BART general manager’s wish: A second route across the bay.
‘No more important project’ than second bay crossing, general manager says
OAKLAND » A second route across the bay to ease bottlenecks between Oakland and San Francisco. Discounted fares for low-income riders. New fare gates that are harder to sneak through.
Those are among the projects on BART’s wish list as Bay Area transportation leaders put together plans for a massive tax measure that would raise $100 billion over several decades to fund an array of projects meant to ease traffic and improve public transit around the region.
The organizations pushing for Faster Bay Area, the “mega-measure” that voters could take up in November 2020, have so far shied away from listing the specific projects it would pay for. But the groups — the business advocacy organization Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Bay Area Council and the urban planning think-tank SPUR — have broadly described plans that would better integrate the region’s transit systems and make major improvements to freeways and rail infrastructure like BART’s.
“There is no more important project than the second crossing” for the next several decades of Bay Area transportation, BART General Manager Robert Powers said Monday, though he said the list of projects that would be funded through the measure had not been finalized.
That second crossing — a tun
nel or bridge that would also carry Caltrain or Amtrak trains across the Bay — needs the money that the mega-measure would generate to become a reality, Powers said.
“Some type of major funding initiative, such as Faster Bay Area, will be part of the solution for the second crossing. Has to be,” said Powers, who was appointed general manager in July.
As other supporters of the plan have, Powers pointed to ballot initiatives approved by voters in Seattle and Los Angeles in 2016 that raised tens of billions of dollars.
“I would hope that the Bay Area can do something very similar,” Powers said.
Funds for discounted fares
BART also wants to use money from the initiative to offer low-income riders discounted fares, he said, something the agency has started exploring as part of a 12-18-month pilot program along with MUNI, Caltrain and Golden Gate Transit.
And Powers said BART wants to use the measure’s funding to upgrade or potentially replace its tunnel running through the East Bay hills between the Rockridge and Orinda stations, which crosses the Hayward Fault.
BART’s board of directors last week approved a $150 million plan to replace the agency’s familiar wedge-shaped orange fare gates over the next several years with a swinging, French doorstyle design. Powers said the new design “will have a huge impact on fare evasion,” which costs the system tens of millions of dollars
of lost revenue each year and which some riders and BART officials blame for crime and public perceptions that the system is unsafe.
Faster Bay Area could solve a key problem that BART officials acknowledged as they brought the proposal to the board: They haven’t identified any funding for the new gates.
“It’s not only important to BART, it’s important to the whole Bay Area,” Powers said of the tax measure.
Asked whether the second Bay crossing or other initiatives Powers mentioned will be among the projects funded through the measure, a spokeswoman for Faster Bay Area said the campaign is still developing its framework for what projects it will fund.
‘Riders first’ mindset
Powers spoke in the cavernous Operations Control Center
attached to Oakland’s Lake Merritt Station: the mission control of the BART system, where dispatchers and other staff track every train, and every potential delay, in real time. A veteran of transit systems in Baltimore and Seattle, Powers joined BART’s ranks seven years ago, rising to the level of assistant general manager before being appointed to the top spot last July.
Powers is launching a tour to speak with and hear from riders around the system this month, beginning with stops Wednesday at Lake Merritt Station from 8 to 9 a.m. and Montgomery Station in Downtown San Francisco from 3 to 4:30 p.m.
Asked about his priorities as general manager, Powers began with what he said was his desire to improve the experience of taking BART, an effort he described as “riders first.”
He laid out a vision that included
ensuring stations are clean and appealing, making BART police a more visible presence on trains, cracking down on fare evasion and doing a better job of addressing homelessness in the system.
Powers said he and BART staff will not take a position on a controversial proposal expected to come before the Board of Directors later this month that would ban people from panhandling or performing for money on trains and platforms.
BART’s response to homelessness needs to strike a balance, Powers said, between ensuring that the agency stays open to everyone and doesn’t criminalize poverty, and protecting passengers from aggressive panhandling or dangerous behavior.
“It certainly is not BART’s to solve, or any one agency’s to solve, but everybody has got to do what they can,” Powers said.