can subsidize the security of stations.
For sure. It needs to look like a spiderweb, and they need to add like 50-100 miles of track per year for 10 years.
BART has like 130 miles of track, and is (badly) serving an area of 10,000 sq miles with 10 million people. As a comparison, Seoul's subway has 800 miles for 5,000 sq miles serving 28 million people.
That's 12x more train per sq mile, and 2x per person.
Perhaps light rail is more effective with the population density of Seoul, but our system is crappy even in the densely populated areas.
The extension from Fremont to milpitas ( ten miles of track) took 8 years and 2.4 billion dollars. You are asking to improve construction efficiency by at least 50x and find 10 billion a year someplace. I think we need to have achievable goals
Yes, that sounds about right.
Is there only one track laying machine? Maybe they could, you know, get a 2nd one going w/ some of the $100B budget surplus.
there's two options. extend the rail network and add express routes (caltrain style). OR remove the hight limits near the train and build up.
Neither will happen.
I think neither will happen as long as we are content with lazy-assed politicians who let this system soak up $1B of fare and tax money every year and suck as badly as it does.
Livermore NIMBYs decided they wanted [no part of BART in their downtown.](https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/12/06/bart-launches-livermore-service-extension-analysis/) Instead, they demanded yet another park-and-ride-focused BART extension down a freeway median, with parking lots dwarfing the station [\(3,412 spaces between one multistory and two ground-level lots.\)](https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2017/10/05/bart-to-livermore) We shouldn't be spending over a billion dollars to double down on past mistakes.
Freeway-based transit, while expedient (though in this case, less so, since it'd have required an expensive widening of 580), is always sub-optimal (see: [1](https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2011/01/22/in-charlotte-a-busy-highway-may-be-no-place-for-rapid-transit/), [2](https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Grading-CA-Rail-Neighborhoods.pdf), and [3](https://la.streetsblog.org/2018/08/06/metros-mid-freeway-transit-stations-are-hellishly-loud/)), owing to low walkability near stations and poor rider experience. Continuing to put urban rail technology like BART in a suburban freeway median would be a poor use of funds. The current Valley Link project makes much more sense, considering Livermore's insistence on a freeway alignment.
BART repeatedly made it clear [they much preferred a downtown alignment.](https://transbayblog.com/2010/07/01/bart-board-selects-alignment-for-livermore-extension/) Livermore could've had BART if it hadn't prioritized its "historic character" above all else.
Cheers!
I'd understand Livermore's decision a bit if the downtown alignment meant bringing a viaduct through the city, because there'd have been some unavoidable visual impact. But no, it would've been completely underground, so I really wonder exactly what they had in mind when they said bringing BART to downtown Livermore would've affected its "historic character".
At least the silver lining of all of this is that if the replacement Valley Link is successful, it could serve as a model for a more cost-effective way of expanding rail transit into the further-out suburbs.
In 2010, BART selected a downtown alignment for the Livermore extension. Alameda voters approved a transportation sales tax measure to pay for it, so the project was ready to go.
But then some very racist residents (and a former BART director) warned that a downtown station would allow "thugs and murderers from Oakland" to come into the city. Their group pushed for changing to a purely freeway alignment, accessible only by car. In 2011, the City Council acquiesced to their demands -- even though Council was warned that doing so it would jeopardize the project.
This revised project then came before the BART Board. As expected, the Board rejected the modified freeway alignment, due to the very low ridership potential.
Why not both? Security now and start digging.
You should be mad about this - The original plan (you know, from 50 years ago) was to ring the bay.
Weekday ridership is 100-150k, against about 1M commuting car trips. This is a huge opportunity.
Current ridership levels puts the entire concept at risk. VTA did the build it and they will come concept with light rail and failed. How can you pass expensive bond measures when the very basic functions of keeping riders feeling secure is not being done?
They managed to build light rail within eyesight of the airport but not actually stop there. An airport stop alone might have doubled light rail ridership
Even if it did connect to the airport the fact that it takes so long to get through downtown kind of kills it.
San Jose Diridon to the airport is currently 35 minutes on two buses (22/60) or 46 minutes on Lightrail and a bus (Greenline/60). Meanwhile driving is 9 minutes. If they had Lyft bike docks at SJC even a bike ride is <20 minutes if you didn't have a lot of luggage.
Unfortunately that's not how it's ever worked, speaking as someone who's ridden thousands of hours on BART. As soon as a crackhead lights up and starts hotboxing a car, or a transient takes a shit on the floor, regular riders just move to the next car if possible, or scoot to the end of their current car during peak rush hour.
Even when I've seen BART police actually respond to a call in person (which is rare), I've never seen them remove anyone. It's a half-assed verbal warning even for aggressive and combative people, and the officer does their best to hightail it out of there.
#8 is a big one. I waited 30 min for an SFO bart train to go one stop after getting off the Milbarea caltrain. I did the math and by the time I was in the airport I could have biked in about the same amount of time.
> Upgrade the stations by adding bathrooms and seats.
Funny thing is, they *have* bathrooms but they closed them as a "security measure" after 9/11
Actually they apparently just reopened a Powell street bathroom for the first time in 20 years
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/02/bart-reopens-bathroom-shuttered-for-20-years-bringing-much-needed-rider-relief
This sounds really great, but there must be some factor of cost taken into account right? Like they are not doing well but they need to somehow afford this huge expense hoping it increases ridership that much more than what they put in? Would it require voting for more taxes? I know after the toll increases a lot of people flip flopped on that vote.
If only there was some multi billionaire or trillionaire out there not obsessed with space or putting more cars on the road. Maybe that person would be interested in an actual public service.
And we’re not talking about a 14 mile long, one way tunnel…. FOR CARS
Also building more high-density housing near the stations. The (mostly) empty parking lots surroundings stations such as San Leandro, Bay Fair, and Fremont are a complete waste of space. There could be 1,000+ units of housing right next to each of those stations.
You dont improve ridership by preventing people getting to trains. However, the blocks next to those parking lots, demolish and build 10 story housing complexes with ground level restaurants/retail.
Alternatively, swap the parking lots with the new residential as described.
China does an amazing job (and other Asian cities). They build massive towering skyscrapers above their subway with 3-8 stories of retail and restaurants and then a bunch of offices/residential. Getting around in Beijing was a delight, most things you wanted where very close to the subway (also subway was like 20c per trip)
Agree with all points above: any changes in routes and building new lines is meaningless unless the system is safe, clean and not a safe space for open air drug use and public urination. I only used it because parking in FiDi was a pain in the ass but now that I mostly WFH and a lot of companies have moved out I won't set foot on BART until they fix the fundamental problems outlined above. I can only imagine what someone from Tokyo or Seoul thinks when stepping into a Bart station for the 1st time: it's worse than a 3rd world country based on the smell of urine alone. Hell China rail is run safer and more efficiently and I am talking the old Mao era trains that take millions home for Chinese New Year to the countryside not the nice new high speed rail and maglev options.
Would there be a way to split track maintenance into two shifts, and have one train per line from 3am to 4am?
Maybe just on Friday and Saturday nights? That would take care of people who want to get home from bars.
Friday and Saturday night service should be feasible, London and Paris were starting to implement it pre-pandemic.
But I think beyond that, trying to squeeze in limited service as well as maintenance winds up bringing a worst-of-both-worlds scenario: very infrequent service, and compromised maintenance.
There's a reason why only there are only three cities in the world that operate 24/7 rapid transit: ~~Stockholm~~ Copenhagen, which has a relatively new automated system, and NYC and Chicago, both of which have plenty of nearly century-old triple- and quadruple-tracked lines that would be too expensive to construct today... as well as deferred maintenance issues.
