German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
ChineseBay Area Diaries — Part IX: BART
[Note: The entry's time was set too early and it was released incomplete. The time is reset to reflect the complete version.]
BART is a two-rail monorail.
The thesis is cold but succinct, but its simplicity is apt for a rapid transit system that is more complex, more complicated and more burdensome than it has to be. Even BART’s successes and strong points must be couched with qualifiers that almost cancel out its merits. BART is a true regional network serving four counties, but it’s a special district that has prerogatives different from — and usually in conflict with — the communities it serves. BART’s ridership demonstrates its success, but expanding service using its proprietary equipment — from its broad gauge to the one-of-a-kind cars and automated control system — is unnecessarily expensive. BART can command a premium price for service and boasts a remarkable farebox recovery of over 50 percent, but the logic behind the prices is twisted to incomprehensibility (demonstrated below). BART is often held up as a model for how a comprehensive mass transit system should be built in the future, but the farsighted designs of space-age planning are now considered archaic and impractical.
Might as well build the guideway as a monorail at this point. BART has much in common with monorails — way too much. BART, with two rails, is working proof of the folly of monorails. BART was conceived and designed by engineers with no reference to other disciplines and dynamics of passenger transportation. It was very much a product of the then-contemporary fashion of the scientific community: The past is a closed door, and the future begins today. Everything about BART seems to emit an aura of public transportation of, by and for people with utter disdain for it. It’s a train meant to make all other vehicle before it be eaten, digested and defecated by history. The engineers and planners were given free rein to reinvent the wheel and the stone age while they were at it. Rights of way were plentiful, but the new cars could not run on them, so virgin guideways were built. The Transbay Tube is a testament to ingenuity, but it replaced an equally effective and comprehensive streetcar system that ran above the water on the Bay Bridge. Plus, the whole point of the wider gauge was so the trains could cross the Golden Gate Bridge, which was later ruled to be impossible physically and politically — Marin County opted out of the BART district when it had the chance in 1962 and even four decades later maintains the Bay Area’s worst public transit. The district itself reflected a “the good is the enemy of the perfect, but the good-enough is the enemy of the good” compromise, where a new agency was created because none of the existing systems at the time would merge or cooperate to bring BART to fruition. So a separate entity was created parallel to available bus and train systems, but the prerogatives of BART and transit agency managers were different and in direct conflict.
Sir Peter Hall cited BART as one of five examples in “Great Planning Disasters”, published in 1980. Almost 30 years later, BART is 104 miles and has a weekday ridership of over 300,000. That’s a catastrophic success.
Go, go gadget bahn.
All aboard
Millbrae, one of the newest cities to receive BART service, has been underperforming relative to the more mature corridors in San Francisco and the East Bay.
The harsh assessment of BART is by no means an indictment of a lousy operation. BART trains are frequent and reliable, especially considering the complexities of several lines sharing stations on the San Francisco and Oakland trunk.
In the four shared stations in the Market Street Subway, several BART trains ran in and out smoothly. Upstairs, Muni Metro trains chronically bunched up and stopped frequently in tunnels, running as slowly and unpredictably as when they ran in street traffic. Muni Metro also had a rough, jerky ride which were likely attributable to the vehicles rather than the tracks, which appeared to be in good condition. BART was velvet-smooth.
The BART cars were also startlingly plush. They had numerous oversized cushion seats and carpeting. The aisles were also wide enough to provide ample room for standees. Metro’s subway cars — or most rail vehicles outside of regional commuter service, for that matter — don’t even come close. Impressively, these cars were kept very clean and without a trace of vandalism. BART service attendants earned their pay and more for keeping the carpeted and upholstered cars from looking like they were used by 300,000 people a day.
What you see is what riders get: comfy sofa seats, carpeting and giant aquarium windows. The light activity was at the beginning of the line in Millbrae, just as boardings began. The train would get more crowded north of Daly City.
The stations were a stark contrast. L.A.’s subway took frivolity to new heights, or depths, but the 1970s-vintage San Francisco and Oakland-area stations were claustrophobic and dour. They looked more like a Soviet slaughterhouse floor than a train platform. The architects must’ve said to themselves, “What would a station look like if Bergman directed a postapocalyptic sci-fi film?” and used that as the central theme. Reinforcing the grimness was the mechanical PA, sounding like a “Speak & Spell”, voicing the rundown of the next trains. “Fremont, 10-car train, arriving in 4 minutes … Dublin-Pleasanton, 9-car train, arriving in 6 minutes … ” and so on, the mechanical man droned. The messages were simulcast on the LED boards.
