What a relief! After 20 years, BART reopens S.F. restroom
All 10 underground facilities closed after 9/11 are slated to reopen by 2026
For over 20 years, the restroom at BART’s Powell Street station in downtown San Francisco remained shuttered.
That changed on Wednesday with a toilet-paper-cutting, first-flush ceremony and a frenzy of news photographers cramming into a single stall. BART officials unveiled a fully remodeled restroom adorned with white tiles and two stainless steel toilets — to the relief of passengers who have been scrambling for decades for somewhere to go at one of the transit system’s busiest stations.
This week’s reopening comes after a yearslong push from some BART board members to reopen bathrooms that were closed for security reasons in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Oakland’s 19th Street station restroom is slated to reopen on Feb. 25 as part of a pilot program that is nearly four years behind schedule.
“It’s time for these bathrooms to reopen,” said Kuro Kurosaka, a BART user in Berkeley who keeps a mental map of the best places to access toilets outside BART stations during his trips into San Francisco. In recent months, he started a Facebook group advocating for restroom access.
“It’s been on my mind for a while,” he said. “When (President) Biden called back the military from Afghanistan I thought, ‘The war is over — and the bathroom is still closed.’ ”
Restrooms in eight other underground stations in Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley remain closed. While above-ground bathrooms quickly reopened,
“It’s been on my mind for a while. When (President) Biden called back the military from Afghanistan I thought, ‘The war is over — and the bathroom is still closed.’ ” — Kuro Kurosaka, a BART user in Berkeley
BART, citing federal guidance, said the underground bathrooms’ ventilation system could be a staging ground for an attack.
Meanwhile, elevators and escalators became notorious havens for public urination — and worse.
The new Powell Street bathroom features two allgender stalls with a handwashing sink located outside the bathroom. There are railings enclosing the toilets to ensure access for people with disabilities, and instead of rolled toilet paper, a metal box dispenses hand-sized squares of thin tissue.
The design is similar to modern airport restrooms, with no entrance door separating the facility from the station to prevent users from locking themselves in. However, the wide entrance combined with a lack of an entrance door does give the thousands of people passing by the restroom each day a direct line of sight into the stall, where they can glimpse the toilet user’s legs.
Joe Mondragon gave the toilet a satisfactory review after becoming one of the first members of the public to flush the Powell station toilets in two decades.
“It was fine,” he said with a shrug.
In an initial pilot phase lasting through March 20, attendants will staff the Powell Street and 19th Street stations at a cost of $98,800. The attendants are a “welcoming presence” and will present user guidelines, but they are not tasked with cleaning the units or handling bathroom problems that may arise, according to Andrew Jones, the general manager of District Works, which is staffing the attendants.
“It’s a waste of money,” said Keith Garcia, head of the BART Police Officers Association, who criticized BART for not using union-employed crisis response officers to staff the restrooms. He also accused BART leadership of overplaying the significance of the bathroom reopening. “They really did nothing except take the door off. They didn’t increase capacity,” said Garcia.
“You’ve got this big celebration, and it’s for a twostall bathroom.”
Powell Street is among BART’s most-used stations, currently serving over 450,000 riders each month, about 30% of pre-pandemic ridership numbers.
Reopening all the closed restrooms is expected to take at least until 2026 and cost $14 million, although the BART board has yet to allocate all the funds and the system faces a looming fiscal cliff as ridership tanked during the pandemic.
Bathrooms in the Lake Merritt station in Oakland and Montgomery station in San Francisco are next to reopen later this year followed by Embarcadero and Downtown Berkeley in 2023. Last on the list is the restroom renovation in the 24th Street station in San Francisco’s Mission District, which will finish in 2026 if BART sticks to the current timetable.
BART board President Rebecca Saltzman has advocated for reopening the bathrooms for over five years, pushing against previous BART management and other board members who were reluctant to get the toilets flushing again. On Wednesday she hailed the bathroom bringing in a “new era at BART.”
In an interview earlier this week, she said that along with legitimate security concerns, bureaucratic “inertia” has kept the restrooms closed.
“There was so much focus on keeping the system running, and there was less focus on things that were thought of as little,” she said. “But all these things add up.”