Brand-new BART stations shine but sit nearly empty
Daily riders at Berryessa, Milpitas stops are just 5% of the 17,000 projected
Six months after they opened, the South Bay’s two new BART stations are getting rave reviews.
“I’ve never seen such a nice BART station,” rider Mark Perkowski said before stepping inside the gleaming, airy entryway of the Milpitas stop on his commute home to Hayward. The Berryessa station is “one of the nicest ones I’ve been to,” said Emeryville resident Eronie Harris, who had taken BART to visit his girlfriend in San Jose.
There is good news behind the scenes too: BART Assistant General Manager Tamar Allen said service has “been running very smoothly” on the extension.
Only one thing hasn’t gone according to plan since the stations opened to fanfare on the morning of June 13. Even by the lowered standards of the coronavirus era, the $2.3 billion South Bay extension is serving a paltry number of riders.
In November, its best month so far, the Milpitas station averaged just 391 riders each weekday, while the Berryessa stop managed 500. That represents about 5% of the more than 17,000 combined daily trips that planners had projected the stations would handle.
Meanwhile, VTA has budgeted more than $80 million for the extension for its first year of service. Given the sparse ridership in the stations’ first five months, that would work out to just over $300 the agency is spending per passenger, though officials say the ac
tual cost could change.
Nobody would expect the stations to meet their projected crowds these days when a huge share of the commuting public is working from home and local governments have told prospective BART passengers to travel as little as possible. But the shortfall is steeper than in the rest of the BART system, where ridership has hovered at a little better than 10% of pre-pandemic levels.
Milpitas ranks as BART’s least-visited conventional station, with only the connector spur to the Oakland airport serving fewer riders. Berryessa ranked just a few spots better.
But VTA is not secondguessing the decision to open the stations in the midst of a global pandemic, after a two-year delay in finishing the extension.
“Everything is different right now, so I don’t think that this is representative of the future,” said VTA spokeswoman Bernice Alaniz, who noted ridership has been growing from month to month. “The stations were built and the systems were expanded looking out for 100 years — this is a long, long-term investment.”
While closed offices, shelter orders, and wariness among the public to be in shared spaces are broadly blamed for decimating ridership throughout the BART system, Alaniz said it has been especially difficult to promote the new stations to prospective riders in the South Bay.
Officials had planned to lure riders by advertising leisure trips, like taking BART to have fun in San Francisco, in hopes that could lead them to consider the system for their commute — but coronavirus has put that effort on hold.
Alaniz insists there is a brighter future ahead: Along with the eventual end of the pandemic, clusters of apartment buildings rising around both stations are expected to fill up with thousands of regular BART riders.
Perkowski, the Milpitas commuter, shared that optimism.
The stations “came at the wrong time” for attracting new riders, he said. “Once this COVID thing is over, they’ll try it.”
Under the terms of the agreements that brought BART to the South Bay, VTA was responsible for building the extension and must foot the bill to maintain and operate the two stops — paying for workers such as station agents, cleaning staff and BART police.
VTA is also chipping in for the South Bay’s share of improvements to the BART system as a whole. The costs are funded by a sales tax voters approved in 2008 for station operations. From July through November, when the stations recorded a total of 116,601 riders, this news organization calculated that it cost the agency about $305 per passenger, based on VTA’s annual budget.
Alaniz disputed the estimate as “overly simplified” because the actual operating costs could be lower depending on several factors that might change over the year, such as BART’s service cuts to save money during the pandemic.
VTA also gets to keep the fare revenue from all trips that start or end in Santa Clara County, as well as the fees paid by drivers who park at the stations’ lots, though with ridership so low, those revenues have similarly fallen far short of projections.
Although sparsely used, the new stations have been a boon for some South Bay residents, such as 23-yearold Jesus Lopez.
He used to drive from his home in East San Jose to the construction site where he works in downtown San Francisco but started looking into BART after the Berryessa station opened.
Lopez realized that parking at the station and catching a BART train would take the same amount of time as driving to the city, plus his employer would reimburse him for taking public transit.
“I’d rather just drive here and relax,” Lopez said. If the BART line still ended at Warm Springs station in Fremont, he said, “I wouldn’t consider it.”
Alaniz also noted that many of the riders who remain on BART and other transit systems are essential workers, while others rely on public transportation because they can’t afford a car or aren’t able to drive.
“Even though we’re carrying less people, to those people that we’re carrying this is a lifeline for them,” Alaniz said.