BART had 30 years to perfect what Metro still cannot do today on the subway. L.A. has had close to 10 years now to make similar announcements as to which direction the subway trains are going, and it would only need to be done on outbound trains between Union Station and Wilshire/Vermont. Two lines on five stations, yet Metro treats it as though it’s being asked to build the Giza pyramids. BART has as many as four lines in San Francisco, with 7 possible destinations, and car lengths anywhere from 3 to 10. As for why the car lengths figured so prominently: Riders need to know where to queue and not have to run if a short train arrives. The dwell times are sometimes only 10 to 15 seconds. Is there anyone BART can loan to L.A. to show Metro how to get it? Just the station announcements, that is. We wouldn’t want for people to know that a BART employee is here to show us how we could have a leviathan rail network, too. Anarchy would result.
Half squid, half gorilla
BART wouldn’t be the agency L.A. should emulate, either. It’s a very bad role model. BART got a lot done, connected a sprawling megalopolis, and had shown robust ridership. It’s inspired some suburban communities to adapt and adopt the train’s presence into overall developments. What could possibly be wrong?
The details.
For one thing, while L.A. didn’t mimic BART’s overdesign, we had our own cranial flatulence with non-interopability of trains. When our lines were drawn out, two separate agencies who hated each other with a passion drew two different plans. RTD, an operations-minded agency, built a subway. The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, a planning body, had designs for a regional light rail network primarily on existing rights of way. Naturally, the agencies were focusing on one-upsmanship and didn’t consult each other to see at least if there could be a common vehicle. That’s not even getting to how hopelessly bad both were at the actual construction phase.
Another problem is that L.A. survived and beat back a consent decree. During transit’s nadir in the 1990s, one of the worst institutional decisions Metro made was to enter into a legal agreement with an extreme-left organization masquerading as a rider advocacy organization. The intent of the organization was to win a judgment in court that would have forced Metro to shut down and dismantle all rail service in L.A. County. Instead, it entered into a legal agreement where bus operations outcomes were mandated by courts. For one thing, Metro had to guarantee seating or buy new buses and expand the fleet when there were standees. A court order forced Metro to glut service supply for what was in the eyes of the consent decree a remedial service. It was not a service expansion as much as it was a court order to operate service inefficiently.
Even though the business end of the consent decree expired 15 months ago and the plaintiff still exists but is irrelevant, L.A. has to be very mindful of the bus-rail balance post-decree. And the Bay Area should learn a thing or two from us!
If there is one good thing that could be said for the consent decree — and is probably the only one — it’s that it stopped Metro Rail from being another BART. How could that have been a bad thing? Look at connecting bus service outside of Sanfran.
At least Metro had the opportunity to reconcile bus and rail operations and planning internally (Metro is helpless in getting municipal carriers to play ball). The Bay Area can’t.
BART focuses its primary trunk service on San Francisco, with it forming the head of a squid. The four endpoints on the east side of the Tube form its tentacles, with a secondary trunk formed through Oakland.
San Francisco had a very busy intracity bus and rail system at levels that could be maintained with or without BART.
This wasn’t the case in Alameda or Contra Costa counties. Alameda County’s population and economic center is formed in the working-class industrial basin of Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, San Leandro and Hayward. Despite having a busy port and being in a prime location in a prosperous metropolitan area, Alameda County always found itself struggling economically. As for transportation, it must pay for taxes on both a local bus system and for its share of BART.
In the East Bay, this squid service also took on the characteristics of a gorilla. It was very burdensome to maintain both San Francisco-like train and bus service. BART had something that AC Transit didn’t: funding primacy.
When counties buy in to BART by joining the district, they take on the responsibilities of funding both their construction and and operations within their jurisdictions. This solved the problem of the who’s-subsidizing-whom issue, but there was always a threat of a county chiseling its obligation. So the BART service obligations were the first to be paid. It sounded like a fiscally upright arrangement.
The burden would then fall on bus riders. Since BART only had to be concerned with its trains and would get first dibs on money, it didn’t have to worry about local bus service. AC Transit bore the brunt of service cuts, even though there was very heavy demand for local East Bay bus service.
Contra Costa County, on the other hand, started its bus services mostly after the first BART lines arrived. (Richmond is within Contra Costa County but has long been within AC Transit’s coverage area; the C stands for Contra Costa County even though only two cities are served by the neighboring county’s agency). The county’s public transit network resembled the infrastructure of a banana republic. It had very good train service to take commuters to and from their bedroom communities, and the local bus services act as feeders. Since most of the BART commuters park-and-ride, local bus service is run at a bare minimum, and mostly for out-of-towners not to be stranded within the stations. Worse, Contra Costa County’s bus policy was punted to sub-regional carriers, rather than a single agency for the county. Communities near the San Pablo Bay are stuck with WestCAT; communities near Suisun Bay are at the mercy of Tri-Delta Transit; and the interior county must deal with County Connection. Contra Costa’s transit problem is that BART provides a negative feedback loop. Since transit ridership is heavily weighted toward BART, this hinders the ability to provide more frequent or more comprehensive bus service. Transit riders don’t want to put up with the crappy service and won’t use it, orienting their trips around BART as well, thereby taking away any potential demand.
