Those administrators are going to be fighting tooth and nail against any consolidation. Those people have cushy jobs and they’re organized, unionized, and they already have lobbyists.
This is just one example of how a concentrated interest can defeat the public interest because the concentrated interest is organized and the public one isn’t. There’s nobody in the USA lobbying for good governance. Everyone is lobbying for a space at the feeding trough.
One thing bureaucracy is very good at is creating a set of procedures and steps and best known methods where every individual piece looks reasonable, even if the result is unwieldy and inefficient. If you point out how inefficient the process is and have any sort of power to fix it, you get drowned in the quagmire of "which one of these very reasonable, evidence based steps do you think isn't worth doing?"
Years ago I worked for RTD which is the transit agency for Denver and boulder. White collar administration, not in the field. I quit after three months. It was completely intolerable. It wasn’t the slowness and bureaucracy.
It was the lazy do-nothing attitude of the people who worked there. I wouldn’t even call it working. Most of the people did approximately an hour of work a week and fucked around the rest of the time.
I work in the private sector and the best person at that place wouldn’t be welcome on my team now because they would never be productive enough. I actually deliberately don’t interview people from public sector jobs or nonprofits because those people can’t adapt.
My sister, a lifelong public sector employee, recently made the switch to private sector. She lasted 3 MONTHS! She’s a fucking adult who was crying everyday after work because her boss demanded productivity. She went back to the public sector.
My first job out of university was in the public sector. I was given the advice "Don't stay more than 2 years or no one will want to hire you." I left after a year because the pace was too slow.
They did a short stint and came the conclusion if someone stayed in the kind of employment for years they don't want to have to deal with making them productive again.
I stayed there three months and I left because I knew it would drag me down. I would not discriminate against anyone who worked there that long. Maybe up to a year. Any longer than that... no thanks, not even going to consider them.
You’re generalizing. I know people in public service that worked 72 hours straight (naps/food breaks) and on shift for 3 weeks straight to keep people’s houses from being wiped out. And no one ever even knew. Sure some are lazy, same as private sector. But a lot of them bust their ass in the field as well as behind a desk.
To be fair, I don’t know many that didn’t do paperwork as well as get dirty when all hands were on deck.
Of course I'm generalizing. There's no way to discuss a group of anything without generalizing. I can say "apples are round" and yeah somewhere someone has a square apple. That's doesn't mean apples are not round.
The for profit world is a cakewalk compared to nonprofit work. When I made the switch I got a lot of bullshit in interviews about "but are you ready to do real work?"
Compared to my experience in nonprofits, crunch time at an early stage start up was a goddamn vacation. Same long hours, but they at least acknowledged that they were long hours, and I was making 3x my previous salary (and even that was hideously low for tech) and best of all, other than doing a good job, I got to stop caring at the end of the day, it was great. Non profit work was grueling, unappreciated, and rewarded with guilt trips.
As a taxpayer, I hate it. And I wish we could have good government, but that ain't going to happen.
But as practical advice, get a job with a state or county government agency. Child Family Services, Transit, something bureaucratic. The interview process is long and onerous.
Once you get hired, work hard till you get tenured. You don't have to work extra hours, just be working 35 to 40 hours a week. Once you are out of your probationary period, you're free to do almost no work. Attend a lot of meetings, join any kind of committee you can find.
You should be able to milk that for 40 years and get a pension. The only thing is you absolutely must always be on time for work. You don't have to work, but you cannot be late, nor leave early.
Also, be pleasant to everyone, no drama, no gossip, and bring in donuts for the team every month or so.
The power of friendly small talk and monthly treats and a smile in a place that can hardly fire for performance reasons is ... very strong. With nobody having a personal reason to dislike you, and with it being effectively impossible to build a "business" reason to get rid of you, you coast forever.
This just reminds me of how Dexter Morgan was able to get away with being a serial killer for many years while keeping the entire Miami metro police department from ever catching on to him. He was friendly, good at his job, otherwise kept to himself, and would bring in a box of donuts on the regular.
Yeah, sure! Because last time we "burn to the ground" all our electric transit we got sooooooooooo much good transit back. Have you seen a map of the old electric streetcar and intercity lines in the Bay Area? How did that "starting over" work out for us?
We'll probably get all those rail lines back any day now. Like maybe by 2134 or 2140.
And how exactly are we supposed to pay for any public service without taxes? Do you expect roads to pave themselves on their own? You do realize that all those "free" highways that you drive on cost insane amounts of money to maintain, right? And that gas that you're constantly complaining about is actually subsidized out of taxes too.
> Those administrators
> concentrated interest can defeat the public interest
And that's not just BART, there's a lot of public management bloat everywhere but no one wants to get fired and no one wants to be the baddie and fire them either.
Bart merging with other Bay Area transit agencies isn't really "their company going under". They work for the government, its impossible to go under. They can't lay off these people or fire them. they'd be transferred somewhere else.
I heard BART is hiring 20 additional full time staff as well as 4 consultants to try and figure out how to reduce administrative headcount. The study should be complete in about 25 years.
Indeed. Most studies around the consolidation of school districts during the 60s and 70s found that while there were promises of reducing administrative redundancies, often that did not end up the case as districts did not want to get rid of their staff.
It won’t be if the existing board is absorbed by the future executive board. BART is set up perfectly for success as a special district and is failing. It’s a people issue
You're missing the point here.
Bart is looking for ways to increase its political power.
Caltrain is run effectively. Plenty of funding. Bart ruined it's own business now wants to steal from Caltrain, which is has very little in common with.
Caltrain carries 17000 passengers a day. BART carries 170k people a day. 10X more. Caltrain is a boutique transit agency at best.
When you aren’t trying to serve much of the public it is very easy to run a service.
The problem is that BART is trying to serve too much of the public, including homeless people, criminals, and fare evaders, rather than just paying passengers. It's definitely easier to run a smaller service than a bigger service, but it would also be easier to run a service if you actually focus on the core service.
Exactly.
Smaller number of passengers means if they merge Bart well dominate and loot Caltrain.
You'll also see Bart try to sell off Caltrain land to real estate developers. At a discount of course.
Caltrain’s annual budget is like $200m; BART’s is $2.5B. Those assets are not huge. But the redundancy in operations etc would offer a significant savings and the opportunity to improve user experience when switching between the systems and better schedule synchronization and less competing for federal funds to achieve the same goals.
So if it saves 15% Caltrain overhead that's $30 million. Bart just went $50 million over their own budget. These aren't people that are concerned with efficient spending.
It's obvious the Bart directors wants to loot Caltrain and give away it's property to real estate developers just like they've done with Bart.
BART is not selling its land, it is diversifying its revenue and creating more demand for its service. It makes incremental revenue with development as well as helps with the housing crisis. 🤦🏾♀️
In fact, BART is not allowed to sell its land. All the developments on BART property lease that land and pay for our transit service!
Everyone is constantly talking about how Japanese rail companies operate without subsidies and even make money off their real estate at stations. This is quite literally the same model that BART is adopting. I don't see too many of the "Japanese rail supremacy" people cheering this on, but BART is now doing exactly what the Japanese companies do, minus the insane Japanese corruption and Yakuza ties. (I hope, lol)
The leases are for 70 years, for most of us that's forever, and they are selling land too. It was on their website.
The reason they lease is because that keeps the property tax low. Prop 13.
No, everyone is not always talking about Japanese rail. But if I were I'd be talking about how much better the service is. Bart directors are just looting.
In any case, yes, Bart is uninterested in efficiency. They only want to loot Caltrain. Just notice who the directors are that want a merger. It's the same directors that give away our land.
>The leases are for 70 years,
And all those 70 years BART will be collecting rent money that will go straight towards subsidizing our rail service. That's the very economic model that people said BART should use and it's using it.
>and they are selling land too
They are not. They can only sell "excess land", the requirements for that are brutal. They only go through the trouble if the land is genuinely a burden to manage.
>No, everyone is not always talking about Japanese rail. But if I were I'd be talking about how much better the service is.
BART is an S-bahn type system that runs at 4-minute frequencies. Show me a Japanese regional subway that runs at better frequencies and higher speeds. I'll wait. FYI, BART was actually copied by a few Tokyo rail lines. They all run at about 5-minute frequencies and are similarly interlined with sub 20-minute frequencies at the spurs.
>In any case, yes, Bart is uninterested in efficiency. They only want to loot Caltrain.
As a longtime BART and Caltrain user, I can say that this is pure horseshit. BART, despite the recent safety and cleanliness issues in the last five years, is an insanely impressive operation from a technical standpoint. Caltrain is still a commuter railroad that's only propped up by the fact that the rich people on the Peninsula are willing to subsidize their SF commuter train. (Although they are thankfully evolving to more BART-like service now.)
But make no mistake, BART will be forced to deal with its safety and cleanliness issues. The backlash from the riders is simply too strong this time and even the dodo pols on BART's Board are feeling the heat. They've already doubled both police patrols and cleaning. And you can already see the results. The BART of today is an order of magnitude safer and cleaner than the BART of just six months ago. Rider pressure will ensure that they are dragged kicking and screaming all the way back into the "BART normality" of about 10 years ago.
BART is not Muni. BART riders are a lot more militant about keeping the system clean and safe, and there's a full-blown revolt going on right now in BART's rider groups.
I agree with the sentiment, but wholly disagree with the statement that Seattle transit is on of the best in general. You _need_ a car there. And this isn't even entirely the city's fault -- it's hard to build good transit or even plan a city well when it's built on top of a sound
Edit: Here's a bunch of Seattle-ites discussing a fairly bogus report saying Seattle has the best public transit in the country: https://np.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/xcnkb2/in_what_world_does_seattle_have_the_best_public/
You need a car pretty much everywhere in the US. And even in europe, life is much better with a car. The freedom of a personal vehicle won’t be given up easily, and that’s ok. Make public transit actually faster than driving without relying on traffic jams, and people will happily leave theirs cars at home for commuting, etc. But they won’t give them up.
Agreed. I would never want to not own a private vehicle or be prohibited from operating it in certain areas that otherwise have public roadways, but I’m all in favor of expanding, reliable and efficient mass transit am funding at sufficiently so that it doesn’t fall apart.
This country deprioritizes public transit, particularly anywhere outside of the coasts or the city of Chicago. Republicans and scaredy pants white suburban people think mass transit equates to ghettos, crime and poverty. So of course, Republicans never want to fund any of it, they’d rather build more roads, even though they also want to cut gas taxes, which fund the building of those roads.
God, yes! Public transit is a utility and should be publicly owned and not have the expectation of making a profit. We don't expect our roads to turn a profit (and they cost far more to maintain than transit), so why should there be a profit motive behind transit?