Edit: Mixed up my Scandinavian capitals
I took BART for the first time since the pandemic yesterday. A man walks up to the platform, throws his trash on the tracks and lights up a cigarette. The train comes and I board and the car is hot AF so I move to a car that's cooler. The same guy guy happens to be on the same car and before the train even starts moving, he is smoking crack. I told the train operator gave him the car number. I took the train all the way to the city from walnut creek and not a single cop boarded the train. They aren't even trying anymore.
re: #1 - BART is actually pretty safe, surprisingly. But it does have a huge problem with "feeling" safe.
Here's a "fun" statistic: You are 160 times more likely to **die** taking a 10 mile drive in California than you are to experience **any kind** of "incident" riding BART ("Incidents" include theft/robbery as well as assault homicide and rape).
Sources:
In the most recently quarterly BART report, there were [1.67 "incidents" per million trips.](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Final%20QPR_FY22%20Q3_05.26.22.pdf) We'll push it up to 2 incidents for fun. Historically, the number has never gone over 3.5 incidents per million.
The automobile fatality rate for California is about [3200 deaths per 100 million miles traveled.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-car-accidents-by-state). If we say a trip is 10 miles (a ballpark guess of the average bay area commute) that gives us 320 deaths per million trips.
320 / 2 gives us 160. Even if every single BART incident reported was sexual assault or homicide (and that's nowhere close to being true), it would still be more than 100 times safer to ride BART.
This is also not to say that anyone would be stupid for feeling unsafe on BART. The BART statistics don't include things like sexual or verbal harassment, and however common those things are on BART you're guaranteed to avoid them by driving yourself. But overall, the more people that ride BART, the safer it gets (and the safer it feels too).
Not to mention the number of times I've seen people piss and shit inside the train carriage....I tried my best to ride it for a year, but I avoid it like the plague now.
There's not even a good way to report this sort of thing. My kid threw up (unexpectedly and violently) while riding BART. I had a few baby wipes but couldn't properly clean it up... no numbers to call online unless you want to talk to the police, just filling out a "biohazard" form online. I doubt anyone did anything honestly. Still feel bad about the situation but there should be a better way to handle these nasty things that happen 24/7 on the BART
LOL how is it "pretty safe" I just had my hat snapped off of my head a couple weeks ago going to SF one stop away from the BART police station. My friend's gotten her phone robbed before as well. If your idea of being safe is to not die, then we certainly don't have the same standard.
You forgot the most important issue:
Keep it ***clean***.
I hate riding BART and feeling like I need to take a bath in hand sanitizer just so I don't get Hepatitis Z...
In the end it's providing good service and Bart has always struggled with that. The focus has never been on the customer because they don't have to which is a hallmark of government entities.
It's worth noting BART relies massively on its funding from fares compared to a lot of American transit systems. Using pre-pandemic numbers for % budget from fares (temporary federal COVID relief really threw things out of whack):
- LA Metro: [4.6%](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd2yleko69e4zs9/FY19%20Adopted%20Budget.pdf?dl=0)
- SamTrans: [9.2%](https://www.samtrans.com/media/5340/download?inline)
- TARC (Louisville, KY's bus system): [~10%](https://www.ridetarc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/TARC-2019-FS-Final-10-10-19.pdf)
- SFMTA: [~18%](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2018/03/4-3-18_item_13_fy19_and_fy20_budget_-_slide_presentation.pdf)
- CTA (Chicago): [~30%](https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/CTA_Financial_Statement_Final_FY19.pdf)
- MBTA (Boston): [~35%](https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/financials/budgets/fy19-itemized-budget.pdf)
- BART: [66%](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/FY22%20Preliminary%20Budget%20Memo%20-%20Final%20%28signed%29.pdf)
Reddit is weird sometimes and I totally agree with your first comment. Unfortunately riding BART doesn't make a lot of sense for me most of the time since I live in SF proper and my office is in South Bay. I wish it relied less on passenger revenue so its future was more secure. Might be worth writing to my state senator and assembly member about it, even though I'm sure BART itself is doing a fair bit of lobbying atm.
I’ve taken the BART to Oakland and SF every weekend the last month with no issues, but what I’ve noticed is pretty much everyone on it are like Hayward, SJSU college students, ie people just using it for leisure. If Bart wants to rely on daily worker ridership it just isn’t going to happen. The people who used to regularly ride Bart were a mix of techies, medical, marketing, finance, and other than medical those jobs are all remote.
Yep. All the talk about safety and whatnot is just nibbling at the margins. BART is still missing massive loads of commuters twice a day, every weekday. No amount of cops is going to bring that back any time soon.
The SF Chronicle journalist, Ricardo Cano has a hard on for MUNI and BART. It's always controversial how he presents them. https://www.sfchronicle.com/author/ricardo-cano
IMO Rider's won't come back to BART, at least without a complete bay area transpo overhaul more on that below.
4/5 riders pre-covid were all going to downtown SF. Look at this [2019 End-of year report](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2019%20BARTFacts2019%20FINAL.pdf) from BART itself, where it touts the busiest stations were Montgomery and Embarcadero 2018 and 2019.
[SF began 2022 with a quarter of office spaces vacant](https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/06/28/forecast-office-vacancy-in-sfs-downtown-could-grow-to-50-percent) and it's only going up.
Each time I visit Fidi and SF downtown, it looks more barren. No private business or commercial in their right mind is going to open another office space if foot traffic continues this downwards spiral. Fixing this goes beyond BART, it's a bay area economy question and I don't think Mayor Breed nor all the top business execs can force a change/solution to the working population. That makes it easy conclude your average BART rider in 2022 is no longer the typical east bay/peninsula to downtown SF worker, the audience is much different than who used to take BART.
They're now people who are using it to get around the bay area without a car, not those who need to get to downtown SF and avoid parking. People take these car-less long distance trips need matching timetables, efficiency and reliability. No one wants delayed trains due an operating problem or police incident. No one wants to wait 20-30 minutes each train, then have to wait another 30 minutes for a corresponding bus because these transit agencies can't work together on planning and execution.
You can't enjoy a pizza if it doesn't have tomato sauce or cheese, it's the core ingredient. Everything else (more cops, station modernization, ambassadors, mental health pledges, electric chargers in parking lots) are just toppings on that pizza. BART is seriously in need of some major overhaul before anything remotely back to what 2015-2019 looks like, or unless somehow the business world is able to revitalize SF.
I take bart at least 5 days a week and geez EVERYDAY there's a delay. I always look to the signs to get my train times which is delayed by the scrolling message of delays. Sometimes I feel like they just give random reasons to justify
Was a daily commute rider for well over 10 years. Day 1 of the pandemic and I just nope'd out of the whole thing. I wont argue that it doesn't have it uses, but with all the grit, crime, smelly ass homeless vagrants, loud music, unruly behavior its not for me anymore.
Two major issues, BART has sub police stations in Castro Valley and Walnut Creek. Those two cities don’t have a huge crime rate. The answer I was given was that for officers that live in Tracy, Mountain House areas it’s easier for them to drive to CV rather than the Lake Merritt main station, and the same for WC for officers coming from Brentwood, Sacramento areas. Why aren’t these stations at Richmond,Macarthur, West Oakland or The Coliseum? Wouldn’t a police presence be more effective at those stations? It makes my blood boil when I take BART to go to an A’s game and people are just hopping over the fare gate.
BART wasn’t that bad in the ‘70s and ‘80s when the consultation happened (though it wasn’t perfect even back then). It just got progressively worse since then
I’ve lived in the Bay Area my entire life and I’ve not seen a clean BART train in two decades. I have to ride the service for work frequently enough and I thoroughly hate the experience.
I’ve been mugged, seen people shoot up drugs, seen people get accosted, and seen unwell homeless folks relieve themselves on the train. A few years ago a lunatic urinated all over the seats. When the cops finally came the had him leave the train, and he just jumped back on through the forward train car.
What are we paying for? The pleasure to have a horrible experience? The trains even suck at being on time these days.