The Bay Area’s biggest loser has to be samTrans. San Mateo County bet it all on a massive BART extension and watched it backfire bad. San Mateo opted out of being a charter member of the BART district, but it still got service as far as Daly City, on the northern edge of the county line, and then Colma, the city where the dead outnumber the living. The line kept creeping southward, going in as far as Millbrae and San Francisco International Airport. The county paid for these extensions by pawning samTrans service. The massive service expansion southward proved to be a colossal failure. Airport ridership had been abysmal, plus BART was largely duplicating the service of the more culturally ingrained Caltrain commuter rail service. The saddest part of all: samTrans lost more bus riders than BART gained rail riders.
Now the squid-gorilla is coming after Santa Clara County, with a long-term vision of forming a ring around the Bay. The Valley Transportation Authority is grappling with paying for an excessively expensive BART extension, all while being infamous for having an extensive but unproductive light rail network. It also already has service along both sides of the bay by the more antiquated technology known as conventional rail. BART would be astronomically expensive, redundant and if light rail has been any indication … Santa Clara County should know what the First Rule of Holes is.
We don’t want all this happening in L.A. And the Bay Area sure as hell would not want governance by consent decree. When most transit advocates are doing the right thing by resisting BART expansion, the Bay Area had better straighten up sand fly right.
Pyramid scheme
BART had also innovated its fare structure, becoming the first transit agency to put its pricing plan through what is known in the entertainment industry as development hell. Oh, there was some definite method behind it, but explaining it to its logical end would probably be used in court to free Charles Manson
Scott Mercer, a regular MetroReader, is known on this and other blogs for his vehement disdain and opposition to distance-based fares. He’ll probably never set foot on BART, that’s for sure.
There are distance based fares. And more.
To know how much a ride costs, this is needed:
Click on the pyramid for a closer view of one-way fares.
So, yes, there’s a semblance of distance-based fares. Development hell in politics is known as “consensus,” so there were some provisions tailored to local sensibilities. In many cases, using BART to mimic a local service area, such as within San Francisco, riders pay the same fare as the local transit system. San Franciscans get a great deal from BART, as the quality and quantity of service is better than equivalent Muni Metro service.
Cross a county line, though, and prepare to pack Astro Glide with the fare card. San Franciscans can pay $1.50 to go from Embarcadero to Balboa Park stations, the easternmost and westernmost stops within the county. But look at a fare from Embarcadero to West Oakland or Balboa Park to Daly City, both of which are shorter trips but cost more because the riders crossed county lines.
The other quirk in the system was BART’s “excursion fare,” defined as passengers exiting the same station from where their one-way trips originated. BART has waist-high faregates that require passengers to stick their paper stored-value cards in the grab-and-spit reader when they enter and exit. The excursion fare is $4.90. Or, passengers could’ve ridden the whole system and gotten out at the stop (in the same county) next to their origin and swiped out at the cheapest fare. They then could swipe back in at that station and returned to the origin, losing a few minutes but saving a lot of money.
BART never implemented an unlimited pass system. The BART Plus Pass ate $23 of value for a 15-day period, which goes toward free rides on connecting bus services. The other downside was that unlike the blue cards, BART forced riders to purchase these passes in fixed denominations. The only discount consolation BART offered for purchases was a $48 value card for $45 and $64 for $60. BART gave steep discounts, 62.5 percent, to elderly and disabled riders.
To the ends of the Earth
BART trains lay over on the evening of January 17 in Pittsburg. That’s California, with no H at the end. This community is so far away from the Bay Area, it might as well have been Pennsylvania.
The fares, though, were more than reasonable for the distance and quality of the service. Especially for the trip used in the case study for BART’s entry in the Bay Area Diaries.
The most memorable ride is the system’s most audacious line, starting from SFO and going to Pittsburg/Bay Point. A Google Map had to be zoomed out to the middle ticker to get those two points to fit! A one-way trip, end-to-end, is 48 miles!
This trip was considerably shorter, only starting at the Civic Center Station in San Francisco, but heading out to Pittsburg/Bay Point in Pittsburg.
Pure balls.