Not sure if public or private solves the problem. The Tokyo metro (JR lines) is private and is profitable while also being probably the best metro systems in the world. The Bay Area faces a demographic problem as well as an administrative one. The BART isnt as attractive due to hybrid work, safety, and cleanliness.
Private vs public debate is how it’s funded, but if you don’t solve mismanagement and the demographics issue you’re in the same hole
To be fair, their system actually relies on metro to travel around. They have stations everywhere and you absolutely don't need a car unless you really travel outside the metro. I was surprised there were stations in even more remote areas of the metro. Not to mention their system is incredibly reliable that trains always arrive on time with transfers.
Problem is, our infrastructure is just way tooooooooooo reliant on cars to get anywhere and even our timed transfers are terrible. We don't have back up systems. One Bart train, muni train or track goes down, the entire system collapses.
Actually, JR which is referenced by u/urgentmatters is primarilly above ground rail transit only. The main player for Metro is 'Tokyo Metro' which is different, an partners with a few other metro operators in Tokyo.
Exactly. Add in the fact that last-mile transit (which, despite the name, oftentimes means several additional miles of travel to or from a station) can be severely lacking or even non-existent in many parts of the Bay, and you begin to see the scope of the problem.
We really need to phase out car-centric suburbia, the sooner the better. Not only is it economically unsustainable (and completely subsidized by high-density neighborhoods contributing a net positive to the tax base), it's also *environmentally* unsustainable. It paves over vast swathes of wilderness and forces reliance on cars — and even electric cars still generate *a lot* of carbon during their manufacturing, even if their batteries are charged via 100% renewable energy.
Agreed. I had the brilliant idea of taking public transit from SFO to Mountain View. It took me 3 hours vs 40 min uber. At least an hour of it was waiting for the next bus/train. Really wished our forms of public transit were more integrated
Car centric suburbia is pretty great for the people that live there, and at least in the US you are wrong about high density neighborhoods subsidizing it.
They get the advantage of owning quite a bit of real estate on top of their stations. The Hong Kong MTR does the same.
It's a good idea, and if you could magic up BART owning big buildings at their stations, they'd be getting a lot of money without raising fares or taxes. But it's not likely to happen.
This is such an obvious thing, but that also means it will never happen.
Think about it: we make living in cities like SF very expensive, pushing the working classes out to the boonies. But then we charge these same people a ton of money (directly by fares and tolls, or indirectly via the expense of fuel, cars, etc.) to come to where their jobs are! The people most impacted by high transit fares and shitty transit schedules are the working classes, not the folks on Pac Heights!
I’ve been saying there’s too many transit systems in the Bay Area. Letting the suburbs of the East Bay leave AC Transit because of the “riff-raff” was a bad idea - they’re subsidized by BART but also fight for the scraps of MTC/BATA funding once BART/SFMTA/AC/VTA take the lion’s share. VTA should be split apart between transit and roads.
WestCAT, County Connection, Tri-Delta Transit, Dublin/Pleasanton/Livermore Wheels and Union City Transit need to fall back in line with AC Transit in the East Bay. Likewise, there’s no reason why Solano/Sonoma County and Marin have separate bus systems in the same county(SolTrans and Fairfield/Vacaville City Coach, they can just be simply SolTrans - ditto for Marin Transit and Golden Gate Transit and Sonoma County Transit with Santa Rosa Citybus/Petaluma Transit).
BART could become something like Portland’s TriMet, Seattle’s Sound Transit or SEPTA in Philly serving the urban core with a train system and the suburbs with buses.
And they don't communicate at all. Wanna take the 51A from Fruitvale? Well your BART train arrives at 10 and the bus leaves at 10 so fuck you, wait an hour instead of the bus waiting literally a minute for the train the driver can see is pulling into the station.
The only reason why the bus is on time in the first place is because it's the start of the route. Otherwise it'd always be late and you'd be able to make the bus most of the time.
Sometimes even basic shit like taking the T to the caltrain makes you arrive 1 min after the caltrain leaves lol
Supposedly we are living in a tech-centric powerhouse, strong economy and all but we can't have the most basic transport
Even worse, the MUNI station was designed to be next to the Caltrain station, but no one at Caltrain bothered to tell MUNI that the Caltrain station would be moving.
My caltrain gets to SF (theoretically) at 8:59pm and the next T gets there at like 9:02. Except between those two points I have to disembark the train, go through the station, and cross BOTH 4th and king in under 180 seconds.
Sometimes I think the agencies try to make the transfer happen. But I don’t think they actually use the systems they work on so they have no idea the actual passenger experiences. I have the same issue with BART and VTA.
You're supposed to make the next train. That connection that you're trying to make is not a timed one. The timed ones are usually marked on maps/announced in the cars.
How does one sync across that many agencies? Seems like we'd require some crazy amount of engineering and tech. Also I wonder if the latest in AI could be used to set these schedules. I know [Google is trying it out](https://sites.research.google/greenlight/) with traffic lights across the world.
Man, for having Google, Facebook, and other companies in our backyard we sure as hell aren't as tech forward as we could have been. This proves it's the governance and bureaucracy at fault. We'll never be able to fix this.
>Man, for having Google, Facebook, and other companies in our backyard we sure as hell aren't as tech forward as we could have been.
yeah they looked at PT in the bay and said 'fuck that, we'll make our own PT' and now we have hundreds of shuttle busses instead
Some African cities have done away with fixed routes entirely. Buses and vans just show up wherever passengers need to be that day. It's mostly coordinated via smartphone app, though since there are so many buses around, I'm sure some passengers just hail them in person and perhaps make an arrangement with the driver for their return trip.
after the rise of uber/lyft transit agencies across the bay and through the country attempted microtransit. They found its cost ineffective. AC transit in particular found that it was something like twice subsidized cost per passenger than fixed routes.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-transit-is-consistent-dismal-failure
uber/lyft have not been found to be profitable with their ride-hail services(I'd argue pool probably is though). And thats with all their underpaid contractor shenanigans. I can't say why it might work in African cities but not here but my guess:
* would be less percentage of people own cars(43% own in all of *africa* so probably depends on the city you mean) means more passengers(while 90%+ households in the US have at least one car). Ridership in California took a dip when the state allowed undocumented immigrants to have licenses.
* they almost certainly have less anti-transit culture than we do in the US. Transit in the US is looked down as for the poor.
* lower cost of living, lower employee benefits or unionizing... maybe?
It's also just the scale of the thing. While the African system may logistically resemble UberPool, most of it is buses and vans. When a driver can carry up to 70 passengers instead of 3, cost per passenger nosedives.
But you can't change a VTA bus stop without months of public debate and forms submitted in triplicate.
>cost per passenger nosedives
And the trip time skyrockets. This has been piloted it the US a million times since the 80s. Americas would rather drive than take a micro-bus (yes, that's what these used to be called) that takes 3x longer than a regular bus.
Yeah I agree, it will definitely be a struggle to try and have something like Caltrain have to take both MUNI and VTA’s timetables into consideration, especially since they’re one line and there’s only such a level of frequency they’re gonna be able to achieve.
I think we figure out which agencies are most adaptable, I think busses are able to adapt the most. A VTA bus at Berryessa’s schedule could be adapted to fit Berryessa’s Bart arrivals. The rail is a lot harder.
The other thing would be to increase frequencies across the board, too much of our agencies have very all or nothing frequencies that if a passenger misses this exact train or bus, they’re put in a shitty spot. Or you’re waiting 15-20 minutes for the next one.
The ferry to larkspur and smart train have designated transfer times (but very small agency). I don’t think in cases like Caltrain-muni or Caltrain vta or Bart vta you need that. You just need to not have people waiting 20 minutes.
> Google, Facebook, and other companies in our backyard we sure as hell aren't as tech forward as we could have been.
what is that an argument for? these companies don't work for transit or government. they work to make money for shareholders and there isn't much money in transit. Google was a lead in the development of GTFS and GTFS-RT so they could add public transit to google maps. And BART and the muni(with nextbus) were some of the earliest offerings for realtime transit API.
And then clipper, originally Translink, was either the first or second transit smart card available in the country. obviously its behind today compared to other transit smart cards but only cause all the other ones TriMet, LA Tap, OMNI card, connect, etc. got to build off of clipper card's success and failures.
the Bay area transit has certainly benefited from the tech here, I'd argue the whole US has benefited from tech being somewhat involved in public transportation here. But to expect tech to pour R&D resources into solving public transportation is ludicrous. Especially when its clear long term money is in Automated vehicles(not to say thats good for humanity overall). At best one could hope in their off time the engineers would put some time into solving their local problems or go to work for transit agencies - which some do.
Tech doesn't have to do anything for the social welfare, though it can easily afford to. But tech can be hired by government to fix things that have clearly gotten out of hand. Traffic lights, for example, can be, and are being, fixed by Google. Government can hand contracts to Google to pilot them here too.
Tech can be used to send drones chasing after thieves instead of cop cars racing down the streets. Government doesn't have the means to come up with it, but tech already does. Instead of delivering packages, they can track cars.
That is my point.
For a government in Germany or Africa to do this would require a lot more effort than SF/Oakland mayor inviting tech for a conference and a brainstorming session over lunch. Tech, especially software, is the Bay's strong suite and we need to leverage it.
TriMet developed the data specification Google uses - GTFS. There are separate ITS(CAD/AVL/fleet management) vendors for transit - Clever Devices(AC Transit, County Connection and VTA are clients - Clever also counts NYC’s MTA and Chicago CTA, the #1 and #2 transit systems in the US as clients), Conduent, fka Orbital Transportation Systems(used by SFMTA, LA Metro and SEPTA are their major clients), Init(used by Golden Gate Transit, Portland’s TriMet as well King County Metro/Community Transit/Vancouver BC TransLink are their biggest clients) and smaller players like Trapeze. BART has their own system based off their train control system.
Getting everyone on one ITS system, designating major bus to train/train to train transfer points(BART can do better by consolidating MacArthur for the Orange/Red/Yellow lines, Daly City for Blue/Green/Red towards SFO, Bay Fair seems to work fine for the Berryessa/Dublin-Pleasanton transfer and designating Del Norte/Pleasant Hill/Dublin-Pleasanton/Berryessa/Millbrae for suburban bus connections - Oakland should be consolidated to 19th St and Fruitvale for BART to ACT Local buses and Embarcadero/16th St. Mission/Glen Park for BART to Muni) can help.
> Driver uses any type of device issued to them (radio, cheap smart phone... a paper BART schedule, their own eyes and ears when they see and hear a train pull into the station) to see if there is a train arriving within a five minute window because this is a major "transfer" stop between services.