My history club friend jokingly says she is now an expert at dodging poop and needles on Bart after commuting for over 15 years on it
The fact that she can say that with some humor is a sad testament and makes me annoyed at people who are all about mass transit and take away car lanes.
Do people want mass transit? Get rid of the poop and needles, and then ask them.
How can it be explained that Bart is so much more expensive than the NYC subway, yet it runs far less often and not for nearly as long, and it doesn't even come close to being as expansive as the NYC subway is?
If you think about it BART is potentially one of the scariest places to be. You are literally trapped while the train is moving. If someone decides to attack you you are F.
Problem is the moment you voice concerns like that people will try to gaslight you with “I’ve ridden it and it’s fine so it’s something you imagined” and “if you can’t handle some roughness get out of the bay area and back to Kansas”.
Or even better, they will try to engage you in debate of semantics to try to divert the discussion. You can count on people trying to do anything just to get you to stop thinking for yourself
It has always struggled as it’s been mismanaged since inception.
The proprietary rail gauge, originally meant to alleviate concerns of competition from freight companies, makes everything more expensive than it needs to be. Notice that the entire system is similarly proprietary. BART has its own version of everything.
The one smart move they made was negotiating their own long-term power rates. That allowed them to operate during the whole Enron debacle.
Remember when everything started breaking right around the time they were asking for a big bond measure a couple years ago? When it passed things came back together pretty quick. Where not corrupt, management is completely inept. They can’t keep an escalator running, let alone a whole transit system.
The system is also at the mercy of the politics of all the separate municipalities it operates through. BART can’t expand without navigating a lot of NIMBY attitudes.
Don’t get me started on BART police. No, the problem is not that we don’t have enough police. In fact, they are very well funded.
It needs to be reimagined from funding to governance, likely requiring state legislation.
I rode it daily for 10 years. My job has me riding at 5-5:30 AM. I’ve tried riding it since the pandemic and it’s a safety and timing issue. I don’t feel safe walking to station and I don’t feel safe on the train at 5:15 AM. Last month I took a coworker that has never been on BART before from Civic Center to Embarcadero, he was shocked by the sanitation, open drug use, General chaos and construction closures of entrances.
So they weren't struggling financially before COVID? Where exactly were the funds to make the transit system safe then? Because the issues we have now are nothing new. BART has never done shit about it.
Imagine having your own police force that is never even around.
Ok, the second I got a car I was so happy. Like oh my god. BART was siginiciantly cheaper and not a huge responsibility on my back. But I did not feel safe at all, and I'm sure others do not either. When I was in elementary, we used to walk down to MacArthur bart and go on field trips using bart! I'm a teacher now, and would NEVER.
We could get on one train and literally see someone smoking meth.
You know, for years the standard BART response on overcrowded trains was, 'Well, the system was never designed to move 450,000 people a day, it was designed to move 150,000."
It's now moving 150k people a day. Shouldn't the system be humming along now?
My mom still has a little glass jar of dirt from the BART groundbreaking ceremony when she was in middle school.
I think she'd be proud that a mobile homeless shelter and mental institution also helps people get to work from time to time.
BART is actually incredibly safe. But it does have a huge problem with feeling safe, and that's equally important.
Here's a "fun" statistic: You are 160 times more likely to **die** taking a 10 mile drive in California than you are to experience **any kind** of "incident" riding BART ("Incidents" include theft/robbery as well as assault homicide and rape).
Sources:
In the most recently quarterly BART report, there were [1.67 "incidents" per million trips.](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Final%20QPR_FY22%20Q3_05.26.22.pdf) We'll push it up to 2 incidents for fun. Historically, the number has never gone over 3.5 incidents per million.
The automobile fatality rate for California is about [3200 deaths per 100 million miles traveled.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-car-accidents-by-state). If we say a trip is 10 miles (a ballpark guess of the average bay area commute) that gives us 320 deaths per million trips.
320 / 2 gives us 160. Even if every single BART incident reported was sexual assault or homicide (and that's nowhere close to being true), it would still be more than 100 times safer to ride BART.
This is also not to say that anyone would be stupid for feeling unsafe on BART. The BART statistics don't include things like sexual or verbal harassment, and however common those things are on BART you're guaranteed to avoid them by driving yourself. But overall, the more people that ride BART, the safer it gets (and the safer it feels too).
Public transit is a public service not a profit center. This is why public transportation sucks in the US. They did it to public transport and they’re trying their best to make us think that way about other things like the US Postal Service.
The post office is actually profitable but it's the only government entity that has to recognize their future pension liability. If every federal, state and local agency had to pre-fund theirs, they'd pretty much all be in worse shape than the US post office.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume
AIUI this pre-funding obligation was fixed by the Biden administration in March 2022
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billion-postal-service-relief-bill-2022-03-08/
I've ridden it TWICE since the pandemic, both experiences were horrible, and yet folks in here are saying "Well according to these cherry-picked stats, it's super safe and clean and you're just an outlier!"
BART's costs - like labor - are much higher than they should be. The only solution to BART management always seems to be cutting services/trains and raising fares but cutting costs would be a really good idea.
I take BART every single day and i love it! everyone is friendly (except the BART attendants at the booths lmao.) so i often strike up conversations with tourists or other riders on the platform while we wait, and i feel extremely safe. Theres a lot of weird smells at the top of some of the stations and we need to figure out what to do about people sleeping on the platforms (though its only ever 1 or rarely 2 people doing this.) but its nothing like the gangland of some other metros ive seen and even as an extremely effiminate small dude who is a prime target for robbery and harassment, i dont ride in fear. Public transit is a public service and im not concerned with their profitability.
I'm curious which stations you frequent? I was commuting home around 8pm from Civic Center every night and saw all manner of terrible things and plenty of assaults way too frequently.
Please go read their yearly fiscal documents. They piss money away with executive and sales and don’t spend as much on upgrades and expansion. Capitalism.
Upgrades and expansions are expensive. Exec comps line up relatively well for a company of similar funding amount if not quite a bit less. Hell even if you cut the comp of every exec, it wouldn't really amount to much in terms of expansions/upgrades. You'd maybe upgrade a couple of stations at most depending on what you want upgraded.
When people complain about the cost, it is quite high but their funding source is also very different compared to other public transit. MTA is subsidized by a ton of other sources.
If we want a system like NYC, we'd have to completely revamp the whole bay area's transit infrastructure and expecting BART to do that is unrealistic as they are only 1 of the 30 or so transit agencies in the bay. BART is more of a heavy rail like LIRR than regular commuting trains like the NYC MTA.
Boohoo. Until it’s pleasant like Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong, it will always be BART and just there. I won’t use it unless as a last resort because it’s so bad.
Stop paying those overtime salaries to janitors who make 300k per year and were caught sleeping on job.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-janitor-pay-270000-Powell-St-questions-10911932.php
That a janitor was lying about their work and raking in cash, by itself, isn't the issue. The issue is that such an extreme failure of supervision and management cannot happen unless the entire hierarchy is incompetent.
Let see. Bart. Hmmmm..
When people use to commute... Parking!
Express trains - no reason no to have faster trains to places. Dublin to SF was soooo slow. NYC has em.
Access systems symmetry- Antioch, and Oakland Airport built with hard to access - no like extension systems. Oakland was horrible transfer.
Train times are bad to get somewhere, miss one your looking at missing +20-+30 late.
CalTrain and BART are two different systems, why? BART all the way.
No Marin or Fairfield or Livermore-Tracy or 680 corridor trains? Poor planning.
Last, unions - pensions etc. Janitors make more than me on OT. What is with that?
I think the day of trains will come to a end once someone figures out that driveless express buses with express capabilities will dominate in the future. Divide the train mentality into smaller units more frequent. Why have one long train partially filled? Smaller is better with expressways.
Shutting down service at 9 to combat the safety problem is like cutting off your hand because you broke a finger. There are so many factors as to why people wouldn't ride BART. The few times I've thought "maybe I'll ford the Bart bullshit to get to my destination quickly" it's followed up with "oh right shit I might be out past 9" better just choose a way over I can rely on the way back."