Imagine if L.A. had built the Gold Line Foothill Extension. Now imagine its eastern terminal was in Fontana. That’s roughly the same distance.
The ridership, for an evening trip after rush hour had passed, was quite heavy. Most of the traffic was long distance, too, so it wasn’t buoyed by the Sanfran-Oakland trunk jumpers. The 9-car train would be packed until Walnut Creek, when ridership thinned considerably. It was surprising at first to see ridership go out as far as Walnut Creek.
[Note: Added content starts here.]
The train thinned out considerably by the time it had reached Pittsburg. Only about five passengers remained to the end of the line. This was not too surprising; Pittsburg is w-a-a-a-y out there. What’s next … Sacramento? Well no, but eBart threatens extensions to Antioch (!), Brentwood (!!) and Byron (!!!). This would be the equivalent of the Foothill Gold Line to Redlands.
Another train was in Pittsburg for the trip west. No more than 5 people boarded here. So, the line appears to be overbuilt. Then the train arrived in Walnut Creek. Here, so many people boarded that all 9 cars were half- to two-thirds full. This was around 7:45 p.m. That’s very high ridership for a suburb. What’s in the city that produces so many boardings — at night, no less? The train continued to see brisk business at the Oakland stations and Embcadero, where this round-trip ended.
‘Too’ everything
BART’s problem is not what it does or where it goes, but how it does it. The Bay Aea is very fortunate to have a 100+ mile train system that is fast and frequent. BART service is great. Too great. BART service runs far. Too far. BART has been successful. Too successful. BART draws on its track record to plan on growing big. Too big.
“Too everything” is a problem. BART has built up a reputation and is fully a part of the Bay Area’s social fabric. It built its success in the worst possible way.
The Bay Area’s choice was not always as black-and-white as BART or nothing. The Bay Area still has plenty of extant railroad rights of way and highways, so there’s no physical or practical reason fast transit service is bound to BART technology.
BART was built in the right place, but at the wrong time with the wrong people in charge. A decade earlier marked the sunset of the streetcar era and the dawn of the automobile era, but Northern California made a more concerted effort to preserve some remnants of its urban traction. San Francisco succeeded, but the East Bay’s Key System was the one that got away. Had those remained, the East Bay could still have a rail network that would serve both local and Transbay riders equally well, and Oakland and its neighbors would have service where it should have been.
The automobile era had also chopped down the tree of knowledge of mass transit management. In these managers place came the Young Turks of the also-blossoming Military-Industrial Complex. They were the economic vanguard of scientists, engineers and technocrats. They had no obligations to what was there before them. The present was a clean slate and the future was the completed project. They had a chance to design, plan and build everything, which they did. They had to, since the school of thought from World War II to the 1970s was triumphalistic and optimistic about the future while dismissing ‘the past’ as an anchor to human ambition.
BART began service when this mode of thinking was starting to fall out of favor professionally and culturally. BART was beginning to find its place. Whatever successed BART had, it was because the service existed. Design had nothing to do with it.
Design has everything to do with BART’s problems, though. The BART design is not found anywhere else in the world. If more transit systems built trains to the BART standard, the development costs would be lower. It is also a closed-end system that requires brand new rights of way, rather than utilizing traction already existing. BART could expand much faster and easier had the trains been standard gauge. Today, it would be cheaper and easier to run comparable frequency on Caltrain and Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor — they already ring the Bay now — than to build out BART. Besides arguing over the BART expense, the other heated debate comes when the check arrives as the table. The multiple counties are suspicious of one another over who pays and who benefits, but within their own jurisdictions a separate battle brews over how much must be allocated to BART versus other transit needs.
Monorail supporters make the same assertion, that the solution to the transportation problem is a technical one. Supporters cannot point to a viable example to demonstrate their claims, but they can learn a lot from BART. Supporters, much like the team behind BART, are two of a kind. They both are motivated by a disdain of past and present transportation and have more of a desire to be proven right through developing a new “world-beating” concept.
Consequently, the Bay Area has evolved to the point where opposition to popular and potentially effective BART extensions comes from transit advocates themselves. Some, such as BayRail Alliance, recommend improvements to conventional rail systems. Others are backyard groups, such as the Santa Clara VTA Riders Union, that don’t wart BART funding to devour local transit.
BART does a lot well, but there’s a lot it does too well.
Previously:
- Prologue
- Part II: Megabus
- Part III: Golden Gate Transit
- Part IV: Sonoma County
- Part V: Golden Gate Ferry
- Part VI: Muni rail
- Part VII: Muni buses
- Part VIII: Caltrain
 Photo by neutralSurface via Flickr (Creative Commons license) |
BART Board for upcoming arrivals:
|
Discussion
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
As far as 1970s new-build heavy rail systems go, the Washington Metro kicks the shit out of BART from both planning and operational perspectives.