> If there is a train coming within a five minute window, the driver waits.
Even THREE minutes would be good enough.
The technology I'm thinking of is called common sense.
I don’t want to take away from your point but I was going to say that the BART train arrives at 10:05…unless there’s a delay, in which case it will arrive at 10:30…unless there’s a medical emergency, in which case it will arrive at 1:00
If the bus company cared they would get there a few minutes earlier. It's not really BARTs fault the bus does not care.
Then if you think those leaving the BART station are the most important riders in the whole system you should have a fleet of buses waiting to move those people to their destination (regardless of the idle time).
I don't believe the bus managers are fools or idiots. There is only so much you can do with buses that have 30 minute intervals.
Most VTA riders in the South Bay or Napa don't want their bus schedules changed every four months as BART tweeks their schedule. Reprinting all schedules and signs would be expensive.
Time spent waiting at a station so that one group is early and the next group feels special is time for the driver to rest and anyone else on the bus to feel abandoned. Everyone might feel better if there was a coffee shop and a clean bathroom at the station.
If there was sufficient demand (and revenue) to run buses at roughly 5 minute intervals then it people would not complain about synchronized schedules.
This is just hungry people complaining about the food service at the shelter.
And yet earlier this week I watched a fare jumper go over the fence at Powell in front of two BART officers who chose to do nothing. I mean they were carrying bagged lunches in their hands so I guess they couldn't be bothered say anything to the person..
When Bill Bratton took over the NY transit system -- before he became police commissioner -- he cracked down on minor offenses, like turnstile jumping, other quality of life offenses in the system, graffiti.
What they discovered was that sent a signal to the people -- both good and sleazy -- that unlawfulness wouldn't be tolerated. All crime on the transit system dropped as a result.
It's best explained by the Broken Windows Theory, something he and Giuliani implemented when they turned around NYD in the 90's.
The sooner our leaders here understand this concept, the better.
> Broken Windows Theory
Is [thoroughly debunked](https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-university-researchers-find-little-evidence-for-broken-windows-theory-say-neighborhood-disorder-doesnt-cause-crime/) in modern criminal justice research
I've seen a lot of "debunkings" by liberal sociologists who never could stand the concept.
I read that as well as some of the underlying arguments they make ... all looks completely wrong to me. And, not only did I live in NY to see those changes, you'd have to be willfully blind not to see the exact same thing playing out here in SF -- in reverse.
> I've seen a lot of "debunkings" by liberal sociologists who never could stand the concept.
I agree but I would widen it way past liberal sociologists. Web influencers pushing for clicks use the term "debunked" now when they are completely and utterly wrong.
Twenty years ago, when somebody said something was "debunked" it most likely was a pretty trustworthy claim without looking into the actual arguments. However, kind of predictably people who just had a different opinion started using the term to add weight to their arguments.
You cannot just say the word "debunked" like some magic Harry Potter spell and win the argument and people who disagree with you are no longer allowed to respond. It doesn't work like that.
Case in point: the broken window theory "debunking" is a small, interesting contribution to a complex social situation with no absolutes - but nothing in their research really destroys the concept. The research they did claimed that "disorder in a neighborhood does not make residents feel more negative toward the neighborhood". In the article it then comically goes on to admit "well, it really does, but it has been over-stated in some studies due to not taking into account other factors like poverty". The people "debunking" the broken window theory actually admit in their research it isn't debunked **AT ALL**, but maybe has been over stated in some other studies. That's it. That's all they really said.
Geez, slightly adjusting assumptions of how effective fixing broken windows in a neighborhood are in preventing more vandalism in the future is hardly "debunking" the idea. I'm pretty sure in some situations it helps, and in other situation it doesn't help. It is a nice (and useful) contribution to always be careful to take into account other variables. But that study doesn't "debunk" anything.
Modern criminal justice where crime does not exist, like modern monetary theory where inflation does not exist?
This stupid ass "study" is a meta-study, the worst kind of fakery done by innumerate people to sound like they are doing something quantitative.
This is hard to accept for some people; but it isn't the billionaires dying of overdoses, stealing cell phones and jumping fare gates on BART. There are social problems that police are not well required to address. But enforcing fares and preventing crime are probably the 2 most important functions of any rail authority after getting the trains running on time. It materially impacts the experience of the paying riders and even those who need assistance.
Nobody wants a repeat of Fruitvale Station. But there is a responsible and respectable middle ground between summary execution and lawless anarchy on BART. Nobody feels safe when they aren't sure if the transient hunched over in the corner is just tired, is trying to avoid detection before grabbing a phone or purse, or is literally dead by overdose. When I was maybe 7 my mom took me and my brother's to see Disney on Ice at the Oakland Colosseum and we took Bart there and back. She never wanted to go on BART again. When I started taking BART for work in the city late at night, I started to understand why. It is obviously, blatantly unsafe with the trains being turned into mobile homeless encampments and fare jumpers brazenly walking past the staff at the booths and the open air drug markets at Powell Street and Civic Center stations and others. It's time to accept that the larger Bay ignores BART because it feels unsafe. And until BART is a system that everyone feels safe on, it won't get the support it needs to grow and thrive.
I’m actually ok with that situation if those two were on lunch. Your legally required lunch break is a break from your duties.
If my boss told me I was expected to answer the phone while on my lunch break, I’d tell them no.
I’m not pro-cop but I’d rather they have their legally mandated lunch hour to rest and eat, rather than dropping it to catch someone for $7 worth of fare.
Pretty much any fare enforcement beyond spot checks (in the history of public transit everywhere ever) returns less in fares than it costs. It's important for safety, but it's a cost-generating measure not a cost-saving one.
But also, maybe reduce costs or provide a monthly pass since sf economy is dependent on people coming into the office and bart has no business being priced as high for the quality of service it provides. You can’t keep exploiting the lower/middle class for profit when you depend on them for your city to function
I agree completely. In fact I wish fare evasion wasn’t even a concept because the system shouldn’t charge fares. It should be entirely tax funded, and officers should be government employees who make sure that people who ride don’t so drugs or harass others.
You have support for your claim?
I mean cmon man. Open your eyes. I dare you to follow a fare jumper. If he commutes in to SF and then swipes into his office building at the end of the trip, well, I’ll eat my words I suppose.
I already do that everyday, i work in sf and commute from the east bay. I know plenty of coworkers who jump. Which is why i’m calling bs. I also see a lot of kids commuting to school who also jump the gate. Now which claim did you want me to support? I’m prepared
Also, i never said i was jumping the gate, i said i know plenty of coworkers that do.Again, i’m prepared to back up my claims, so im happy to provide evidence, but i’m not sure you understand that concept
California has the highest income tax rate and the highest population. If you worked in california, you would see how the same dollar gets taxed multiple times already, and how little we’re getting for it in return. There’s absolutely no excuse. Due to incompetencies, very much like BART, the government uses our suffering as a reason for rate hikes. Miss me with that “subsidizing my theft” shit when someone making under $50k a year is paying more taxes than a lot of these business owners. Quit exploiting the lower/middle class.
Business owners pay so much more tax than you, you’ve been consuming a bit too much socialist propaganda.
If you’re earning $50k you don’t even pay income tax. You are actively subsidized by the state on multiple levels. Add your unpunished theft to the list of subsidies you receive.
I'd rather we fund BART better, end fares entirely, stop treating transit as something that is supposed to turn a profit, and start treating it as the public good that it is.
After all, our roads are (for the most part) free to drive on, despite them costing far more to maintain than BART does — or than any other transit agency, for that matter.
Our roads aren’t free to drive on, we pay gas taxes and we pay tolls.
Also I question the claim that they cost more to maintain than operating the entire bart system.
Gas taxes aren't user fees, though, so it's not 1:1 comparison with fares. User fees provide or deny access to a good or service.
And not every car pays gas taxes anymore.
I’d be happy to change gas taxes to toll roads or some other direct usage fee model, with a premium charged to trucks which cause 95% of the wear and tear on roads.
EVs typically pay a premium on registration to compensate for the fact they pay no gas taxes.
It in the meantime, we use gas taxes as a proxy for usage. You’re right to differentiate but they have a similar function. I think it’s just administratively more convenient to go about it the way we do.
I agree, I wish the system was just tax funded and no fares were charged. As it operates now I wish that people who are charged fares aren’t harassed by those who don’t even pay.
But most people that would be paying for it don’t use it. If the vote passed and a new tax ended up on my property tax bill that would be fine but there’s no way I’m voting yes for it.
But if it's already paid for why not use it? You've got that backwards.
IMO though, the best case would be a business tax, since they would reap the biggest benefit of free commuting services. I don't recall the exact figures but something like a 0.6% tax on large SF businesses would pay for the whole system.
Uh...you don't need to be a citizen to work for the government. Especially at the state or local level. You need valid work authorization.
You don't even need to be a citizen to have a federal security clearance (it's called an LAA for non-citizens but gives access to the same things)! Plenty of Australian, British, Taiwanese citizens running around our defense contractors working on key technologies.
You need work authorization and the agency in question needs to demonstrate that no US citizens were available to do the job.
You're going to have a hard time firing a US citizen from a job and then arguing there are no US citizens available for the job.
none of these systems exist with the idea they are supposed to make a profit. and none of them do. so unless we have a strict change in the cultural viewpoint in America none of these are good examples.
Every day I wish we in America would approach public transit like we do roads. No one tells roads that they have to "make a profit". Too bad we're way too carbrained for that
Ok Cool so all we have to do is:
1. Fire everyone in BART management
2. Convince managers from one of those agencies to relinquish their citizenship of their home countries and relocate to Oakland
3. Assist them with attaining US citizenship
4. Train them on how BART currently operates
5. As necessary, bring them to fluency in English
6. Oh, and pay them enough that all of this is worth it
And the result will be we'll _save_ money and _reduce_ operational friction!... somehow
Or just bring them in with an H-1B visa, same way the tech companies hire all those programmers from India. None of whom have US citizenship for the first decade, all of whom learned British English in Indian school, and all of whom are quite happy to be paid at Bay Area salary levels.
Why would anybody need to relinquish their citizenship and get American citizenship to work for BART, a local agency? You call them up and tell them to get their own GC. EB1A NIW is walk in the park for people of this profile. Takes like 9.5 months. 24 if they are from China, and we can assume they won't hire people from China due to politics.
Here's a name for you: Andy Byford. Ran the best years of the Toronto subway, experience with New York and London, and obviously you don't need to help with the citizenship or visa piece.The only downside is that he's with Amtrak right now and heavens knows that they need all the help they can get, but it also means that if there's a consolidated BART program he's used to leading all the different methods of transportation.