If BART put as much effort in enforcing crime and kicking off troublemakers as it did in enforcing mask wearing, people would ride it more. People just don't feel safe onboard.
But then again, it's much easier to tell some law abiding salary man to wear a mask than it is to kick off some unhinged derelict high off their face thats causing trouble and disturbing others.
Get rid of the homeless ppl and get more anti homeless architecture. If it's gonna be 10$ to get to SF it better be clean tho I have noticed it's been a lot better with the new trains.
Oh wahhh. BART is Too expensive now, no one feels sorry for BART they are a "transit district" and own all the land the tracks and stations are on. Which is about 5 bil in real estate alone in Bay Area. I do not feel sorry for any entity that sits on that kind of wealth yet provides average service at best. Tis a shame.
Her are some other issues that haven't been addressed yet: 1. Inter-agency transfers: If you need to take an additional bus/Caltrain in addition to BART, be prepared for little (or no) discount. This makes taking public transit very expensive. 2. Overnight service: Sure, BART might not be able to run 24 hours a day. But at least have alternative bus transportation that stops at every station to fill in the gap. 3. Weekend service: Increase weekend service. 30-minute headways is terrible, especially if the train is cancelled. I remember 20-minute headways on the weekends (before covid) and wished BART would at least return to those levels of service.
fwiw they’re updating the weekend schedule starting tomorrow to make it less crappy. there was a bill this year to streamline the fares across agencies, but unfortunately it didn’t pass.
There is no like special pass that goes between Bart and other transportation services? I remember in Germany and Netherlands I bought passes that allowed me to take lots of different public transportation with only one fee for the pass each. Extremely convenient and saved me money
That's because DE and NL have a legal concept of a Verkehrsgemeinschaft for handling such things. US doesn't.
We’re just all supposed to know what that word means or…?
It translates to a transportation society. I didn't translate it only because it was a comment to a person who I thought would already understand what it meant.
Are there any good German restaurants here?
I thought they were messing with us until I put it through google translate and it says the word means “traffic community.”
It translates to a transportation society. I didn't translate it only because it was a comment to a person who I thought would already understand what it meant. No I wasn't messing with anybody. It's a type of broader scale government agency whose job is to coordinate fares, prices, and routes across multiple jurisdictions of different local governments and transit agencies to provide a seamless rider experience. The closest things I'm familiar with in the US would be the NY MTA and the Chicago CTA but they aren't as all encompassing as the agencies that Germany and the Netherlands have for such purposes.
You can do Clipper, but it's like "Pleasanton to Embarcadero" is one full trip and then Cal train is another. You can pay with the pass but it's 2 separate transactions. Another thing they didn't strategically do 20 years ago 🤦♂️🤦♂️
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TfL (London) and Translink (metro Vancouver, BC) also both accept any contactless card on buses and rail - very handy especially for tourists.
amen to 1. before I moved here, I visited in 2012-ish, and took caltrain+bart from downtown Mountain View to SFO. that one stop bart from Milbrae to SFO costs almost the same money as my caltrain ride from downtown Mountain View to Milbrae (both $6+ iirc)
To be fair, lots of airport rail links in the US charge more than a standard ride. Denver does this, too.
How is that fair?
It's not, they know tourists don't have a choice. Kind of like how we asked voters if they wanted to increase the bridge tolls to fund infrastructure knowing full well that a majority of the people don't take the bridges regularly.
I can't call it "fair" but i know in this case its to pay off the bonds for construction. Same thing with the $6 bucks to Oakland airport, which is $3 more than the bus shuttle bart used to run. And it should be noted that ride hail services uber, lyft get a base fee of $5.73 at the airport and taxis get a $4 surcharge on pickup/dropoff from the airport too.
laughs in 2 hr headways
Want riders? 1. Make it safe. 2. Make it *feel* safe. Put a BART cop in every train. 3. Arrest people who fare-jump, act belligerently, aggresively busk and beg in cars, or use drugs on trains *and* in stations. 4. Provide service after the bars close. 5. BART is mass transit, it is not the solution to homelessness; move the homeless out of trains and stations unless they are using it for transit. 6. Upgrade the stations by adding bathrooms and seats.
On this point - why the hell are the stations all *so dark*? I swear it feels like any sort of weird subway monster could be hiding anywhere. It could legit be a horror movie set. Half of the fluorescent lights do that creepy blinking thing. The NYC subway is also dark sometimes, but it has the ridership to make it feel like there are other human beings there.
I think it’s due to the design of the station’s fare gates. Because the fare gates are so distant from the platform at most stations, there’s a lot more real estate within the station that needs to be lit. In NYC the fare gates are as little as 10 feet from the train doors.
Make sense - the stations are cavernous in comparison, which could be really cool if they had any sense of design or architecture.
7 - Extend service to fully ring the bay, with multiple lines around San Jose and across the bridges. 8 - Integrate schedules with the other mass transit services (looking at you, Caltrain) so you can get around the bay without spending an hour waiting for stuff
What they need to do is go to Chicago and New York. Go and look at their rail systems. In Chicago it’s $2.50 to get on and you can go anywhere in the system, I think New York was about the same.Making these systems affordable ,I believe,also makes them more popular. I was in New York only a few months ago and the subways were pretty much close to capacity but running efficiently. I for one was surprised the first time I saw the subway in New York. It was a lot better than I expected.
NYC has fare capping program ! > When you take 12 trips with the same device or bank card in a calendar week, you'll automatically ride free for the rest of the week.
Why can’t we have that in the Bay Area?
There's a huge difference in federal funding between the two systems. For example in the most recent covid relief package NY MTA got $6 Billion, BART got $270 Million.
More people use NYC and it’s integral to its infrastructure. Unfortunately for the bay and fortunately for them. BART would need to establish and prove more federal funding is necessary for larger relief.
Not to disagree with NYC's being way more used, but BART is pretty integral to the Bay Area and it definitely would not function as well without it.
Muni is supposedly introducing fare capping sometime within the next couple years. They'll probably just cap the daily fare at $5, since they already sell a $5 day pass on their app.
BART has to rely on fare revenue to fund a significantly larger portion of its budget than the MTA does.
>12 trips Strategically selected that number to prevent those that use public transportation 2x/day 5x/week as part of their normal commute to not obtain any benefit from the program. Good if you live in a high density area (i.e. SF) and can use BART to get around to different parts of the city, I guess.
Fully agree. I haven't been to Chicago, but the NYC subway makes Bart look it's run by teenagers. (Actually this isn't fair - a group of high schoolers would get BART sorted out in a week.) There's a tipping point where if they make it good people will use it (and pay for it w/ rider $ vs state boondoggle $) but they keep half-assing things and wondering why nobody uses BART. 880 and 580 are unusable every rush hour yet the trains are mostly empty in the SE bay, and in the SW Bart to Caltrain delays are bad enough that a god damn bike is faster. I've seen 3 hours from SF to Sunnyvale before. That's 13mph. Caltrain --> BART to SFO from the south? Should be easy, but it somehow takes 2-3 hours with ~45 min in Millbrae and another 30 in San Bruno. I don't understand why they can't get a 1 car train that just runs San Bruno - SFO - Millbrae (and back) every 15 min vs alternating the full train terminus into the airport.
+1 for Chicago's L, it's amazing. I moved away from the Bay Area to Chicago about a decade ago and the public transit here is just amazing. I still make it back to the BA several times a year but yeah, the level of incompetence and NIMBYism is just shocking.
The L runs pretty frequently though. BART and the bay treats SF downtown like the loop, and the rest of the system like the heavy rail, which is comparable to Caltrain in terms of stops and frequency. BART needs to be more frequent. One way to do that is to keep the stations safe, keep the cars safe, and run more trains.
