BART reaches crisis point
Built nearly a half century ago, BART can’t handle a busier, more demanding era. This slow- building problem is producing a wholesale collapse in service that riders will likely be facing for weeks to come.
More than 50 of the system’s 669 railcars are knocked out of service by mystery power surges. Replacement parts are scarce. A stretch of the system in Contra Costa County is shut down, with buses filling in. Passengers jammed into smaller trains running late are seething, already irritated by a system showing more delays than ever.
These are problems of BART’s making, but also due to a booming Bay Area. Improvements and extensions haven’t kept up with growth. The turnstiles are spinning with 440,000 commuters per weekday, a bump of 100,000 riders in just five years. A brutal and succinct tweet from a BART media official stated that the system “has reached the end of its useful life. That is our reality.” He wasn’t corrected by superiors.
Since it opened in the early 1970s, BART has channeled changes in much of the region, feeding downtown centers, spurring suburban growth and luring commuters out of cars. At the same time it hooked riders on a transit agency that yields disaster when it can’t deliver. It’s a similar tale in other big cities, notably Washington, D. C., where a fire risk led to a one- day surprise shutdown of the country’s second- biggest transit system.
In the short term, rapid fixes must be found. Service needs to be reliable. Railcars have to be repaired while a fleet of 775 new cars arrives to take over. Plans for faster trains spaced at shorter intervals are a promise that should be fulfilled.
But BART’s shabby state is also a stop- and- think moment. Elected members of the agency’s board need to look beyond their terms in examining an aging and overworked system. Management needs to anticipate problems, not sweep up afterward. A pair of strikes two years ago disrupted service and led to large pay concessions to labor, a hold- for- ransom setup that must be fixed.
On the horizon is a $ 3.5 billion bond measure headed to the November ballot. It’s billed as a no- frills package, no doubt to gather support from wary voters. But even that large sum may not be sufficient to upgrade tracks, computers and stations that are rundown and outdated.
More than ever, the system needs an injection of repair funds. But with that money comes a requirement that BART’s leaders produce a dependable and essential system.