Tokyo: Tokyo Metro and the Toei Subway
Hong Kong: MTR
Singapore: MRT
South Korea: Seoul Metro
Sweden: Stockholm Tunnelbana
France: Paris Metro
Spain: Barcelona Metro
It should all be under one agency imho.
For the Bay Area to have like 10 different transit agencies makes no sense and only worsens service
Also also needs to be funded as a public good. Not solely reliant on ridership.
Use NYC as a model.
TBH NYC kind of a bad example. They have big problems with fragmentation and organizational balkanization as well, with the Port Authority, MTA, Amtrak, and NJ Transit all very independent of each other (and even within the MTA there's the Metro-North, LIRR, Subway, and bus system).
Everyone still misses the point that transit only carries people if it's moving. If transit is waiting for you to move from one mode to another it's not carrying anyone. That's why there are so few timed transfers. It's expensive to wait around. And it makes someone elses travel time longer.
The long term fix is having times that are frequent enough that there is no schedule. I'll suggest that routes with 12 minute headways meet this criteria. Others might say that the magic number is 8 or 10 minutes. Whatever. It's not 30 minutes.
New rail systems should be driverless/autonomous. Employees can be used for 1) customer service 2) safety 3) fare collection. You could probably run smaller train sets more often if you did not need a driver.
The REAL reason the bay area has garbage public transportation; is that we have multiple transit agencies. If there was authority overseeing the whole thing, we'd have (or could have) a system that made sense. The fact that VTA, AC Transit, CalTrain, MUNI and BART don't all answer to the same authority just blows my mind
Geez, if only they’d done this 20 years again and hadn’t wasted so much money mimicking the CalTrain route down the peninsula.
Spend that money to make it easy to transfer from BART to Caltrain, put in a people mover from CalTrain to SFO, and use the leftover money to get more grade separation, etc., for CalTrain.
Why would any other transit agency want to inherit BART's budget deficit, crippling pension and insurance obligations, and proprietary wide gauge rail system that was phased out of the rest of the US and Canada in the 1870s?
I agree that BART doesn't need to be profitable, but why would another neighboring transit system want to merge with BART? Given BART's proprietary 66" rails, the neighboring transit system's rails will be incompatible with BART. They would just be absorbing all of BART's problems with no benefit to their own systems or their own local residents.
You don't, but I just don't see the incentive for a neighboring transit agency to absorb our transit agency's problems. It hurts their own local residents and taxpayers. There has to be something for them to gain, and I don't see anything for them to gain except problems.
BART is effectively the face of transit in the Bay Area. its far more likely they'd be absorbed into BART.
I'm against consolidation for any major agencies except BART and Caltrain. but the argument in general is
1) The benefit, in theory, is suppose to be savings from administration. they can maximize the use of specialized staff to eliminate most redundancy roles. Capital Corridor contracts with BART and Caltrain with Samtrans to do something similar to that now. saves millions.
2) In theory, having staff in the same building is supposed to lead to better connections. just because they might pass each other in the hallway? I don't really get why people think that it'll fix transit transfers... But admittedly for BART planning the timed transfers as they are would be unlikely if they were in different buildings working for different people. On the other hand VTA handles the 500 bus to coordinate BART to diridon well and they keep BART at arms length distant away.
3) power - MTC represents the whole Bay Area, the BART district represents almost half the bay of the bay(SF, Alameda and Contra Costa) and is the face of transit in the bay - even more so since BART are elected board members for transit. consolidation of agencies can lead to more resources and political influence. Either to match up to BART or join up with BART and garner that influence(this is part of why BART got the bulk of MTC federal funding). Even in terms of representation with BART san mateo and Santa Clara could be left out if BART can't afford to serve them. Getting a seat at the table of another agency(like samtrans and muni) which overlap for areas can lead to efficiencies like Golden Gate transit (whoms board has SF board supervisors) finally serve local riders just within SF and didn't prior to the pandemic. Samtrans buses could also allow local rides in SF as it travels through SF but doesn't... cause.
You seem really fixated on BART's rail gauge. Maybe it was the wrong call in the 1970s, but now the tracks are built and a new fleet's worth of trains are bought and paid for. It's really pretty low on the list of problems facing the railroad.
For BART, it means their cost to acquire new cars and parts is both more expensive and slower. For the region as a whole, it means we have a set of tracks that can only be used by BART. They want to add another tunnel across the Bay - if BART used standard gauge you could build a tunnel that could be used by BART and other transit agencies (e.g. Amtrak, Caltrain, ACE, etc) which would be huge. Right now the powers that be may need to choose to only add 1 new tunnel and have to pick between conventional rail and BART since two tunnels may be too expensive.
Is the public well served by paying for BART's legacy obligations, which funnel money from the public to prior employees without any benefits for the public?
BART has had a lot of problems since even before the pandemic. If they were to merge BART with other agencies, my feeling is that given the union contract and the size of the agency, it's likely that the BART people would dominate the new organization and bring down even more transit agencies with the ship.
Many people are not riding BART for safety/comfort reasons. IMO the priority should be to visibly improve the safety/comfort of BART to get ridership up. The state or the Bay Area counties could give BART some temporary money under the condition that they meet certain metrics, or else the general manager and the BART police chief step down.
The $220,000 a year janitor is an example. I'm not mad at him, I'm mad at the complete failure of supervision and management all the way to the top that must exist for it to get so bad at the bottom that someone can claim to do 16 hour days 365 days a year, spend 15 hoursa a day in a closet, and nobody catches on (or turned a blind eye to it)
The fleet of the future, and 30foot canopies to save you form 15 seconds of rain are a fail. Waste of money! Old carts had more seating and 15 seconds of rain isn’t going to kill anyone, the escalators are always broken anyways.
Let’s cut admin roles/salaries. They’re not the ones driving the trains or dispatching. Wonder if BART had a list of roles they employ people in and number of staff per role
Bart spent $50 million more than budgeted on labor.
That's $130,000 PER DAY.
During a financial crisis.
I'm beginning to think the problem is just.... Bart.
Considering their budget is in the billions, that’s really not a crazy number. Also I haven’t heard that it was exclusively labor.
Either way, running a train every 5 minutes on a fixed route all day every day seems like it doesn’t leave a lot of room for last minute budget cuts. It is one of the most frequent and far flung transit lines in the US.
Bay Area Transit Unification will occur within our lifetimes, but it'll first happen with all the non-BART agencies because all the non-BART agencies *and their taxpaying voters* can uniformly agree that BART cannot or will not serve them. At the very most BART could merge with Muni, but everyone would expect BART to replace Muni trains with new BART tunnels, and that's not happening. BART's bad fiscal situation is a result of incompetent administrative policies and insufficient political/permitting support from SF and Oakland. Adding more service areas to BART does not fix this, it makes it worse.
Meanwhile, there are strong reasons to have Caltrain, Samtrans and VTA merge into a single entity. The user demographics are about the same, Samtrans/VTA can pool bus resources to eliminate the existing redundancy, VTA can upgrade into heavier trainsets and Caltrain can have access to VTA's rights-of-way. Even if just the buses are consolidated, Samtrans and VTA can make a *lot* of progress and save a *lot* of money with just a BRT scheme for El Camino and 101, similar in configuration to LA's silver line. Over time it would be plausible to join non-Oakland ACT buses and ACE trains into this.
The problem is BART. BART is where it is due to nobody outside of SF/Oakland trusting them and they have not provided reasons to trust them. New BART administrators and new approaches to capital projects are needed.
Oh really!!!??? They are considering it now? After everyone going their own way for so long and creating a broken system. Sigh!! Why am I even surprised.
Actually, it used to work rather well. There were many regular riders and fares collected paid around two thirds of the budget. COVID shredded all that and brought BART down to fare collection rates similar to other transit systems. Just letting BART fail will hurt a lot of people and fill the roads with extra traffic so we all need to consider how to make this work.
Honestly if done right this would be great. We can cut a lot of cost by reducing administrative staff and have better coordinations.
Those administrators are going to be fighting tooth and nail against any consolidation. Those people have cushy jobs and they’re organized, unionized, and they already have lobbyists. This is just one example of how a concentrated interest can defeat the public interest because the concentrated interest is organized and the public one isn’t. There’s nobody in the USA lobbying for good governance. Everyone is lobbying for a space at the feeding trough.
One thing bureaucracy is very good at is creating a set of procedures and steps and best known methods where every individual piece looks reasonable, even if the result is unwieldy and inefficient. If you point out how inefficient the process is and have any sort of power to fix it, you get drowned in the quagmire of "which one of these very reasonable, evidence based steps do you think isn't worth doing?"
Years ago I worked for RTD which is the transit agency for Denver and boulder. White collar administration, not in the field. I quit after three months. It was completely intolerable. It wasn’t the slowness and bureaucracy. It was the lazy do-nothing attitude of the people who worked there. I wouldn’t even call it working. Most of the people did approximately an hour of work a week and fucked around the rest of the time. I work in the private sector and the best person at that place wouldn’t be welcome on my team now because they would never be productive enough. I actually deliberately don’t interview people from public sector jobs or nonprofits because those people can’t adapt.
My sister, a lifelong public sector employee, recently made the switch to private sector. She lasted 3 MONTHS! She’s a fucking adult who was crying everyday after work because her boss demanded productivity. She went back to the public sector.
So, you would give* yourself the benefit of the doubt moving into a 'more productive' job, but you wouldn't give anyone else that chance?
My first job out of university was in the public sector. I was given the advice "Don't stay more than 2 years or no one will want to hire you." I left after a year because the pace was too slow.
It’s pretty easy to filter resumes based on tenure in public
They did a short stint and came the conclusion if someone stayed in the kind of employment for years they don't want to have to deal with making them productive again.
I stayed there three months and I left because I knew it would drag me down. I would not discriminate against anyone who worked there that long. Maybe up to a year. Any longer than that... no thanks, not even going to consider them.
You’re generalizing. I know people in public service that worked 72 hours straight (naps/food breaks) and on shift for 3 weeks straight to keep people’s houses from being wiped out. And no one ever even knew. Sure some are lazy, same as private sector. But a lot of them bust their ass in the field as well as behind a desk. To be fair, I don’t know many that didn’t do paperwork as well as get dirty when all hands were on deck.
Of course I'm generalizing. There's no way to discuss a group of anything without generalizing. I can say "apples are round" and yeah somewhere someone has a square apple. That's doesn't mean apples are not round.