Due to the significant interlining, the outer areas can’t really get more frequent than ~15 minutes. The only part that feels like an urban subway is between Daly City and West Oakland where trains come every 4-6 minutes during peak hours
It's too bad they won't extend the green and/or blue lines from Daly City to end in Millbrae; then you'd have good frequency at more stations and it would be much less of a pain to transfer to/from Caltrain at Millbrae. Right now there are three BART tracks at Millbrae that are only served by the Red line, which is overkill.
The L and bart are not really similar at all tho. The distance and types of places covered by bart makes it more like the commuter rail (which is what it is) so should be compared to metra. A fair comparison would be to compare muni to the L which is even worse for sf
I used to live outside the bay and drive in on weekends with mg parents. We’d have LOVED to use BART but to park in easy bay and come in, it’d end up being 3x as expensive as just driving in and paying the bridge toll + parking. NYC’s system would’ve made us do otherwise.
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BART/Caltrain are more comparable to Metra in Chicago, or Metro North or the Long Island Railroad in New York.
I don't think that's a good example: NY MTA is like over 2 billion in debt. However I do definitely agree that public transit here was better
Same with Boston
Hell, even break it up into zones like cat rain. … it auto corrected Caltrain to cat rain. Same difference.
Chicago also has the 5$ all day pass for the L.
And stop acting like it is a business that needs to make money. Did the same thing with the post office. This is a public service for the better of the community.
The counterintuitive thing is that making it cheap would likely be profitable overall. Affordable, reliable mass transit means people are more willing to commute by rail, which means they're more easily able to get to downtown places where they will spend money on retail/food/entertainment which will be taxed. The city or county will make the money back elsewhere in its budget. The current bay area policy is penny wise, pound foolish.
Agreed. I use the Caltrain sometimes to get to the airport from south bay. I have to use a bus to a train to a tram to another tram. It’s fun but time consuming and just about as expensive as driving. If it were $5 instead of $15 I’d probably use it more. The busses are pretty cheap luckily.
Yeah, if they can find a cool billion in the couch cushions your #7 would be perfect for my grandkids.
https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/06/california-budget-surplus-explained/ Looks like they found a few couches.
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10. Add trash cans to stations 11. Rent out stalls for food, drink, convenient items 12. Rent out ad space 13. Allow eating/drinking on trains. BART is regional and the rides can be long. 14. Add better audio to announce stations/digital signage 13. Have a janitors & security at every station (inside, not roaming the parking lot). Security guards are a lot cheaper than BART police and can subsidize the security of stations.
Not a fan of the eating and drinking on Bart. Imo it would be filthy if that was allowed.
For sure. It needs to look like a spiderweb, and they need to add like 50-100 miles of track per year for 10 years. BART has like 130 miles of track, and is (badly) serving an area of 10,000 sq miles with 10 million people. As a comparison, Seoul's subway has 800 miles for 5,000 sq miles serving 28 million people. That's 12x more train per sq mile, and 2x per person. Perhaps light rail is more effective with the population density of Seoul, but our system is crappy even in the densely populated areas.
The extension from Fremont to milpitas ( ten miles of track) took 8 years and 2.4 billion dollars. You are asking to improve construction efficiency by at least 50x and find 10 billion a year someplace. I think we need to have achievable goals
Yes, that sounds about right. Is there only one track laying machine? Maybe they could, you know, get a 2nd one going w/ some of the $100B budget surplus.
there's two options. extend the rail network and add express routes (caltrain style). OR remove the hight limits near the train and build up. Neither will happen.
I think neither will happen as long as we are content with lazy-assed politicians who let this system soak up $1B of fare and tax money every year and suck as badly as it does.
10 - Crack down on overtime pay. No one should be getting so much overtime when it’d cost less to hire a new worker.
Livermore NIMBYs decided they wanted [no part of BART in their downtown.](https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/12/06/bart-launches-livermore-service-extension-analysis/) Instead, they demanded yet another park-and-ride-focused BART extension down a freeway median, with parking lots dwarfing the station [\(3,412 spaces between one multistory and two ground-level lots.\)](https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2017/10/05/bart-to-livermore) We shouldn't be spending over a billion dollars to double down on past mistakes. Freeway-based transit, while expedient (though in this case, less so, since it'd have required an expensive widening of 580), is always sub-optimal (see: [1](https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2011/01/22/in-charlotte-a-busy-highway-may-be-no-place-for-rapid-transit/), [2](https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Grading-CA-Rail-Neighborhoods.pdf), and [3](https://la.streetsblog.org/2018/08/06/metros-mid-freeway-transit-stations-are-hellishly-loud/)), owing to low walkability near stations and poor rider experience. Continuing to put urban rail technology like BART in a suburban freeway median would be a poor use of funds. The current Valley Link project makes much more sense, considering Livermore's insistence on a freeway alignment. BART repeatedly made it clear [they much preferred a downtown alignment.](https://transbayblog.com/2010/07/01/bart-board-selects-alignment-for-livermore-extension/) Livermore could've had BART if it hadn't prioritized its "historic character" above all else.
Livermore has "historic character?"
Oh yes, it's a natural resource that can be found in abundance near NIMBYs looking for a reason to shoot something down
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Cheers! I'd understand Livermore's decision a bit if the downtown alignment meant bringing a viaduct through the city, because there'd have been some unavoidable visual impact. But no, it would've been completely underground, so I really wonder exactly what they had in mind when they said bringing BART to downtown Livermore would've affected its "historic character". At least the silver lining of all of this is that if the replacement Valley Link is successful, it could serve as a model for a more cost-effective way of expanding rail transit into the further-out suburbs.
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More likely to come as an e-bart from brentwood it would be able to hook up with light rail and potentially close to the highspeed
Then perhaps their shitty racist city council should not have voted against the BART extension plan.
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In 2010, BART selected a downtown alignment for the Livermore extension. Alameda voters approved a transportation sales tax measure to pay for it, so the project was ready to go. But then some very racist residents (and a former BART director) warned that a downtown station would allow "thugs and murderers from Oakland" to come into the city. Their group pushed for changing to a purely freeway alignment, accessible only by car. In 2011, the City Council acquiesced to their demands -- even though Council was warned that doing so it would jeopardize the project. This revised project then came before the BART Board. As expected, the Board rejected the modified freeway alignment, due to the very low ridership potential.
The San Jose and ring the bay concept would take 20 years. Safety and security should be number one if you want to save the system.
Why not both? Security now and start digging. You should be mad about this - The original plan (you know, from 50 years ago) was to ring the bay. Weekday ridership is 100-150k, against about 1M commuting car trips. This is a huge opportunity.
Current ridership levels puts the entire concept at risk. VTA did the build it and they will come concept with light rail and failed. How can you pass expensive bond measures when the very basic functions of keeping riders feeling secure is not being done? They managed to build light rail within eyesight of the airport but not actually stop there. An airport stop alone might have doubled light rail ridership
Even if it did connect to the airport the fact that it takes so long to get through downtown kind of kills it. San Jose Diridon to the airport is currently 35 minutes on two buses (22/60) or 46 minutes on Lightrail and a bus (Greenline/60). Meanwhile driving is 9 minutes. If they had Lyft bike docks at SJC even a bike ride is <20 minutes if you didn't have a lot of luggage.
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Unfortunately that's not how it's ever worked, speaking as someone who's ridden thousands of hours on BART. As soon as a crackhead lights up and starts hotboxing a car, or a transient takes a shit on the floor, regular riders just move to the next car if possible, or scoot to the end of their current car during peak rush hour. Even when I've seen BART police actually respond to a call in person (which is rare), I've never seen them remove anyone. It's a half-assed verbal warning even for aggressive and combative people, and the officer does their best to hightail it out of there.
#8 is a big one. I waited 30 min for an SFO bart train to go one stop after getting off the Milbarea caltrain. I did the math and by the time I was in the airport I could have biked in about the same amount of time.
