San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
BART, at 50, showing signs of midlife crisis
If you want to see the Bay Area in all its promise and all its problems, take a ride on BART. It’s the perfect time: What was hailed as a space-age transit system when it was new and shiny is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the start of service this month. The news media has always been interested in BART from its early service problems to what now appears to be a midlife crisis.
The great pandemic that began in the spring of 2020 was major blow to BART, the most important transit agency in the region. Workers were told stay home, and they did. Offices emptied out, and so did BART trains. One veteran BART operator remembered a day when he ran a 10-car train with fewer than 100 passengers.
Two years later, a combination of remote and office work is becoming fairly standard. Two days a week at home, three in the office. Car and truck traffic on the Bay Bridge has nearly returned to pre-COVID levels. But BART trains are carrying half the number of passengers they did three years ago.
At midweek last week, on a typical day, 181,788 passengers went through the fare gates — 228,966 fewer than the same day in 2019.
Obviously something is wrong. And its not just COVID. So I decided to see for myself. I spent much of a day riding on BART, from San Francisco all the way out to Antioch, on the edge of the delta, and from there down the length of the South Bay to the new Berryessa Station. On the ride to Antioch, I could see a sailboat on the San Joaquin River. From Berryessa, I could see the tall buildings of downtown San Jose.
I had done something similar five or six years ago, but now I could see things had changed. There were far fewer passengers. I’d gone to the far edges of the system, but also rolled through downtown San Francisco just past 5 in the afternoon, the heart of the old rush hour. We went through Embarcadero, Montgomery and Powell stations and still had empty seats.
But if there are fewer passengers, there is more BART. Lines have been extended east to Antioch and south to the edges of San Jose.
Despite BART’s reputation as an urban rail system, it passes through a lot of open space, especially the rolling brown hills of Contra Costa and around Mission Peak in the South Bay.
Swaths of green trees flash by the train windows between Pleasant Hill and Concord.
It’s a bit of a surprise: BART is bigger than you think.
So it was the first time I’d ridden on the little mini-BART train that connects the conventional 10-car BART trains at the Pittsburg/Bay Point end of the line. The small train, usually a single diesel powered car, runs 10 miles down the middle of the Highway 4 freeway, like a streamlined version of an old-time interurban train. The Antioch line opened in 2018 at a cost of $518 million, nearly half of the price of a conventional extension.
That’s the good side of the view out the window of a BART train. But passengers can see the other side of the Bay Area, too, right out the window, only minutes away.
South of Lake Merritt on the west side of the tracks are miles of rundown or abandoned factories and warehouses and acres of uncollected trash, like a Third World country. There are also encampments of homeless people right next to the elevated tracks at West Oakland, ragged tent cities on the train line to suburbia. That wasn’t visible only five or six years ago.
BART itself seems a bit shabby in this part of the system. Graffiti taggers have worked over the line around MacArthur Station, one of the main transfer points, and BART has let it go.
The trains themselves seem shabby as well. BART has given up on washing the exteriors of the cars, and nearly every silvery train is covered with a thin layer of dirt.
But the champions for graffiti and urban sleaze are the 16th Street and 24th Street stations in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Until last week, sidewalk peddlers selling stolen goods, drug dealers and others had taken over the plaza at 24th Street Station. The situation was allowed to deteriorate for months, with crime and even a fatal stabbing. For a while, BART and the city threw a chain link fence around the station plaza. The fence didn’t last, and the peddlers returned. But Monday the cops moved in and cleared the area. By midweek half a dozen cops and civic “ambassadors” were on hand to keep order.
So on its 50th anniversary, there was a lot of optimistic talk about BART — a new Transbay Tube someday, new extensions to San Jose and Santa Clara, new lines inside San Francisco.
But the real future is not far down the tracks. Federal COVID operating subsidies that have helped keep BART afloat run out in 2024. BART is heavily dependent on passenger fares, so an agency that has lost half its customers faces the biggest challenge of its life: whether a commuter railroad can survive without commuters.