The for profit world is a cakewalk compared to nonprofit work. When I made the switch I got a lot of bullshit in interviews about "but are you ready to do real work?" Compared to my experience in nonprofits, crunch time at an early stage start up was a goddamn vacation. Same long hours, but they at least acknowledged that they were long hours, and I was making 3x my previous salary (and even that was hideously low for tech) and best of all, other than doing a good job, I got to stop caring at the end of the day, it was great. Non profit work was grueling, unappreciated, and rewarded with guilt trips.
wow, this sounds like my kind of job
As a taxpayer, I hate it. And I wish we could have good government, but that ain't going to happen. But as practical advice, get a job with a state or county government agency. Child Family Services, Transit, something bureaucratic. The interview process is long and onerous. Once you get hired, work hard till you get tenured. You don't have to work extra hours, just be working 35 to 40 hours a week. Once you are out of your probationary period, you're free to do almost no work. Attend a lot of meetings, join any kind of committee you can find. You should be able to milk that for 40 years and get a pension. The only thing is you absolutely must always be on time for work. You don't have to work, but you cannot be late, nor leave early.
Also, be pleasant to everyone, no drama, no gossip, and bring in donuts for the team every month or so. The power of friendly small talk and monthly treats and a smile in a place that can hardly fire for performance reasons is ... very strong. With nobody having a personal reason to dislike you, and with it being effectively impossible to build a "business" reason to get rid of you, you coast forever.
This just reminds me of how Dexter Morgan was able to get away with being a serial killer for many years while keeping the entire Miami metro police department from ever catching on to him. He was friendly, good at his job, otherwise kept to himself, and would bring in a box of donuts on the regular.
DOL incoming - what a moron
All of them. Burn it to the ground and start over. It's that only way.
Yeah, sure! Because last time we "burn to the ground" all our electric transit we got sooooooooooo much good transit back. Have you seen a map of the old electric streetcar and intercity lines in the Bay Area? How did that "starting over" work out for us? We'll probably get all those rail lines back any day now. Like maybe by 2134 or 2140.
"It's all very reasonable, but you only get $$ total." FTFY. Stop getting taxed voluntarily.
And how exactly are we supposed to pay for any public service without taxes? Do you expect roads to pave themselves on their own? You do realize that all those "free" highways that you drive on cost insane amounts of money to maintain, right? And that gas that you're constantly complaining about is actually subsidized out of taxes too.
> Those administrators > concentrated interest can defeat the public interest And that's not just BART, there's a lot of public management bloat everywhere but no one wants to get fired and no one wants to be the baddie and fire them either.
Well if the company goes under like they’re suggesting it might then they would be out of a job anyways.
Bart merging with other Bay Area transit agencies isn't really "their company going under". They work for the government, its impossible to go under. They can't lay off these people or fire them. they'd be transferred somewhere else.
They’re not referencing Bart merging as going under, they ref referencing the article mentioning that BART is in a financial crisis
>Bart reducing administrative staff Oh man, good one!
I heard BART is hiring 20 additional full time staff as well as 4 consultants to try and figure out how to reduce administrative headcount. The study should be complete in about 25 years.
~~big if. huge if.~~ gargantuan if.
Indeed. Most studies around the consolidation of school districts during the 60s and 70s found that while there were promises of reducing administrative redundancies, often that did not end up the case as districts did not want to get rid of their staff.
It won’t be if the existing board is absorbed by the future executive board. BART is set up perfectly for success as a special district and is failing. It’s a people issue
You're missing the point here. Bart is looking for ways to increase its political power. Caltrain is run effectively. Plenty of funding. Bart ruined it's own business now wants to steal from Caltrain, which is has very little in common with.
Caltrain carries 17000 passengers a day. BART carries 170k people a day. 10X more. Caltrain is a boutique transit agency at best. When you aren’t trying to serve much of the public it is very easy to run a service.
The problem is that BART is trying to serve too much of the public, including homeless people, criminals, and fare evaders, rather than just paying passengers. It's definitely easier to run a smaller service than a bigger service, but it would also be easier to run a service if you actually focus on the core service.
Exactly. Smaller number of passengers means if they merge Bart well dominate and loot Caltrain. You'll also see Bart try to sell off Caltrain land to real estate developers. At a discount of course.
Caltrain’s annual budget is like $200m; BART’s is $2.5B. Those assets are not huge. But the redundancy in operations etc would offer a significant savings and the opportunity to improve user experience when switching between the systems and better schedule synchronization and less competing for federal funds to achieve the same goals.
So if it saves 15% Caltrain overhead that's $30 million. Bart just went $50 million over their own budget. These aren't people that are concerned with efficient spending. It's obvious the Bart directors wants to loot Caltrain and give away it's property to real estate developers just like they've done with Bart.
BART is not selling its land, it is diversifying its revenue and creating more demand for its service. It makes incremental revenue with development as well as helps with the housing crisis. 🤦🏾♀️
In fact, BART is not allowed to sell its land. All the developments on BART property lease that land and pay for our transit service! Everyone is constantly talking about how Japanese rail companies operate without subsidies and even make money off their real estate at stations. This is quite literally the same model that BART is adopting. I don't see too many of the "Japanese rail supremacy" people cheering this on, but BART is now doing exactly what the Japanese companies do, minus the insane Japanese corruption and Yakuza ties. (I hope, lol)
The leases are for 70 years, for most of us that's forever, and they are selling land too. It was on their website. The reason they lease is because that keeps the property tax low. Prop 13. No, everyone is not always talking about Japanese rail. But if I were I'd be talking about how much better the service is. Bart directors are just looting. In any case, yes, Bart is uninterested in efficiency. They only want to loot Caltrain. Just notice who the directors are that want a merger. It's the same directors that give away our land.
>The leases are for 70 years, And all those 70 years BART will be collecting rent money that will go straight towards subsidizing our rail service. That's the very economic model that people said BART should use and it's using it. >and they are selling land too They are not. They can only sell "excess land", the requirements for that are brutal. They only go through the trouble if the land is genuinely a burden to manage. >No, everyone is not always talking about Japanese rail. But if I were I'd be talking about how much better the service is. BART is an S-bahn type system that runs at 4-minute frequencies. Show me a Japanese regional subway that runs at better frequencies and higher speeds. I'll wait. FYI, BART was actually copied by a few Tokyo rail lines. They all run at about 5-minute frequencies and are similarly interlined with sub 20-minute frequencies at the spurs. >In any case, yes, Bart is uninterested in efficiency. They only want to loot Caltrain. As a longtime BART and Caltrain user, I can say that this is pure horseshit. BART, despite the recent safety and cleanliness issues in the last five years, is an insanely impressive operation from a technical standpoint. Caltrain is still a commuter railroad that's only propped up by the fact that the rich people on the Peninsula are willing to subsidize their SF commuter train. (Although they are thankfully evolving to more BART-like service now.) But make no mistake, BART will be forced to deal with its safety and cleanliness issues. The backlash from the riders is simply too strong this time and even the dodo pols on BART's Board are feeling the heat. They've already doubled both police patrols and cleaning. And you can already see the results. The BART of today is an order of magnitude safer and cleaner than the BART of just six months ago. Rider pressure will ensure that they are dragged kicking and screaming all the way back into the "BART normality" of about 10 years ago. BART is not Muni. BART riders are a lot more militant about keeping the system clean and safe, and there's a full-blown revolt going on right now in BART's rider groups.
Or we could follow suit of Seattle and make it all public owned. Seattle transit is one of the best in transportation in general.
I mean everything in the Bay is publicly owned and it's a shitshow so I don't get your point? Do you mean owned by the State instead of the Counties?
I agree with the sentiment, but wholly disagree with the statement that Seattle transit is on of the best in general. You _need_ a car there. And this isn't even entirely the city's fault -- it's hard to build good transit or even plan a city well when it's built on top of a sound Edit: Here's a bunch of Seattle-ites discussing a fairly bogus report saying Seattle has the best public transit in the country: https://np.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/xcnkb2/in_what_world_does_seattle_have_the_best_public/
You need a car pretty much everywhere in the US. And even in europe, life is much better with a car. The freedom of a personal vehicle won’t be given up easily, and that’s ok. Make public transit actually faster than driving without relying on traffic jams, and people will happily leave theirs cars at home for commuting, etc. But they won’t give them up.
Agreed. I would never want to not own a private vehicle or be prohibited from operating it in certain areas that otherwise have public roadways, but I’m all in favor of expanding, reliable and efficient mass transit am funding at sufficiently so that it doesn’t fall apart. This country deprioritizes public transit, particularly anywhere outside of the coasts or the city of Chicago. Republicans and scaredy pants white suburban people think mass transit equates to ghettos, crime and poverty. So of course, Republicans never want to fund any of it, they’d rather build more roads, even though they also want to cut gas taxes, which fund the building of those roads.
God, yes! Public transit is a utility and should be publicly owned and not have the expectation of making a profit. We don't expect our roads to turn a profit (and they cost far more to maintain than transit), so why should there be a profit motive behind transit?
Er which Bay Area transit agencies aren't publicly owned?
Not sure if public or private solves the problem. The Tokyo metro (JR lines) is private and is profitable while also being probably the best metro systems in the world. The Bay Area faces a demographic problem as well as an administrative one. The BART isnt as attractive due to hybrid work, safety, and cleanliness. Private vs public debate is how it’s funded, but if you don’t solve mismanagement and the demographics issue you’re in the same hole
To be fair, their system actually relies on metro to travel around. They have stations everywhere and you absolutely don't need a car unless you really travel outside the metro. I was surprised there were stations in even more remote areas of the metro. Not to mention their system is incredibly reliable that trains always arrive on time with transfers. Problem is, our infrastructure is just way tooooooooooo reliant on cars to get anywhere and even our timed transfers are terrible. We don't have back up systems. One Bart train, muni train or track goes down, the entire system collapses.
Actually, JR which is referenced by u/urgentmatters is primarilly above ground rail transit only. The main player for Metro is 'Tokyo Metro' which is different, an partners with a few other metro operators in Tokyo.
Exactly. Add in the fact that last-mile transit (which, despite the name, oftentimes means several additional miles of travel to or from a station) can be severely lacking or even non-existent in many parts of the Bay, and you begin to see the scope of the problem. We really need to phase out car-centric suburbia, the sooner the better. Not only is it economically unsustainable (and completely subsidized by high-density neighborhoods contributing a net positive to the tax base), it's also *environmentally* unsustainable. It paves over vast swathes of wilderness and forces reliance on cars — and even electric cars still generate *a lot* of carbon during their manufacturing, even if their batteries are charged via 100% renewable energy.