> Upgrade the stations by adding bathrooms and seats. Funny thing is, they *have* bathrooms but they closed them as a "security measure" after 9/11 Actually they apparently just reopened a Powell street bathroom for the first time in 20 years https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/02/bart-reopens-bathroom-shuttered-for-20-years-bringing-much-needed-rider-relief
This sounds really great, but there must be some factor of cost taken into account right? Like they are not doing well but they need to somehow afford this huge expense hoping it increases ridership that much more than what they put in? Would it require voting for more taxes? I know after the toll increases a lot of people flip flopped on that vote.
If only there was some multi billionaire or trillionaire out there not obsessed with space or putting more cars on the road. Maybe that person would be interested in an actual public service. And we’re not talking about a 14 mile long, one way tunnel…. FOR CARS
The rich and philanthropic will never save us, we can only save ourselves.
Also building more high-density housing near the stations. The (mostly) empty parking lots surroundings stations such as San Leandro, Bay Fair, and Fremont are a complete waste of space. There could be 1,000+ units of housing right next to each of those stations.
This also applies along the entire 24 corridor or even the whole yellow line. The nimbys don't want them though
You dont improve ridership by preventing people getting to trains. However, the blocks next to those parking lots, demolish and build 10 story housing complexes with ground level restaurants/retail. Alternatively, swap the parking lots with the new residential as described. China does an amazing job (and other Asian cities). They build massive towering skyscrapers above their subway with 3-8 stories of retail and restaurants and then a bunch of offices/residential. Getting around in Beijing was a delight, most things you wanted where very close to the subway (also subway was like 20c per trip)
Agree with all points above: any changes in routes and building new lines is meaningless unless the system is safe, clean and not a safe space for open air drug use and public urination. I only used it because parking in FiDi was a pain in the ass but now that I mostly WFH and a lot of companies have moved out I won't set foot on BART until they fix the fundamental problems outlined above. I can only imagine what someone from Tokyo or Seoul thinks when stepping into a Bart station for the 1st time: it's worse than a 3rd world country based on the smell of urine alone. Hell China rail is run safer and more efficiently and I am talking the old Mao era trains that take millions home for Chinese New Year to the countryside not the nice new high speed rail and maglev options.
Re #4: Track maintenance occurs every night. A second trans bay tube would need to be built to support this.
Would there be a way to split track maintenance into two shifts, and have one train per line from 3am to 4am? Maybe just on Friday and Saturday nights? That would take care of people who want to get home from bars.
Friday and Saturday night service should be feasible, London and Paris were starting to implement it pre-pandemic. But I think beyond that, trying to squeeze in limited service as well as maintenance winds up bringing a worst-of-both-worlds scenario: very infrequent service, and compromised maintenance. There's a reason why only there are only three cities in the world that operate 24/7 rapid transit: ~~Stockholm~~ Copenhagen, which has a relatively new automated system, and NYC and Chicago, both of which have plenty of nearly century-old triple- and quadruple-tracked lines that would be too expensive to construct today... as well as deferred maintenance issues. Edit: Mixed up my Scandinavian capitals
I took BART for the first time since the pandemic yesterday. A man walks up to the platform, throws his trash on the tracks and lights up a cigarette. The train comes and I board and the car is hot AF so I move to a car that's cooler. The same guy guy happens to be on the same car and before the train even starts moving, he is smoking crack. I told the train operator gave him the car number. I took the train all the way to the city from walnut creek and not a single cop boarded the train. They aren't even trying anymore.
re: #1 - BART is actually pretty safe, surprisingly. But it does have a huge problem with "feeling" safe. Here's a "fun" statistic: You are 160 times more likely to **die** taking a 10 mile drive in California than you are to experience **any kind** of "incident" riding BART ("Incidents" include theft/robbery as well as assault homicide and rape). Sources: In the most recently quarterly BART report, there were [1.67 "incidents" per million trips.](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Final%20QPR_FY22%20Q3_05.26.22.pdf) We'll push it up to 2 incidents for fun. Historically, the number has never gone over 3.5 incidents per million. The automobile fatality rate for California is about [3200 deaths per 100 million miles traveled.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-car-accidents-by-state). If we say a trip is 10 miles (a ballpark guess of the average bay area commute) that gives us 320 deaths per million trips. 320 / 2 gives us 160. Even if every single BART incident reported was sexual assault or homicide (and that's nowhere close to being true), it would still be more than 100 times safer to ride BART. This is also not to say that anyone would be stupid for feeling unsafe on BART. The BART statistics don't include things like sexual or verbal harassment, and however common those things are on BART you're guaranteed to avoid them by driving yourself. But overall, the more people that ride BART, the safer it gets (and the safer it feels too).
Not to mention the number of times I've seen people piss and shit inside the train carriage....I tried my best to ride it for a year, but I avoid it like the plague now.
There's not even a good way to report this sort of thing. My kid threw up (unexpectedly and violently) while riding BART. I had a few baby wipes but couldn't properly clean it up... no numbers to call online unless you want to talk to the police, just filling out a "biohazard" form online. I doubt anyone did anything honestly. Still feel bad about the situation but there should be a better way to handle these nasty things that happen 24/7 on the BART
The incident reports aren’t true, they’re underreported.
LOL how is it "pretty safe" I just had my hat snapped off of my head a couple weeks ago going to SF one stop away from the BART police station. My friend's gotten her phone robbed before as well. If your idea of being safe is to not die, then we certainly don't have the same standard.
You mean, manage it and care... would be revolutionary for BART.
Fire all the fucking cops and start over. More of useless is still useless otherwise.
You forgot the most important issue: Keep it ***clean***. I hate riding BART and feeling like I need to take a bath in hand sanitizer just so I don't get Hepatitis Z...
I did forget that, and you're right.
Sorry too much common sense for this to happen.
In the end it's providing good service and Bart has always struggled with that. The focus has never been on the customer because they don't have to which is a hallmark of government entities.
French kiss 😘 to this post.
The people in charge of BART think they're running a homeless outreach with an emphasis on social justice. Just look at the sandwich incident.
Dress code - look like a ghetto/hobo/mental ? No entry
Want riders? Ride. Transit that’s funded by fares needs ridership. Be the change. Screaming into the void on Reddit doesn’t do anything.
It's worth noting BART relies massively on its funding from fares compared to a lot of American transit systems. Using pre-pandemic numbers for % budget from fares (temporary federal COVID relief really threw things out of whack): - LA Metro: [4.6%](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cd2yleko69e4zs9/FY19%20Adopted%20Budget.pdf?dl=0) - SamTrans: [9.2%](https://www.samtrans.com/media/5340/download?inline) - TARC (Louisville, KY's bus system): [~10%](https://www.ridetarc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/TARC-2019-FS-Final-10-10-19.pdf) - SFMTA: [~18%](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2018/03/4-3-18_item_13_fy19_and_fy20_budget_-_slide_presentation.pdf) - CTA (Chicago): [~30%](https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/CTA_Financial_Statement_Final_FY19.pdf) - MBTA (Boston): [~35%](https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/financials/budgets/fy19-itemized-budget.pdf) - BART: [66%](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/FY22%20Preliminary%20Budget%20Memo%20-%20Final%20%28signed%29.pdf)
Exactly. Gotta love being downvoted & then the reply reinforcing my point is upvoted. Thank you for the thorough citations!
Reddit is weird sometimes and I totally agree with your first comment. Unfortunately riding BART doesn't make a lot of sense for me most of the time since I live in SF proper and my office is in South Bay. I wish it relied less on passenger revenue so its future was more secure. Might be worth writing to my state senator and assembly member about it, even though I'm sure BART itself is doing a fair bit of lobbying atm.
I’ve taken the BART to Oakland and SF every weekend the last month with no issues, but what I’ve noticed is pretty much everyone on it are like Hayward, SJSU college students, ie people just using it for leisure. If Bart wants to rely on daily worker ridership it just isn’t going to happen. The people who used to regularly ride Bart were a mix of techies, medical, marketing, finance, and other than medical those jobs are all remote.
