San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
PATH TO UNCERTAINTY
Transit system could flourish or stall over finances
For as long as the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s trains have screeched across the region, a feeling has lingered among its loyal and would-be riders that the transit service could be so much more.
It was initially envisioned as a system that would reach across the Golden Gate Bridge and into Wine Country while also stretching into the western neighborhoods of San Francisco. BART, however, has never quite lived up to the designs of its original muses — despite being, perhaps, the most influential manufactured system in the region.
The pandemic didn’t help matters. BART ridership numbers dropped off a cliff after March 2020, and a prominent bond rating company recently warned that BART and other U.S. transit systems heavily reliant on fares are “expected to face sizable budget gaps” in years to come.
And as many people reconsidered various ways they lived their lives, minds also drifted to how transit systems could change as well. On Sunday, BART reaches the 50th anniversary of its first trains streaking people through the Bay Area. The timing provides an interesting peg to a question long asked by transit riders.
What will BART look like in 50 years?
Well, decades from now, BART’s signature silver trains could transport riders from Oakland’s Jack London Square and the populous San Antonio neighborhood east of Lake Merritt via new subway tunnels that converge at a station in the city of Alameda.
From there, BART’s latest rail line could descend into the second Transbay Tube toward San Francisco’s Mission Bay, then connect to Caltrain and High-Speed Rail service in the basement of Salesforce Transit Center in South of Market before heading westward.
The Geary corridor that residents have long yearned for BART to serve becomes dotted with subway stations, preceding stops beneath Golden Gate Park’s Music Concourse and along 19th Avenue. Trains stop underneath Stonestown Galleria and San Francisco State en route to a connection at Daly City Station.
Lines traveling through San Francisco and Oakland will be sprinkled with “infill” stations — stops developed on existing BART tracks — with train turnback capabilities that will allow BART to run more frequent service in its urban core.
Elsewhere, the Bay Area’s regional rail spine extends outward to Livermore and Hercules and, perhaps, Marin County. To the south, rail tracks run underneath San Jose and link the region’s three largest cities via BART — possibly fully encircling the San Francisco Bay.
It’s not just the stuff of dreams. Numerous studies and reports published throughout its first 50 years tease at this potential idealistic future for BART and its riders. But even as BART continues to plan for future expansion, achieving some version of that vision has never felt more tenuous than it does on the 50th birthday of the region’s most popular rail system.
Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic spiraled BART toward an uncertain future on many fronts.
Today, roughly 38% of BART’s pre-pandemic ridership has returned since April 2020, when it cratered to just 6%. The historic drop in ridership brought more urgent questions to the forefront about how BART will financially recover from a pandemic that has severely undercut fares, BART’s main pre-COVID revenue source, and how the system will reinvent itself.
Then there’s the lesson of history that many plans for expansion and development of the BART system materialized in times of unprecedented growth in ridership.
It means forecasts about the future remain muddy, more than two years out from the pandemic, and a firm picture of what the region’s new transportation patterns will be in a post-pandemic world have yet to fully come into sharp relief.
“Our role in the region is evolving,” Val Menotti, BART’s chief planning and development officer, said. “On remote work, we know that will be part of our future. But at what level, to me, it’s not clear, and it may not be clear for a couple of years.”
Still, even in these trying times, the region’s planners and transportation leaders view BART as an important linchpin that better connects the Bay Area’s disconnected rail and bus transit networks together to build a future “world-class rail system.”
Once-in-a-generation expansion projects, such as BART’s extension to Silicon Valley, are under way. The four-station expansion will take riders deep underground to Downtown San Jose and Santa Clara, at an estimated cost of $9.8 billion, when it tentatively opens at the end of this decade.
The pandemic also hasn’t stopped BART from planning for its second Transbay Tube. The transformational project, if realized, could create a new BART line and boost its capacity to transport people across the bay while better connecting the fragmented rail networks in the Northern California “megaregion.” It’s an issue that reached a critical point in 2016 when ridership peaked at all-time highs. Few, if any, meaningful details have been decided in that project, which has a placeholder completion date of 2040.
But pandemic or no pandemic, the extraordinary costs of building rail expansions in the Bay Area and the region’s dismal track record in delivering on these sorts of massive projects on time and under budget is key to why many of these plans remain pie in the sky.
It will have taken almost half a century for BART’s Silicon Valley extension to reach conception to completion. The second Transbay Tube will have taken longer and will require BART and the Bay Area’s patchwork of local governments to raise the tens of billions in funding it needs to become reality.
Even smaller-scale projects have had high price tags. In 2003, for example, engineers projected that it would cost up to $525 million (or just under $850 million in 2022 dollars) to build and operate an infill station at Mission and 30th streets.
“We used to have a saying at BART back in the early ’70s — ‘Build it now, it’ll never be cheaper,’ ” said Mike Healy, BART’s chief spokesperson from 1971 to 2005. “There are always impediments when you have a major infrastructure project like BART. … The challenges, of course, go with the territory.”
The reality of just how long it takes to carry out ambitious transit expansion projects in the region could mean the BART system map won’t look much different a decade or two from now.
Rather, the BART of the future is more likely to change in subtle, but significant, ways.
BART is in the process of modernizing its train control system, allowing it run up to 30 trains an hour through the Transbay Tube by 2032. Other upgrades to outdated infrastructure will likely mean shorter wait times for riders and add capacity for when and if BART exceeds its 2016 ridership peak.
The pandemic also reinvigorated momentum for a regionwide transformation of the Bay Area’s disjointed network of two dozen transit operators.
Since the pandemic, the Bay Area’s transit agencies have collaborated in ways they haven’t before, mustering political will to streamline transit for riders. In the coming years, the region will have standardized wayfinding at train and ferry stations and bus stops that officials say will make getting around the region by transit simpler. By next year, upgrades to the region’s Clipper system will allow transit riders to pay for all fares with the simple tap of a smartphone.
Within the next decade, the agencies could come together to develop a unified fare structure that caps daily fares and offers free transfers between different transit services — making BART, which has some of the nation’s highest fares, more affordable and accessible. Last month, BART and other agencies began piloting a BayPass that offers users unlimited fares between transit operators.
The region’s in-the-works transit transformation could extend to how transit is managed, operated and funded in the Bay Area. Train, bus and ferry service in the region could be scheduled and coordinated by one “network manager,” making it more seamless and appealing to move around via transit. Sacramento lawmakers silently killed a bill this legislative session that would have accelerated some of this integration, but leaders at several agencies, including BART, say they’re committed to carrying out the legislation’s vision.
“One of my goals in the next 10 years is that I have improved, working with the region’s operators, the customer experience such that there is no differentiation between systems — that it’s one Bay Area transit where it doesn’t matter whose system you’re in,” BART General Manager Bob Powers said.
“Wherever you’re going, there will be fair integration there, there will be scheduled coordination there, so much so that it’ll be irrelevant to you where you are and what system you’re in,” Powers said. “That’s going to drive up ridership and improve the overall quality of life for everybody in the Bay Area.”
These simple quality-of-life measures are long overdue and will make it easier for people to ride BART at a time when it has fewer “captive riders” who need to use the system, said Ian Griffiths, policy director for the Seamless Bay Area group advocating for those transit integration changes.
These changes could help introduce BART and Bay Area public transit to riders it’s never fully pursued, Griffiths said, at a time when BART’s future has never been called into question as it has since the pandemic.
“There’s a real risk that BART will not last another 50 years,” said Griffiths, a former BART planner. “The decisions we make now in the next couple of years will determine whether BART will continue to grow and expand, or whether it will atrophy and degrade over the next number of years.”