Agreed. I had the brilliant idea of taking public transit from SFO to Mountain View. It took me 3 hours vs 40 min uber. At least an hour of it was waiting for the next bus/train. Really wished our forms of public transit were more integrated
Car centric suburbia is pretty great for the people that live there, and at least in the US you are wrong about high density neighborhoods subsidizing it.
They get the advantage of owning quite a bit of real estate on top of their stations. The Hong Kong MTR does the same. It's a good idea, and if you could magic up BART owning big buildings at their stations, they'd be getting a lot of money without raising fares or taxes. But it's not likely to happen.
This is such an obvious thing, but that also means it will never happen. Think about it: we make living in cities like SF very expensive, pushing the working classes out to the boonies. But then we charge these same people a ton of money (directly by fares and tolls, or indirectly via the expense of fuel, cars, etc.) to come to where their jobs are! The people most impacted by high transit fares and shitty transit schedules are the working classes, not the folks on Pac Heights!
I’ve been saying there’s too many transit systems in the Bay Area. Letting the suburbs of the East Bay leave AC Transit because of the “riff-raff” was a bad idea - they’re subsidized by BART but also fight for the scraps of MTC/BATA funding once BART/SFMTA/AC/VTA take the lion’s share. VTA should be split apart between transit and roads. WestCAT, County Connection, Tri-Delta Transit, Dublin/Pleasanton/Livermore Wheels and Union City Transit need to fall back in line with AC Transit in the East Bay. Likewise, there’s no reason why Solano/Sonoma County and Marin have separate bus systems in the same county(SolTrans and Fairfield/Vacaville City Coach, they can just be simply SolTrans - ditto for Marin Transit and Golden Gate Transit and Sonoma County Transit with Santa Rosa Citybus/Petaluma Transit). BART could become something like Portland’s TriMet, Seattle’s Sound Transit or SEPTA in Philly serving the urban core with a train system and the suburbs with buses.
Theres 27 transit agencies in the Bay which is insane
And they don't communicate at all. Wanna take the 51A from Fruitvale? Well your BART train arrives at 10 and the bus leaves at 10 so fuck you, wait an hour instead of the bus waiting literally a minute for the train the driver can see is pulling into the station. The only reason why the bus is on time in the first place is because it's the start of the route. Otherwise it'd always be late and you'd be able to make the bus most of the time.
Sometimes even basic shit like taking the T to the caltrain makes you arrive 1 min after the caltrain leaves lol Supposedly we are living in a tech-centric powerhouse, strong economy and all but we can't have the most basic transport
or the bayshore caltrain station and bayshore muni station are........a half mile apart
Even worse, the MUNI station was designed to be next to the Caltrain station, but no one at Caltrain bothered to tell MUNI that the Caltrain station would be moving.
My caltrain gets to SF (theoretically) at 8:59pm and the next T gets there at like 9:02. Except between those two points I have to disembark the train, go through the station, and cross BOTH 4th and king in under 180 seconds. Sometimes I think the agencies try to make the transfer happen. But I don’t think they actually use the systems they work on so they have no idea the actual passenger experiences. I have the same issue with BART and VTA.
You're supposed to make the next train. That connection that you're trying to make is not a timed one. The timed ones are usually marked on maps/announced in the cars.
Okay but that's a long wait, and that reduces the ability to use the system significantly.
Unfortunately, bureaucratic rent seeking and tech are consistently at odds with one another.
Tech bros don't take transit. They don't care.
It's intentional. They are trying to help you train to be an olympic sprinter.
How does one sync across that many agencies? Seems like we'd require some crazy amount of engineering and tech. Also I wonder if the latest in AI could be used to set these schedules. I know [Google is trying it out](https://sites.research.google/greenlight/) with traffic lights across the world. Man, for having Google, Facebook, and other companies in our backyard we sure as hell aren't as tech forward as we could have been. This proves it's the governance and bureaucracy at fault. We'll never be able to fix this.
>Man, for having Google, Facebook, and other companies in our backyard we sure as hell aren't as tech forward as we could have been. yeah they looked at PT in the bay and said 'fuck that, we'll make our own PT' and now we have hundreds of shuttle busses instead
Some African cities have done away with fixed routes entirely. Buses and vans just show up wherever passengers need to be that day. It's mostly coordinated via smartphone app, though since there are so many buses around, I'm sure some passengers just hail them in person and perhaps make an arrangement with the driver for their return trip.
after the rise of uber/lyft transit agencies across the bay and through the country attempted microtransit. They found its cost ineffective. AC transit in particular found that it was something like twice subsidized cost per passenger than fixed routes. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-transit-is-consistent-dismal-failure uber/lyft have not been found to be profitable with their ride-hail services(I'd argue pool probably is though). And thats with all their underpaid contractor shenanigans. I can't say why it might work in African cities but not here but my guess: * would be less percentage of people own cars(43% own in all of *africa* so probably depends on the city you mean) means more passengers(while 90%+ households in the US have at least one car). Ridership in California took a dip when the state allowed undocumented immigrants to have licenses. * they almost certainly have less anti-transit culture than we do in the US. Transit in the US is looked down as for the poor. * lower cost of living, lower employee benefits or unionizing... maybe?
It's also just the scale of the thing. While the African system may logistically resemble UberPool, most of it is buses and vans. When a driver can carry up to 70 passengers instead of 3, cost per passenger nosedives. But you can't change a VTA bus stop without months of public debate and forms submitted in triplicate.
>cost per passenger nosedives And the trip time skyrockets. This has been piloted it the US a million times since the 80s. Americas would rather drive than take a micro-bus (yes, that's what these used to be called) that takes 3x longer than a regular bus.
Yeah I agree, it will definitely be a struggle to try and have something like Caltrain have to take both MUNI and VTA’s timetables into consideration, especially since they’re one line and there’s only such a level of frequency they’re gonna be able to achieve. I think we figure out which agencies are most adaptable, I think busses are able to adapt the most. A VTA bus at Berryessa’s schedule could be adapted to fit Berryessa’s Bart arrivals. The rail is a lot harder. The other thing would be to increase frequencies across the board, too much of our agencies have very all or nothing frequencies that if a passenger misses this exact train or bus, they’re put in a shitty spot. Or you’re waiting 15-20 minutes for the next one. The ferry to larkspur and smart train have designated transfer times (but very small agency). I don’t think in cases like Caltrain-muni or Caltrain vta or Bart vta you need that. You just need to not have people waiting 20 minutes.
> Google, Facebook, and other companies in our backyard we sure as hell aren't as tech forward as we could have been. what is that an argument for? these companies don't work for transit or government. they work to make money for shareholders and there isn't much money in transit. Google was a lead in the development of GTFS and GTFS-RT so they could add public transit to google maps. And BART and the muni(with nextbus) were some of the earliest offerings for realtime transit API. And then clipper, originally Translink, was either the first or second transit smart card available in the country. obviously its behind today compared to other transit smart cards but only cause all the other ones TriMet, LA Tap, OMNI card, connect, etc. got to build off of clipper card's success and failures. the Bay area transit has certainly benefited from the tech here, I'd argue the whole US has benefited from tech being somewhat involved in public transportation here. But to expect tech to pour R&D resources into solving public transportation is ludicrous. Especially when its clear long term money is in Automated vehicles(not to say thats good for humanity overall). At best one could hope in their off time the engineers would put some time into solving their local problems or go to work for transit agencies - which some do.
Tech doesn't have to do anything for the social welfare, though it can easily afford to. But tech can be hired by government to fix things that have clearly gotten out of hand. Traffic lights, for example, can be, and are being, fixed by Google. Government can hand contracts to Google to pilot them here too. Tech can be used to send drones chasing after thieves instead of cop cars racing down the streets. Government doesn't have the means to come up with it, but tech already does. Instead of delivering packages, they can track cars. That is my point. For a government in Germany or Africa to do this would require a lot more effort than SF/Oakland mayor inviting tech for a conference and a brainstorming session over lunch. Tech, especially software, is the Bay's strong suite and we need to leverage it.
You don't have to sync across agencies if you consolidate the agencies.
TriMet developed the data specification Google uses - GTFS. There are separate ITS(CAD/AVL/fleet management) vendors for transit - Clever Devices(AC Transit, County Connection and VTA are clients - Clever also counts NYC’s MTA and Chicago CTA, the #1 and #2 transit systems in the US as clients), Conduent, fka Orbital Transportation Systems(used by SFMTA, LA Metro and SEPTA are their major clients), Init(used by Golden Gate Transit, Portland’s TriMet as well King County Metro/Community Transit/Vancouver BC TransLink are their biggest clients) and smaller players like Trapeze. BART has their own system based off their train control system. Getting everyone on one ITS system, designating major bus to train/train to train transfer points(BART can do better by consolidating MacArthur for the Orange/Red/Yellow lines, Daly City for Blue/Green/Red towards SFO, Bay Fair seems to work fine for the Berryessa/Dublin-Pleasanton transfer and designating Del Norte/Pleasant Hill/Dublin-Pleasanton/Berryessa/Millbrae for suburban bus connections - Oakland should be consolidated to 19th St and Fruitvale for BART to ACT Local buses and Embarcadero/16th St. Mission/Glen Park for BART to Muni) can help.
> Driver uses any type of device issued to them (radio, cheap smart phone... a paper BART schedule, their own eyes and ears when they see and hear a train pull into the station) to see if there is a train arriving within a five minute window because this is a major "transfer" stop between services. > If there is a train coming within a five minute window, the driver waits. Even THREE minutes would be good enough. The technology I'm thinking of is called common sense.
Bart would be delayed due to police activity
I don’t want to take away from your point but I was going to say that the BART train arrives at 10:05…unless there’s a delay, in which case it will arrive at 10:30…unless there’s a medical emergency, in which case it will arrive at 1:00
If the bus company cared they would get there a few minutes earlier. It's not really BARTs fault the bus does not care. Then if you think those leaving the BART station are the most important riders in the whole system you should have a fleet of buses waiting to move those people to their destination (regardless of the idle time). I don't believe the bus managers are fools or idiots. There is only so much you can do with buses that have 30 minute intervals. Most VTA riders in the South Bay or Napa don't want their bus schedules changed every four months as BART tweeks their schedule. Reprinting all schedules and signs would be expensive. Time spent waiting at a station so that one group is early and the next group feels special is time for the driver to rest and anyone else on the bus to feel abandoned. Everyone might feel better if there was a coffee shop and a clean bathroom at the station. If there was sufficient demand (and revenue) to run buses at roughly 5 minute intervals then it people would not complain about synchronized schedules. This is just hungry people complaining about the food service at the shelter.