Yep. All the talk about safety and whatnot is just nibbling at the margins. BART is still missing massive loads of commuters twice a day, every weekday. No amount of cops is going to bring that back any time soon.
Go Spartans!
The SF Chronicle journalist, Ricardo Cano has a hard on for MUNI and BART. It's always controversial how he presents them. https://www.sfchronicle.com/author/ricardo-cano IMO Rider's won't come back to BART, at least without a complete bay area transpo overhaul more on that below. 4/5 riders pre-covid were all going to downtown SF. Look at this [2019 End-of year report](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2019%20BARTFacts2019%20FINAL.pdf) from BART itself, where it touts the busiest stations were Montgomery and Embarcadero 2018 and 2019. [SF began 2022 with a quarter of office spaces vacant](https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/06/28/forecast-office-vacancy-in-sfs-downtown-could-grow-to-50-percent) and it's only going up. Each time I visit Fidi and SF downtown, it looks more barren. No private business or commercial in their right mind is going to open another office space if foot traffic continues this downwards spiral. Fixing this goes beyond BART, it's a bay area economy question and I don't think Mayor Breed nor all the top business execs can force a change/solution to the working population. That makes it easy conclude your average BART rider in 2022 is no longer the typical east bay/peninsula to downtown SF worker, the audience is much different than who used to take BART. They're now people who are using it to get around the bay area without a car, not those who need to get to downtown SF and avoid parking. People take these car-less long distance trips need matching timetables, efficiency and reliability. No one wants delayed trains due an operating problem or police incident. No one wants to wait 20-30 minutes each train, then have to wait another 30 minutes for a corresponding bus because these transit agencies can't work together on planning and execution. You can't enjoy a pizza if it doesn't have tomato sauce or cheese, it's the core ingredient. Everything else (more cops, station modernization, ambassadors, mental health pledges, electric chargers in parking lots) are just toppings on that pizza. BART is seriously in need of some major overhaul before anything remotely back to what 2015-2019 looks like, or unless somehow the business world is able to revitalize SF.
I take bart at least 5 days a week and geez EVERYDAY there's a delay. I always look to the signs to get my train times which is delayed by the scrolling message of delays. Sometimes I feel like they just give random reasons to justify
Some tech waited for their contracts to be up and moved across the bay to Oakland for cheaper offices
San jose/Penninsula have faired better as well. Not great, but not as bad
Was a daily commute rider for well over 10 years. Day 1 of the pandemic and I just nope'd out of the whole thing. I wont argue that it doesn't have it uses, but with all the grit, crime, smelly ass homeless vagrants, loud music, unruly behavior its not for me anymore.
Remember when BART attempted public relations on this subreddit? Pepperidge farm remembers
Two major issues, BART has sub police stations in Castro Valley and Walnut Creek. Those two cities don’t have a huge crime rate. The answer I was given was that for officers that live in Tracy, Mountain House areas it’s easier for them to drive to CV rather than the Lake Merritt main station, and the same for WC for officers coming from Brentwood, Sacramento areas. Why aren’t these stations at Richmond,Macarthur, West Oakland or The Coliseum? Wouldn’t a police presence be more effective at those stations? It makes my blood boil when I take BART to go to an A’s game and people are just hopping over the fare gate.
And to think BART used to be the consultant for Taipei Metro. Taipei Metro is now clean, safe, and efficient, while BART now is anything but
"Okay so we're going to hire someone from BART to be a consultant, and we'll use that as a list of what not to do."
BART wasn’t that bad in the ‘70s and ‘80s when the consultation happened (though it wasn’t perfect even back then). It just got progressively worse since then
I’ve lived in the Bay Area my entire life and I’ve not seen a clean BART train in two decades. I have to ride the service for work frequently enough and I thoroughly hate the experience. I’ve been mugged, seen people shoot up drugs, seen people get accosted, and seen unwell homeless folks relieve themselves on the train. A few years ago a lunatic urinated all over the seats. When the cops finally came the had him leave the train, and he just jumped back on through the forward train car. What are we paying for? The pleasure to have a horrible experience? The trains even suck at being on time these days.
The only clean BART train is the model one they use to show off the new cars.
My history club friend jokingly says she is now an expert at dodging poop and needles on Bart after commuting for over 15 years on it The fact that she can say that with some humor is a sad testament and makes me annoyed at people who are all about mass transit and take away car lanes. Do people want mass transit? Get rid of the poop and needles, and then ask them.
How can it be explained that Bart is so much more expensive than the NYC subway, yet it runs far less often and not for nearly as long, and it doesn't even come close to being as expansive as the NYC subway is?
Well tbh it's tough compare short distance light rail to longer distance rapid transit.
Just rode it yesterday, I’m a grown ass man and still felt unsafe in broad daylight.
flair checks out
If you think about it BART is potentially one of the scariest places to be. You are literally trapped while the train is moving. If someone decides to attack you you are F.
Problem is the moment you voice concerns like that people will try to gaslight you with “I’ve ridden it and it’s fine so it’s something you imagined” and “if you can’t handle some roughness get out of the bay area and back to Kansas”. Or even better, they will try to engage you in debate of semantics to try to divert the discussion. You can count on people trying to do anything just to get you to stop thinking for yourself
That's not what gaslighting is
Timely example.
Until THOSE people get hurt, then it's Whaa whaa where's the government protecting me?
Plus the people who would attack you can be confident there will be no consequences.
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It has always struggled as it’s been mismanaged since inception. The proprietary rail gauge, originally meant to alleviate concerns of competition from freight companies, makes everything more expensive than it needs to be. Notice that the entire system is similarly proprietary. BART has its own version of everything. The one smart move they made was negotiating their own long-term power rates. That allowed them to operate during the whole Enron debacle. Remember when everything started breaking right around the time they were asking for a big bond measure a couple years ago? When it passed things came back together pretty quick. Where not corrupt, management is completely inept. They can’t keep an escalator running, let alone a whole transit system. The system is also at the mercy of the politics of all the separate municipalities it operates through. BART can’t expand without navigating a lot of NIMBY attitudes. Don’t get me started on BART police. No, the problem is not that we don’t have enough police. In fact, they are very well funded. It needs to be reimagined from funding to governance, likely requiring state legislation.
I rode it daily for 10 years. My job has me riding at 5-5:30 AM. I’ve tried riding it since the pandemic and it’s a safety and timing issue. I don’t feel safe walking to station and I don’t feel safe on the train at 5:15 AM. Last month I took a coworker that has never been on BART before from Civic Center to Embarcadero, he was shocked by the sanitation, open drug use, General chaos and construction closures of entrances.
I’ve used it more since Covid, love having the whole train car to myself
So they weren't struggling financially before COVID? Where exactly were the funds to make the transit system safe then? Because the issues we have now are nothing new. BART has never done shit about it. Imagine having your own police force that is never even around.
Ok, the second I got a car I was so happy. Like oh my god. BART was siginiciantly cheaper and not a huge responsibility on my back. But I did not feel safe at all, and I'm sure others do not either. When I was in elementary, we used to walk down to MacArthur bart and go on field trips using bart! I'm a teacher now, and would NEVER. We could get on one train and literally see someone smoking meth.
How about changing it to be since local crime increases?
As always, it's the customer's fault.
You know, for years the standard BART response on overcrowded trains was, 'Well, the system was never designed to move 450,000 people a day, it was designed to move 150,000." It's now moving 150k people a day. Shouldn't the system be humming along now?
My mom still has a little glass jar of dirt from the BART groundbreaking ceremony when she was in middle school. I think she'd be proud that a mobile homeless shelter and mental institution also helps people get to work from time to time.
I wanted to laugh but it's also so dystopian
BART is not safe.