Here’s an exercise in alternate history: what if, instead of being a far-spanning “urban rapid transit” network, BART had instead been built as something resembling the heavy rail systems of New York (subway + PATH) or Chicago? That is, it would have focused on San Francisco and its immediately surrounding areas. There’d still be a Transbay Tube, but service in the East Bay would go no further than Berkeley on the north and the Oakland airport on the south. There’d be service to SFO as well, but along the median of the 101 or the existing Southern Pacific/Caltrain right-of-way.
The money spent on building heavy rail guideways in relatively low-density suburbs would instead have gone toward improving bus and commuter rail service in those areas. Perhaps an arrangement could have developed similar to the NJ Transit-PATH or LIRR-NY Subway transfer points, in which riders transferred in downtown Oakland from suburban commuter rail or buses to BART.
TansBay Tube == Reason for existence. Got it.
Chris, this is an awesome review. You did what millions of public dollars could not. Bravo.
Re: The stations as weird dystopian future. George Lucas actually used them to film THX 1138 while they were being constructed.
More general:
As someone who lived in the Bay Area for four years, I think it is worth mentioning that though Bart is really awkwardly huge and very expensive, there’s a reason the ridership is so high. Being able to go from Berkeley to see my girlfriend in Pleasanton 33 miles away without a car or a bus and on a single ticket is really convenient. The distance is a logistical problem and maybe doesn’t make sense, but as an actual rider I found it really convenient and it encouraged everyone to use it. Being able to travel such big distances by train really made it popular.
I’m surprised the SFO extension is such a disaster. Then again, I always used the Oakland airport stop which required a 2 dollar bus.
I suppose I should mention that the University of California at Berkeley has a pretty cool system where by all the students get bus passes at a mass discount. It was rather controversial because you were forced to pay 50 bucks, but it really encouraged you to use AC transit. I can only imagine how much more we’d have all used the BART if it was possible to get a similar discount system or we could buy real passes instead of distance based fares.
Do USC or UCLA do anything similar? It’d be a great idea to heavily encourage students to use Metro so that those who stay in LA in the future will be more invested in the system.
I think the PA announcements are DECTalk, a vintage speech synthesizer (this field is my day job) best known as Stephen Hawking’s voice. It kinda fits the 60’s-vision-of-the-future architecture of the stations.
Really great post here. As a bay area resident, I have some pretty confused feelings regarding BART and this post sorts out so many of my thoughts. I can’t really add much, but I definitely agree BART has swallowed up local transit authorities, and many fear the same will happen to VTA when and if it is extended to San Jose.
I’m so glad you touched on the fact BART has become intertwined with bay area’s social fabric. When mass transit solutions are casually touted in op-ed columns or in conversation, BART is the preferred end-all solution. Here’s a recent example from the Tracy Press regarding an hypathetical BART expansion to Tracy, over the Altamont Pass:
http://tracypress.com/content/view/13289/2242/
Of course, the article doesn’t seriously consider the expansion, but this is certainly representative of some local opinion.
As for now, BART is expanding several miles to the southern edge of Fremont and preparing its assault into Santa Clara county and San Jose. The Metropolitan Transit commission has also adopted a Bay Area regional rail plan for the next 50 years.
http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/rail/
I did set on foot on BART. Kind of had to when I went to the Bay Area last October, since I did not rent a car.
But, when I spent a day exploring BART and riding most of the system, I just solved the problem of the distance based fares by never leaving the platform. I just stayed on the train and rode it back down the line, then switched to the next line in downtown San Francisco.
Okay, that’s ridiculous. I know. It disregards the point of transit, which is actually traveling from one place to another. Pleasure riding, just for the hell of it, is probably the province of a tiny, tiny minority of riders, well under 1%. But, I did do it.
That said, I’m glad I don’t have to use BART every day, and I’m sure glad we don’t have distance based fares here. For now, that is. I’m sure we’ll be getting them in a few years. Then I will be bummed.
Just forget the criticism about the construction costs and dismantling of local bus service and BART is a wild success.
Great post wad.
I’ve always assumed that the high farebox recovery was in part attributable to the many sections of shared track. If true, it’s a very good case for grade separation and wyes throughout our network.
And I’ve always wondering how many riders would not be on public transit if the system weren’t so extensive and instead only had a CalTrains type service.
The solution from a construction standpoint always will be standard-gauge with typical heavy rail technology. With the length of the system should it have also included technology to allow trains to detach and couple a bit easier, so 10 car trains weren’t needed rolling into Pittsburg.