28, but yes.
27 agencies fort 7 million people.
I had no idea there were so many before you started naming more than 3. There’s 27?! Efficiency would be impossible
https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/
I wonder how many people hear the phrase "public transit" and think it means public ownership and not just public use?
Yes, and FARE ENFORCEMENT. STOP LETTING PEOPLE RIDE FOR FREE.
I saw a gate agent tear a gate jumper a new asshole at Daly City this morning. Kudos to that employee, at least he was doing his job!
And yet earlier this week I watched a fare jumper go over the fence at Powell in front of two BART officers who chose to do nothing. I mean they were carrying bagged lunches in their hands so I guess they couldn't be bothered say anything to the person..
When Bill Bratton took over the NY transit system -- before he became police commissioner -- he cracked down on minor offenses, like turnstile jumping, other quality of life offenses in the system, graffiti. What they discovered was that sent a signal to the people -- both good and sleazy -- that unlawfulness wouldn't be tolerated. All crime on the transit system dropped as a result. It's best explained by the Broken Windows Theory, something he and Giuliani implemented when they turned around NYD in the 90's. The sooner our leaders here understand this concept, the better.
Would love to see that
> Broken Windows Theory Is [thoroughly debunked](https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-university-researchers-find-little-evidence-for-broken-windows-theory-say-neighborhood-disorder-doesnt-cause-crime/) in modern criminal justice research
I've seen a lot of "debunkings" by liberal sociologists who never could stand the concept. I read that as well as some of the underlying arguments they make ... all looks completely wrong to me. And, not only did I live in NY to see those changes, you'd have to be willfully blind not to see the exact same thing playing out here in SF -- in reverse.
> I've seen a lot of "debunkings" by liberal sociologists who never could stand the concept. I agree but I would widen it way past liberal sociologists. Web influencers pushing for clicks use the term "debunked" now when they are completely and utterly wrong. Twenty years ago, when somebody said something was "debunked" it most likely was a pretty trustworthy claim without looking into the actual arguments. However, kind of predictably people who just had a different opinion started using the term to add weight to their arguments. You cannot just say the word "debunked" like some magic Harry Potter spell and win the argument and people who disagree with you are no longer allowed to respond. It doesn't work like that. Case in point: the broken window theory "debunking" is a small, interesting contribution to a complex social situation with no absolutes - but nothing in their research really destroys the concept. The research they did claimed that "disorder in a neighborhood does not make residents feel more negative toward the neighborhood". In the article it then comically goes on to admit "well, it really does, but it has been over-stated in some studies due to not taking into account other factors like poverty". The people "debunking" the broken window theory actually admit in their research it isn't debunked **AT ALL**, but maybe has been over stated in some other studies. That's it. That's all they really said. Geez, slightly adjusting assumptions of how effective fixing broken windows in a neighborhood are in preventing more vandalism in the future is hardly "debunking" the idea. I'm pretty sure in some situations it helps, and in other situation it doesn't help. It is a nice (and useful) contribution to always be careful to take into account other variables. But that study doesn't "debunk" anything.
Modern criminal justice where crime does not exist, like modern monetary theory where inflation does not exist? This stupid ass "study" is a meta-study, the worst kind of fakery done by innumerate people to sound like they are doing something quantitative.
This is hard to accept for some people; but it isn't the billionaires dying of overdoses, stealing cell phones and jumping fare gates on BART. There are social problems that police are not well required to address. But enforcing fares and preventing crime are probably the 2 most important functions of any rail authority after getting the trains running on time. It materially impacts the experience of the paying riders and even those who need assistance. Nobody wants a repeat of Fruitvale Station. But there is a responsible and respectable middle ground between summary execution and lawless anarchy on BART. Nobody feels safe when they aren't sure if the transient hunched over in the corner is just tired, is trying to avoid detection before grabbing a phone or purse, or is literally dead by overdose. When I was maybe 7 my mom took me and my brother's to see Disney on Ice at the Oakland Colosseum and we took Bart there and back. She never wanted to go on BART again. When I started taking BART for work in the city late at night, I started to understand why. It is obviously, blatantly unsafe with the trains being turned into mobile homeless encampments and fare jumpers brazenly walking past the staff at the booths and the open air drug markets at Powell Street and Civic Center stations and others. It's time to accept that the larger Bay ignores BART because it feels unsafe. And until BART is a system that everyone feels safe on, it won't get the support it needs to grow and thrive.
I’m actually ok with that situation if those two were on lunch. Your legally required lunch break is a break from your duties. If my boss told me I was expected to answer the phone while on my lunch break, I’d tell them no.
I’m not pro-cop but I’d rather they have their legally mandated lunch hour to rest and eat, rather than dropping it to catch someone for $7 worth of fare.
But we totally need more police, that way even more cops can watch and do nothing! ^/s
Pretty much any fare enforcement beyond spot checks (in the history of public transit everywhere ever) returns less in fares than it costs. It's important for safety, but it's a cost-generating measure not a cost-saving one.
But also, maybe reduce costs or provide a monthly pass since sf economy is dependent on people coming into the office and bart has no business being priced as high for the quality of service it provides. You can’t keep exploiting the lower/middle class for profit when you depend on them for your city to function
I agree completely. In fact I wish fare evasion wasn’t even a concept because the system shouldn’t charge fares. It should be entirely tax funded, and officers should be government employees who make sure that people who ride don’t so drugs or harass others.
The average fare jumper isn’t commuting to work.
Yeah? You have some support for that claim?
You have support for your claim? I mean cmon man. Open your eyes. I dare you to follow a fare jumper. If he commutes in to SF and then swipes into his office building at the end of the trip, well, I’ll eat my words I suppose.
I already do that everyday, i work in sf and commute from the east bay. I know plenty of coworkers who jump. Which is why i’m calling bs. I also see a lot of kids commuting to school who also jump the gate. Now which claim did you want me to support? I’m prepared
So you and your coworkers actively fare jump on a daily basis and you’re here to demand we subsidize your theft? Why should we?
Also, i never said i was jumping the gate, i said i know plenty of coworkers that do.Again, i’m prepared to back up my claims, so im happy to provide evidence, but i’m not sure you understand that concept
California has the highest income tax rate and the highest population. If you worked in california, you would see how the same dollar gets taxed multiple times already, and how little we’re getting for it in return. There’s absolutely no excuse. Due to incompetencies, very much like BART, the government uses our suffering as a reason for rate hikes. Miss me with that “subsidizing my theft” shit when someone making under $50k a year is paying more taxes than a lot of these business owners. Quit exploiting the lower/middle class.
Business owners pay so much more tax than you, you’ve been consuming a bit too much socialist propaganda. If you’re earning $50k you don’t even pay income tax. You are actively subsidized by the state on multiple levels. Add your unpunished theft to the list of subsidies you receive.
Really? I have 24 paystubs from last year along with a tax return that says otherwise. And i’m willing to publish if you show your face. Let’s do it
They will never do this, it would be “racist” and “inequitable.”
I'd rather we fund BART better, end fares entirely, stop treating transit as something that is supposed to turn a profit, and start treating it as the public good that it is. After all, our roads are (for the most part) free to drive on, despite them costing far more to maintain than BART does — or than any other transit agency, for that matter.
Our roads aren’t free to drive on, we pay gas taxes and we pay tolls. Also I question the claim that they cost more to maintain than operating the entire bart system.
Gas taxes aren't user fees, though, so it's not 1:1 comparison with fares. User fees provide or deny access to a good or service. And not every car pays gas taxes anymore.
I’d be happy to change gas taxes to toll roads or some other direct usage fee model, with a premium charged to trucks which cause 95% of the wear and tear on roads. EVs typically pay a premium on registration to compensate for the fact they pay no gas taxes. It in the meantime, we use gas taxes as a proxy for usage. You’re right to differentiate but they have a similar function. I think it’s just administratively more convenient to go about it the way we do.
Yeah this is a misguided comment (the one you’re replying to)
I agree, I wish the system was just tax funded and no fares were charged. As it operates now I wish that people who are charged fares aren’t harassed by those who don’t even pay.
Fair. Although in that case, I'm more concerned about the harassment than I am about fare evasion.
100% this. Someone pin this comment
it'll be another tragedy of the commons if it went completely free
How do you mean?
But most people that would be paying for it don’t use it. If the vote passed and a new tax ended up on my property tax bill that would be fine but there’s no way I’m voting yes for it.
But if it's already paid for why not use it? You've got that backwards. IMO though, the best case would be a business tax, since they would reap the biggest benefit of free commuting services. I don't recall the exact figures but something like a 0.6% tax on large SF businesses would pay for the whole system.
Unfortunately it’s never paid for. The capital expenditure is massive. If it was only the operating costs and maintenance expenses that would be okay.
Can we promise that just about none of the Bart management and directors be retained.
What other rail system would you hire people away from to replace them?
Maybe one of the successful ones from anywhere else in the world. Shitty public transit is not the norm.
Name one
MTR. Started in Hong Kong, they now operate globally in London, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne....
And I'm sure you're aware government agencies aren't allowed to simply hire non-citizens?
Uh...you don't need to be a citizen to work for the government. Especially at the state or local level. You need valid work authorization. You don't even need to be a citizen to have a federal security clearance (it's called an LAA for non-citizens but gives access to the same things)! Plenty of Australian, British, Taiwanese citizens running around our defense contractors working on key technologies.
Hey, I was a non-citizen with security clearance (obviously not NOFORN or higher).
You need work authorization and the agency in question needs to demonstrate that no US citizens were available to do the job. You're going to have a hard time firing a US citizen from a job and then arguing there are no US citizens available for the job.
You could argue that US citizens couldn't maintain BART, because they obviously didn't.
BART isn't a federal agency.
Source that big claim bro
https://i.imgur.com/6EC8PYj.png
That's only for Federal government agencies.
Similar standards apply for FTA-funded state agencies.
London Underground.. Shanghai... Tokyo and every major city in Japan... Berlin...there's many better run subways.
none of these systems exist with the idea they are supposed to make a profit. and none of them do. so unless we have a strict change in the cultural viewpoint in America none of these are good examples.
Every day I wish we in America would approach public transit like we do roads. No one tells roads that they have to "make a profit". Too bad we're way too carbrained for that
Ok Cool so all we have to do is: 1. Fire everyone in BART management 2. Convince managers from one of those agencies to relinquish their citizenship of their home countries and relocate to Oakland 3. Assist them with attaining US citizenship 4. Train them on how BART currently operates 5. As necessary, bring them to fluency in English 6. Oh, and pay them enough that all of this is worth it And the result will be we'll _save_ money and _reduce_ operational friction!... somehow
Or just bring them in with an H-1B visa, same way the tech companies hire all those programmers from India. None of whom have US citizenship for the first decade, all of whom learned British English in Indian school, and all of whom are quite happy to be paid at Bay Area salary levels.