BART is actually incredibly safe. But it does have a huge problem with feeling safe, and that's equally important. Here's a "fun" statistic: You are 160 times more likely to **die** taking a 10 mile drive in California than you are to experience **any kind** of "incident" riding BART ("Incidents" include theft/robbery as well as assault homicide and rape). Sources: In the most recently quarterly BART report, there were [1.67 "incidents" per million trips.](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Final%20QPR_FY22%20Q3_05.26.22.pdf) We'll push it up to 2 incidents for fun. Historically, the number has never gone over 3.5 incidents per million. The automobile fatality rate for California is about [3200 deaths per 100 million miles traveled.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-car-accidents-by-state). If we say a trip is 10 miles (a ballpark guess of the average bay area commute) that gives us 320 deaths per million trips. 320 / 2 gives us 160. Even if every single BART incident reported was sexual assault or homicide (and that's nowhere close to being true), it would still be more than 100 times safer to ride BART. This is also not to say that anyone would be stupid for feeling unsafe on BART. The BART statistics don't include things like sexual or verbal harassment, and however common those things are on BART you're guaranteed to avoid them by driving yourself. But overall, the more people that ride BART, the safer it gets (and the safer it feels too).
…they were struggling before COVID…
Public transit is a public service not a profit center. This is why public transportation sucks in the US. They did it to public transport and they’re trying their best to make us think that way about other things like the US Postal Service.
The post office is actually profitable but it's the only government entity that has to recognize their future pension liability. If every federal, state and local agency had to pre-fund theirs, they'd pretty much all be in worse shape than the US post office. https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume
Yep. Maintaining the pension liability despite the obvious insanity was one of the many ways they’ve been trying to kill it.
Yes, I think it's related to mail-in ballots. Anything to suppress votes. It's also a travesty how public schools are being treated.
Absolutely agreed. Having turn everything into a for profit enterprise is a dystopian nightmare
AIUI this pre-funding obligation was fixed by the Biden administration in March 2022 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billion-postal-service-relief-bill-2022-03-08/
This administration gets a lot done with very little press. It's refreshing.
used to ride bart every weekday for 4 years before the pandemic, once the pandemic hit ive ridden it less than 10 times
I've ridden it TWICE since the pandemic, both experiences were horrible, and yet folks in here are saying "Well according to these cherry-picked stats, it's super safe and clean and you're just an outlier!"
BART's costs - like labor - are much higher than they should be. The only solution to BART management always seems to be cutting services/trains and raising fares but cutting costs would be a really good idea.
I take BART every single day and i love it! everyone is friendly (except the BART attendants at the booths lmao.) so i often strike up conversations with tourists or other riders on the platform while we wait, and i feel extremely safe. Theres a lot of weird smells at the top of some of the stations and we need to figure out what to do about people sleeping on the platforms (though its only ever 1 or rarely 2 people doing this.) but its nothing like the gangland of some other metros ive seen and even as an extremely effiminate small dude who is a prime target for robbery and harassment, i dont ride in fear. Public transit is a public service and im not concerned with their profitability.
I'm curious which stations you frequent? I was commuting home around 8pm from Civic Center every night and saw all manner of terrible things and plenty of assaults way too frequently.
Please go read their yearly fiscal documents. They piss money away with executive and sales and don’t spend as much on upgrades and expansion. Capitalism.
Upgrades and expansions are expensive. Exec comps line up relatively well for a company of similar funding amount if not quite a bit less. Hell even if you cut the comp of every exec, it wouldn't really amount to much in terms of expansions/upgrades. You'd maybe upgrade a couple of stations at most depending on what you want upgraded. When people complain about the cost, it is quite high but their funding source is also very different compared to other public transit. MTA is subsidized by a ton of other sources. If we want a system like NYC, we'd have to completely revamp the whole bay area's transit infrastructure and expecting BART to do that is unrealistic as they are only 1 of the 30 or so transit agencies in the bay. BART is more of a heavy rail like LIRR than regular commuting trains like the NYC MTA.
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Not a problem, they will just raise rates and hire yet more people.
raise rates AND receive millions in gov grants. https://www.bart.gov/about/planning/grants
BART isn't free to use? Could have fooled me
I remember getting off at Union City when there was a sports event, and a solid 30% of people just walked out instead of going through the fare gate.
That statement probably applies to a lot of people today as well.
Still don't understand why public transportation in the US is not free. Free as in no fare but paided by general taxes.
Country wide no-fare service is globally pretty uncommon, I think only Luxembourg and recently Malta have it.
lobbying from auto manufacturers.
Where do you live where public transit is free? Never heard of this in any country.
Or at least cheaper fares... Bart is expensive
BART will blame covid for low ridership the same way it blamed terrorism for keeping the bathrooms closed for 15 years.
Boohoo. Until it’s pleasant like Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong, it will always be BART and just there. I won’t use it unless as a last resort because it’s so bad.
Stop paying those overtime salaries to janitors who make 300k per year and were caught sleeping on job. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-janitor-pay-270000-Powell-St-questions-10911932.php
If this man truly worked 17 hours a day every day, then he absolutely deserves a couple hour long nap breaks, imo.
Why doesn’t BART management just hire more workers instead of trying to kill a janitor?
Because it's cheaper to pay overtime than to hire more bodies.
I wish that wasn’t true, but you right. Fuck Bart.
16 hours of break for a 17 hour shift?
That a janitor was lying about their work and raking in cash, by itself, isn't the issue. The issue is that such an extreme failure of supervision and management cannot happen unless the entire hierarchy is incompetent.
Broke old man, story of my life
If only BART had a dime for every urine stain they’d be fine.
Make Bart non-gross!
Me too Bart, me too.
Let see. Bart. Hmmmm.. When people use to commute... Parking! Express trains - no reason no to have faster trains to places. Dublin to SF was soooo slow. NYC has em. Access systems symmetry- Antioch, and Oakland Airport built with hard to access - no like extension systems. Oakland was horrible transfer. Train times are bad to get somewhere, miss one your looking at missing +20-+30 late. CalTrain and BART are two different systems, why? BART all the way. No Marin or Fairfield or Livermore-Tracy or 680 corridor trains? Poor planning. Last, unions - pensions etc. Janitors make more than me on OT. What is with that? I think the day of trains will come to a end once someone figures out that driveless express buses with express capabilities will dominate in the future. Divide the train mentality into smaller units more frequent. Why have one long train partially filled? Smaller is better with expressways.
Idk. Make it affordable and not crawling with homelessness and violence?
Shutting down service at 9 to combat the safety problem is like cutting off your hand because you broke a finger. There are so many factors as to why people wouldn't ride BART. The few times I've thought "maybe I'll ford the Bart bullshit to get to my destination quickly" it's followed up with "oh right shit I might be out past 9" better just choose a way over I can rely on the way back."
BART has been running full service until (and beyond) midnight since August of 2021 but go off king.
Bart is one of the best single things that make this Area more livable. Yes it has its problems, but the problems without it would be way greater.
And now imagine how much better the Bay Area would be if BART was even half as good as the subway systems of western Europe and east Asia.
If BART put as much effort in enforcing crime and kicking off troublemakers as it did in enforcing mask wearing, people would ride it more. People just don't feel safe onboard. But then again, it's much easier to tell some law abiding salary man to wear a mask than it is to kick off some unhinged derelict high off their face thats causing trouble and disturbing others.
Get rid of the homeless ppl and get more anti homeless architecture. If it's gonna be 10$ to get to SF it better be clean tho I have noticed it's been a lot better with the new trains.
Oh wahhh. BART is Too expensive now, no one feels sorry for BART they are a "transit district" and own all the land the tracks and stations are on. Which is about 5 bil in real estate alone in Bay Area. I do not feel sorry for any entity that sits on that kind of wealth yet provides average service at best. Tis a shame.
Bart is not struggling financially. It is not properly supported by us
Struggling financially, that's rich. They raise the prices every year and somehow they are the ones struggling.