And transit advocacy organizations that are critical of the local agency’s rail expansion plans? Say it ain’t so wad. Say it ain’t so. Don’tcha know you can’t be a transit advocate if you don’t support what the agency proposes hook-line and sinker?
I loved BART. I rode it to work every day.
We should be so lucky to have such a system here.
When the San Francisco Bay Bridge collapsed after the 1989 quake, BART continued to run strongly and provide its great service.
Simon: Although I don’t know the particular means by which it occurs, student passes are definitely available, and UCLA is heavily served by Santa Monica’s bus system (which has expanded from just Santa Monica to be kind of a kindasorta Westside bus system).
I was pleasantly surprised by how nice BART was. I didn’t get a chance to take it long-distances, instead using it as a substitute for the Market subway a couple of times. But I was impressed, and I was somewhat surprised by the huge cars though I wrote it off as a “Guess they’re going for a Long Island RR meets City Subway sort of thing.” Interesting to learn why it is the way it is, and it’s kind of the exception that proves the gadgetbahn rule.
One problem with BART is that wheelchair access to the Market stations is difficult because there’s 1 elevator for both the MUNI and BART platforms, and so the elevator entrance isn’t gated for either BART or MUNI (I wonder how much fare evasion that causes… probably none on BART outside of the Market subway because of the effective “exit fares”). My BART excursions were cut short by the fact that the second time I took it, I forgot to take my ticket back over to one station attendant at Powell to ask him to run my ticket through the machine, and I probably lost the remaining value on the card as a result. They really need to put a BART fare gate, or at least a free-standing validator, next to the elevator in the Market subway.
I’m impressed by BART as a technical matter, but I think it’s the exception that proves the gadgetbahn rule. It worked despite it’s bizarre configuration, not because of it. Also, it is the rare commuter rail that becomes a local subway, so LIRR- or MNR-style cars are workable.
The argument as presented here about BART kind of makes me dizzy. Is the glass empty or half full? How about taking a full glass, emptying the contents into a larger glass, then declaring the result a failure. Sure, some of BART resembles yesterday’s science fiction. Your point being? Would you rather it didn’t exist?
some of your criticisms against bart seem a bit vague and to me. “too” is a subjective word and is well populated in this post, when i thought the point of this trip to the bay area was to get an objective view of the area’s transit system. i counted 13 uses of the word. this is certainly not to say that bart doesn’t have it’s faults, it does.
regarding it’s fare structure, you are dead on. it’s annoying and retarded. it’s like london’s hyper-expensive zone based fare system on steroids. and no monthly cards, lame!
annoying bart memory - i remember getting a fare card in berkley with enough money on it for 2 people to get back to embarcadero, swiping the card, giving it to my friend to swipe and having it be rejected. we asked the station person what the deal was and they essentially looked at us like we were low-life fare dodgers. apparently once the card is used, it can’t be used again for 20 minutes or something. we had to buy another card. bizarre and also lame.
i used bart all the time when i lived in san francisco and can say with all certainty that it is wwwaaayyy more reliable than muni. getting home to the sunset on the n judah or taking bart deep into the east bay takes the same amount of time.
when you think about what the goal is - getting people out of their cars, bart wins with honors. possibly, it owes a large part of it’s success to the extreme level of anal-retentiveness in it’s planning and execution.
I’ve ridden BART several times. It’s not necessarily a *bad* system, just horribly expensive for what it does (e.g. mostly suburban service that should be done by a frequent Metrolink or Caltrain-type system)
Politics has given BART an overbuilt solution to the airport. What would have made more sense is a joint BART/Caltrain station at Millbrae, plus a people-mover to the airport terminals. There was even a local advocacy group, Coalition for a One-Stop Terminal, advocating this low-cost solution. But then the transit-know-nothings, led by one Quentin Kopp, required that BART actually have a stop in the (then-proposed) International Terminal, regardless of the extra expense. The construction industry, reminiscent of the funeral director pushing a grieving family to buy a solid gold casket when a plain pine box would do just fine, gladly went ahead and lobbied for, and built this overpriced project. Of course, most BART users are now stuck with either a people mover ride or a long walk, since domestic passengers are more likely to use BART than international travellers. People of LA, let that be a lesson to you the next time someone starts griping about the Green Line not going directly into LAX!
There’s also too much emphasis on suburban expansion. The Pittsburg and Livermore extensions aren’t particularly productive. We need a new BART tube, with service out Geary in SF, perhaps another routing in Alameda County, with direct service to Jack London and OAK airport, and perhaps curving northward to Marin County/San Rafael. I’m not thrilled with the proposed San Jose extension, primarily because it’s going to end up in another expensive tunnel to Downtown San Jose, which isn’t a particularly heavy commuter destination to begin with. It’s not SF, or even Oakland for that matter. It might be better to extend one of the VTA light rails to Fremont/Warm Springs, and connect to BART there.
