Marin Independent Journal

BART more than doubling police train presence

- By Eliyahu Kamisher

Amid a worsening financial outlook and slumping ridership, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System is embarking on a new plan to get passengers back on the rails: Improve cleanlines­s and make riders feel safer.

In mid-March, BART will more than double the number of police officers on dedicated foot patrols each shift in what Janice Li, the BART board president, called a “radically new deployment plan” that will “increase presence on trains more than we've ever done before.”

Previously there were a total of 10 officers on foot patrol, split among various shifts. Now there will be an additional eight to 18 BART police strolling stations and trains each shift, according to BART spokespers­on Alicia Trost.

“We had baked-in ridership before the pandemic, people had to go to work and they didn't want to be in the cars,” said Trost. “That is no longer the case and we now have to fight for ridership and market for ridership and be responsive to the needs of potential riders.”

BART's push to win back riders comes as the agency eyes what it calls a “fiscal cliff” — when BART spends the last of $1.6 billion in pandemic relief money. New projection­s, which the BART board will review

Thursday, show that date will be six months sooner than previously expected, now in January 2025. Lagging ridership recovery tied to the economic health of downtown San Francisco is the main driver of BART's fiscal woes. Nearly three years after the pandemic shook the entire country, BART's passenger count is still down by over 60% and has been on a steady decline since October.

The boosted police patrol is in part spurred by a survey of over 3,000 riders, which found personal security and cleanlines­s to be among riders' top concerns. Some responded that BART “is too scary” and “not safe.”

“As I fill out this survey, I'm sitting next to a piece of aluminum foil that was used to smoke heroin,” one rider said.

Still, being a victim of violent crime while riding BART is extremely rare – there are about nine instances for every million trips. Partly because of lower ridership, the likelihood now of being the victim of a violent crime on BART has increased from 3.53 incidents per million in 2018.

Along with the law enforcemen­t staffing, BART has doubled the cleaning hours on its new trains and some legacy trains. The agency is also planning to triple the staffing of its station deep cleaning team known as “Scrub Crews.”

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