Competing visions on BART’s course
12 candidates for board differ on how system should expand
Four of BART’s nine district seats are up for election Tuesday, setting the stage for changes in leadership as the rail system overhauls its decaying infrastructure and braces for enormous growth.
Two seats are open: one in San Francisco, where six candidates are clamoring to succeed Nick Josefowitz; the other in the greater Warm Springs area of southern Alameda County, where two are vying to replace retiring Director Thomas Blalock. Two incumbent board directors, Robert Raburn of Oakland and Joel Keller of east Contra Costa County, are fending off challengers for re-election.
Whoever wins will have to help replace BART’s heart and guts, including 90 miles of track, 135 miles of cable and a nearly obsolete train control system. Those are the issues that loom over a transit agency that spent years chasing splashy projects — and the board will have to pivot toward a more pragmatic future, said BART General Manager Grace Crunican.
“You can’t add extensions, extensions, extensions to a fragile system,” Crunican said, referring to a kind of manifest destiny that drove BART for years, as it stretched trackway deep into Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and along the Peninsula, straining toward Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, its core steadily deteriorated.
The turning point came this year, when the board voted down a new station in Livermore, opting instead to push for repairs and new equip-
ment. A long-awaited extension to San Jose from the eastern side of the bay is still inching forward, but it’s funded by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which is paying BART to operate the station.
For the most part, the agency has stopped trying to build out its map.
“Our focus is to invest in the system we have,” said board Director Rebecca Saltzman, who represents a large swath of the East Bay. “Ultimately, once we get into a state of good repair, we’ll be able to increase service quite a bit.”
Ridership on the 46-year-old rail line is expected to nearly double, from 440,000 weekday passengers today to 770,000 by 2040. To accommodate all those commuters, the next board will probably have to make a lot of expensive decisions that don’t necessarily look good on a political resume, said Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal at the San Francisco transportation consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard.
“If you’re an elected BART board official, you get a lot more political benefit attending ribbon cuttings than you do addressing invisible but critical issues,” like fixing tracks or installing new train controls, he said.
Board directors made that difficult calculus when they rejected the Livermore extension in May, shocking a large crowd of residents and city leaders — including Livermore Mayor John Marchand and Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty — who said the proposed station would bring jobs and economic development to the Tri-Valley region, while easing traffic on Interstate 580.
The 5-4 vote illustrated a geopolitical divide on the board: Directors representing the urban metro areas of Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley and Richmond opposed the $1.6 billion project, not only because of its cost, but also because it would put the station in an area of sparse development. Their suburban colleagues supported it.
Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, a coalition of businesses that pressed for the station in Livermore, is skeptical of the agency’s current direction.
“We think this issue of investing in infrastructure versus expansion is a false choice,” he said. “There’s viable logic to have BART go to the Livermore Valley, and even beyond to the San Joaquin Valley.”
He and Haggerty are now steering plans for a BART-like railway to ferry commuters from Lathrop (San Joaquin County) to Dublin.
With a Tri-Valley stop off the table, BART is shifting focus to what Crunican calls the Big Four: a new fleet of cars; a new train control system; replacing the Hayward maintenance yard; and building five new traction power substations to supply electricity for longer, more frequent trains.
Much of the work will be funded by Measure RR, the $3.5 billion general obligation bond that voters approved in 2016, after an aggressive campaign in which transit officials displayed wornout cable casings and other decrepit gear. Eventually the board will have to scrounge for other sources of money.
Ratna Amin, transportation policy director at the urban think tank SPUR, praised BART for prioritizing maintenance and prudent spending. Such efforts would help stave off the breakdowns, accidents and delays that plague the New York subway and the Metrorail in Washington, D.C., she said.
“We have to sustain and modernize the parts of the system that improve operations,” Amin said. “We can’t just build everything once and hope it lasts for 100 years.”
The agency’s next big expansion will probably be a second Transbay crossing, another monumentally expensive project that Crunican says is necessary “if we expect the Bay Area to grow, and the relationship to remain between Oakland and San Francisco.”
At the same time, the board will now decide how much housing to build and how many parking spaces to shave away from 200 acres of BART parking lots, in light of a new state law that gives the agency that authority over land use. And social issues keep welling up. BART has long struggled to keep stations clean amid the homelessness and drug epidemics, which could cause the agency to lose riders to Uber and Lyft. Now it has new competition to worry about — autonomous vehicles.
This day-to-day work should supplement the restoration of infrastructure, Amin said. Stations need to gleam and trains need to arrive on time for BART to stand a chance against private car services that passengers can summon with a smartphone.
In the coming years, BART also needs to think about itself as part of a larger transit ecosystem that includes Caltrain, city buses and, eventually, highspeed rail. Fixing old equipment is the first step, but the board could also partner with other agencies to create a single ticketing system and seamless connections between modes.
“We’re in desperate need of a comprehensive, integrated regional rail system,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. He called BART a centerpiece of the vision and said there is more at stake in Tuesday’s board election than in years past. Consultant Tumlin agreed. “We’re seeing the same kind of fundamental region-shaping that occurred in the 1950s,” when BART was conceived, he said. It’s a critical moment, and a time for the agency to improve its basic work of getting people around.