As far as bus service in the hinterlands (read: Contra Costa County), BART actually used to run buses to places such as Pinole, Livermore, and Concord/Walnut Creek. At first they were just plain AC buses, under contract to BART, later, when Foothill-Mania took over the bus industry, BART contracted with Laidlaw to run new, shiny, blue BART buses. These eventually were absorbed into the Westcat, Wheels and CCCTA networks….
One way of looking at BART–it’s pretty good for the core urban area of SF/Oakland/Berkeley.
Expensive features like: 100% grade separation, automatic train control, faregates, etc make sense here. Without ATC, trains would have to be spaced farther apart, and the only way to make up for that in capacity would be to run longer trains (and built longer stations) or dig another transbay tube. And you really wouldn’t want grade crossings with trains going by every 2-3 mins.
As you get out into the boonies, though, these features just seem like ridiculous over-engineering. The expense is really blocking expansion of the system, or in some cases skewing it. For example, it would make a lot of sense to expand the Dublin/Pleasanton to downtown Livermore, where it could connect with ACE. But to get there, it would either have to be elevated (which Livermore is opposed to on aesthetic grounds) or tunneled (but c’mon, nobody is seriously going to propose a subway for Livermore). So the BART line is either going to be stuck ending where it does, forever, or else extended in the freeway median, stupidly paralleling but not connecting to ACE, and only serving the outskirts of Livermore.
Donald and Cochon, when I rode BART I was pleased with the service and was amazed by the expansive coverage area. I still did notice, though, that BART is wildly overbuilt and overdesigned.
I posit that BART service is successful because of the service, not because it’s BART. Reverse-engineer BART and all of its one-of-a-kind gizmos. Which are crucial to keep and, and which aren’t?
The train control system seems to work far better than Muni’s. BART trains didn’t idle in tunnels or the stations to let the leading vehicles leave. The distance-based fares are proper for the system. The rights of way go in places that attract ridership.
What can be jettisoned: the A and B car arrangement, the business-class padded seats and carpeting, the need to build virgin rights of way, the stand-alone bureaucracy and the way counties pay for BART, but most of all the nonstandard gauge.
The problem is, though, that with BART you have to take the good along with the bad. So getting good service comes at an excessively high price. Also, it would be even more costly to try to repurpose BART to a “normal” train system, so the Bay Area has no choice but to pay a high premium for the novelty design.
That’s just the cost of building the train line.
BART has a troublesome financial arrangement, too, where it is a separate entity plopped on top of existing transit agencies. Outside of San Francisco, the counties must grieve over how much money should go into BART and then give the remainder to the local bus agencies. Alameda County is a consent decree waiting to happen, Contra Costa County is all but hopeless and San Mateo County took the worst bath of all.
The BART service and network is good, but look at the consequences of it beyond the train stations.
Peter McFerrin, cph and Nick helped further show the problems of BART’s growing pains. And as I expected, this entry turned out to generate a great deal of discussion. All of it very intelligent. Thanks, everyone.
I honestly think you are looking for problems that don’t exist. The pricing scheme isn’t really difficult, unless you are a visitor. But remember: BART is for commuters, not tourists. Regular users don’t really worry about paying exact fare.
There are shortcomings, to be sure. And the critique of the architecture of the stations, though valid, are the smallest of potatoes.
I think one of the greatest things about BART is that it represents a regional, multi-county effort. Down here, LA is not talking to Orange County, or to Riverside, or San Bernardino, as though congestion were a local problem.
Raphael: I agree. I especially don’t get the complaints about the carpeting and comfy seating. So Bay Area residents want to pay for that - more power to them! I’d be willing to pay another quarter on subway fare to have comfy seats and carpeting too. Maybe that’s a credible way to get more middle-class folks onto transit in LA.
I don’t like the distance-based fares because they’re confusing and because BART uses that as an excuse to not have a monthly pass, but they’re generally reasonable and BART is a commuter rail that changes into an urban subway, then back to a commuter rail, so it is a unique situation. I’d like to see a pass that works sort of like Boston’s Zone 1 commuter rail pass, that allows MUNI use and BART use in the city, but that’s a policy question.
Every transit system has problems. BART’s choice to go with unique equipment is an odd one, and probably not the best in hindsight. But it’s clearly not a fatal error. The stations do have a Soviet feel to them, but the stations in Boston have a “This crumbling ceiling is going to come down on my head and kill me” feel to them. I’ll take “Soviet” over “My life is in danger” any day.