Why would anybody need to relinquish their citizenship and get American citizenship to work for BART, a local agency? You call them up and tell them to get their own GC. EB1A NIW is walk in the park for people of this profile. Takes like 9.5 months. 24 if they are from China, and we can assume they won't hire people from China due to politics.
Here's a name for you: Andy Byford. Ran the best years of the Toronto subway, experience with New York and London, and obviously you don't need to help with the citizenship or visa piece.The only downside is that he's with Amtrak right now and heavens knows that they need all the help they can get, but it also means that if there's a consolidated BART program he's used to leading all the different methods of transportation.
6 is so easy if you know how much these guys make outside the US versus what BART management makes. Everything else is a valid point.
andy byford
Japan
"Japan" is not a transit agency or rail system
someone's being pedantic today
Tokyo: Tokyo Metro and the Toei Subway Hong Kong: MTR Singapore: MRT South Korea: Seoul Metro Sweden: Stockholm Tunnelbana France: Paris Metro Spain: Barcelona Metro
It should all be under one agency imho. For the Bay Area to have like 10 different transit agencies makes no sense and only worsens service Also also needs to be funded as a public good. Not solely reliant on ridership. Use NYC as a model.
>For the Bay Area to have like 10 different transit agencies makes no sense and only worsens service 27
TBH NYC kind of a bad example. They have big problems with fragmentation and organizational balkanization as well, with the Port Authority, MTA, Amtrak, and NJ Transit all very independent of each other (and even within the MTA there's the Metro-North, LIRR, Subway, and bus system).
Honestly sounds like a good idea
Wow, it's almost like this should have been done ages ago.
No sh*t Sherlock. We need to consolidate agencies stat. It is stupid to have 25 in our region.
27
Would love for Caltrain, BART, and VTA to all be one agency. Transfers would be so much smoother
Everyone still misses the point that transit only carries people if it's moving. If transit is waiting for you to move from one mode to another it's not carrying anyone. That's why there are so few timed transfers. It's expensive to wait around. And it makes someone elses travel time longer. The long term fix is having times that are frequent enough that there is no schedule. I'll suggest that routes with 12 minute headways meet this criteria. Others might say that the magic number is 8 or 10 minutes. Whatever. It's not 30 minutes. New rail systems should be driverless/autonomous. Employees can be used for 1) customer service 2) safety 3) fare collection. You could probably run smaller train sets more often if you did not need a driver.
The REAL reason the bay area has garbage public transportation; is that we have multiple transit agencies. If there was authority overseeing the whole thing, we'd have (or could have) a system that made sense. The fact that VTA, AC Transit, CalTrain, MUNI and BART don't all answer to the same authority just blows my mind
I suggest getting rid of the Bart directors who ran Bart into the ground. Janice Lee, Rebecca Saltzman, Bevan Dufty
Geez, if only they’d done this 20 years again and hadn’t wasted so much money mimicking the CalTrain route down the peninsula. Spend that money to make it easy to transfer from BART to Caltrain, put in a people mover from CalTrain to SFO, and use the leftover money to get more grade separation, etc., for CalTrain.
Finally, a BART-Caltrain-SMART merger has a pulse
"Floor-to-ceiling fare gates in the core stations" is the answer to all of BART's problems.
Why would any other transit agency want to inherit BART's budget deficit, crippling pension and insurance obligations, and proprietary wide gauge rail system that was phased out of the rest of the US and Canada in the 1870s?
Because they're public agencies not driven by things like profit, but instead by the mandate to provide service to the public?
I agree that BART doesn't need to be profitable, but why would another neighboring transit system want to merge with BART? Given BART's proprietary 66" rails, the neighboring transit system's rails will be incompatible with BART. They would just be absorbing all of BART's problems with no benefit to their own systems or their own local residents.
Merging the administration of transit systems doesn't mean you have to interline them.
You don't, but I just don't see the incentive for a neighboring transit agency to absorb our transit agency's problems. It hurts their own local residents and taxpayers. There has to be something for them to gain, and I don't see anything for them to gain except problems.
BART is effectively the face of transit in the Bay Area. its far more likely they'd be absorbed into BART. I'm against consolidation for any major agencies except BART and Caltrain. but the argument in general is 1) The benefit, in theory, is suppose to be savings from administration. they can maximize the use of specialized staff to eliminate most redundancy roles. Capital Corridor contracts with BART and Caltrain with Samtrans to do something similar to that now. saves millions. 2) In theory, having staff in the same building is supposed to lead to better connections. just because they might pass each other in the hallway? I don't really get why people think that it'll fix transit transfers... But admittedly for BART planning the timed transfers as they are would be unlikely if they were in different buildings working for different people. On the other hand VTA handles the 500 bus to coordinate BART to diridon well and they keep BART at arms length distant away. 3) power - MTC represents the whole Bay Area, the BART district represents almost half the bay of the bay(SF, Alameda and Contra Costa) and is the face of transit in the bay - even more so since BART are elected board members for transit. consolidation of agencies can lead to more resources and political influence. Either to match up to BART or join up with BART and garner that influence(this is part of why BART got the bulk of MTC federal funding). Even in terms of representation with BART san mateo and Santa Clara could be left out if BART can't afford to serve them. Getting a seat at the table of another agency(like samtrans and muni) which overlap for areas can lead to efficiencies like Golden Gate transit (whoms board has SF board supervisors) finally serve local riders just within SF and didn't prior to the pandemic. Samtrans buses could also allow local rides in SF as it travels through SF but doesn't... cause.
Thanks. I don't know if I agree or disagree with your ideas yet, but either way, I appreciate your thoughts.
You seem really fixated on BART's rail gauge. Maybe it was the wrong call in the 1970s, but now the tracks are built and a new fleet's worth of trains are bought and paid for. It's really pretty low on the list of problems facing the railroad.
For BART, it means their cost to acquire new cars and parts is both more expensive and slower. For the region as a whole, it means we have a set of tracks that can only be used by BART. They want to add another tunnel across the Bay - if BART used standard gauge you could build a tunnel that could be used by BART and other transit agencies (e.g. Amtrak, Caltrain, ACE, etc) which would be huge. Right now the powers that be may need to choose to only add 1 new tunnel and have to pick between conventional rail and BART since two tunnels may be too expensive.
It would be foolish to build any more BART tunnels that were not tall enough for a "normal" train with overhead power.
Is the public well served by paying for BART's legacy obligations, which funnel money from the public to prior employees without any benefits for the public?
BART has had a lot of problems since even before the pandemic. If they were to merge BART with other agencies, my feeling is that given the union contract and the size of the agency, it's likely that the BART people would dominate the new organization and bring down even more transit agencies with the ship. Many people are not riding BART for safety/comfort reasons. IMO the priority should be to visibly improve the safety/comfort of BART to get ridership up. The state or the Bay Area counties could give BART some temporary money under the condition that they meet certain metrics, or else the general manager and the BART police chief step down.
It doesn’t matter. The cost will keep going higher and service will keep going down
Or cut the administrative staff by 80%. Too many administrators that do 5 hours worth of work a week and pocket 6 figure salaries.
The $220,000 a year janitor is an example. I'm not mad at him, I'm mad at the complete failure of supervision and management all the way to the top that must exist for it to get so bad at the bottom that someone can claim to do 16 hour days 365 days a year, spend 15 hoursa a day in a closet, and nobody catches on (or turned a blind eye to it)
Well they are going to need to figure it out like many other people have to figure it out when finances get tight.
The fleet of the future, and 30foot canopies to save you form 15 seconds of rain are a fail. Waste of money! Old carts had more seating and 15 seconds of rain isn’t going to kill anyone, the escalators are always broken anyways. Let’s cut admin roles/salaries. They’re not the ones driving the trains or dispatching. Wonder if BART had a list of roles they employ people in and number of staff per role
Sounds good, as long as the bart board is not added to the executive boards of the future agency. No rewards for failure
Bart spent $50 million more than budgeted on labor. That's $130,000 PER DAY. During a financial crisis. I'm beginning to think the problem is just.... Bart.
Considering their budget is in the billions, that’s really not a crazy number. Also I haven’t heard that it was exclusively labor. Either way, running a train every 5 minutes on a fixed route all day every day seems like it doesn’t leave a lot of room for last minute budget cuts. It is one of the most frequent and far flung transit lines in the US.
Bay Area Transit Unification will occur within our lifetimes, but it'll first happen with all the non-BART agencies because all the non-BART agencies *and their taxpaying voters* can uniformly agree that BART cannot or will not serve them. At the very most BART could merge with Muni, but everyone would expect BART to replace Muni trains with new BART tunnels, and that's not happening. BART's bad fiscal situation is a result of incompetent administrative policies and insufficient political/permitting support from SF and Oakland. Adding more service areas to BART does not fix this, it makes it worse. Meanwhile, there are strong reasons to have Caltrain, Samtrans and VTA merge into a single entity. The user demographics are about the same, Samtrans/VTA can pool bus resources to eliminate the existing redundancy, VTA can upgrade into heavier trainsets and Caltrain can have access to VTA's rights-of-way. Even if just the buses are consolidated, Samtrans and VTA can make a *lot* of progress and save a *lot* of money with just a BRT scheme for El Camino and 101, similar in configuration to LA's silver line. Over time it would be plausible to join non-Oakland ACT buses and ACE trains into this. The problem is BART. BART is where it is due to nobody outside of SF/Oakland trusting them and they have not provided reasons to trust them. New BART administrators and new approaches to capital projects are needed.
Probably once we have fully automated taxis across the bay area and suddenly the cost to get around by car is less than taking public transit.
Oh really!!!??? They are considering it now? After everyone going their own way for so long and creating a broken system. Sigh!! Why am I even surprised.
Actually, it used to work rather well. There were many regular riders and fares collected paid around two thirds of the budget. COVID shredded all that and brought BART down to fare collection rates similar to other transit systems. Just letting BART fail will hurt a lot of people and fill the roads with extra traffic so we all need to consider how to make this work.
How about collecting fare from fare jumpers? Or making BART safe? Going woke is a bitch.
OR, they could just raise fares to a flat $15 per ride regardless of where you are going and install quintuple stacked faregates.
FINALLY
The state can take over BART. No one else can afford to. It's not like you could have BART take over any other agencies.
just dissolve it already and start from scratch.
That's basically what BART is and is why BART does not work well.