Well, we do have Metrolink, which sort of does the same thing as BART, albeit more commuter-oriented….
Nice, informative article, though it’s unfortunate, the line comparing the train platforms at the Bay Area stations to a “Soviet slaughterhouse floor,” if only because metro stations in the Former Soviet Union are without a doubt the most beautiful in the world — to such a degree they’re works of art. The Cold War dies a long, slow death.
Greetings from Chicago,IL.
Having friends and relatives who reside in the Bay Area I have ridden BART quite a few times since 1980. I know the system was built with much pain to the local taxpayers and some say it is too lavish.Personally, I think Atlanta’s MARTA car with BART’s seats would be perfect. I also would have used married pairs of railcars from the very beginning. Having said that, BART shames old school frost belt systems like the Chicago Transit Authority any day of the week.
Gene King
Nice article, and interesting comments.
But no one has mentioned the long term land use planning impacts of BART.
It goes out to some places that hardly seem justifiable on cost grounds but medium and long term impacts need to be considered.
People can move to those places and know they are within commute range of San Francisco or whatever which would surely not be possible if they were reliant on cars.
BART is having a profound impact on travel patterns and modal choice in the Bay Area and it is a beneficial one.
That being said, I am amazed at how insightful a visitor’s view of BART was. Congratulations.
The author is one of those most frightful beings on the face of this earth to bureaucrats, a knowledgeable and insightful critic.
Cheers,
Bob Murphy
Of course that’s a really bad excuse. A lot of cities have rail services that have distance based fares and still offer monthly passes, just that those passes are good for the station pair (and usually in between) that you pay for, including MetroLink in LA.
It would probably be less confusing for users if they could buy tickets for station pairs in addition to arbitrary amount. I never worry about how much MetroLink tickets are when I ride it, I just pick my origination and destination station, and it tells me how much it is, and I pay.
This has been an enjoyable series reading about the transit in San Francisco.
The authors statement that “San Francisco got a great deal from BART” is dead wrong. It provides a great connection between downtown and the populous mission district and the airport but other than that its purpose is to get suburban office workers to their jobs downtown.
The original plans for BART envisioned a second line along Geary St. which would have truly served the interests of San Francisco and is one of the few places in the Bay Area heavy rail makes sense.
Lastly, I would like to point out that the subway portion of the Muni Metro (the subway portion) is actually faster than BART during rush hour when traveling along Market street because the dwell times are much shorter.
Also, it should be pointed out that BART receives funding out of sales tax exclusively for BART, not out of some larger pool that get divvied out to multiple agencies. Last year they received about $200 Million Dollars from this tax.
Raphael Mazor wrote:
I did find problems that do exist, bigger than the straw men you set up.
The fare pyramid, in particular, is problematic for commuters as well. Fare equity would be ideal. Equity as in passengers paying an equal amount for equal service, not as in representing every political constituency and incorporating every request into the pricing plan. If passengers would pay, say 50 cents a mile regardless of how far they go, that’s equitable. When passengers have to take a short trip that happens to cross a county line, they get hosed. Plus, every trip entering and exiting SFO has a hefty surcharge. Planner-think says it’s OK because only travelers get soaked. What about the SFO commuters who get socked with the surcharge every day? If they get a pass subsidy, that negates the point of the surcharge.
Instead of the small potatoes of station architecture — personally, I would prefer BART architecture to L.A.’s palatial stations if it brings down the cost of subway construction — what about addressing BART’s “monorail problem” of imposing a separate closed mode in an area with several means of travel or the Bay Area counties who have great train service but thin connecting bus service? Muni is frequent in San Francisco, but most bus service in Alameda County is 30-60 minutes and hourly or worse in Contra Costa and San Mateo counties.
And while I’m here, let me adress Mr. Manson’s post.
He wrote:
Quoting a fragment of a sentence, especially when doing so takes it wildly out of context, hurts your argument more than mine.
Here is the complete paragraph, with the fragment bolded:
This was taken from the subsection discussing BART’s fare policy. BART in San Francisco charges $1.50, the same as Muni. The deal is a better value for the equivalent fare than on Muni Metro. The two systems share five stations: four under Market Street and at Balboa Park. BART has much smoother operations in its tunnels than Muni; Metro trains routinely bunch up with trains idling for about a minute before the car occupying the station leaves. BART cars are more comfortable than Muni’s as well as cleaner; it must be incredibly challenging to keep the padded cloth seats and carpeting as clean as they are with over 300,000 passengers riding and the service in operation most of the day.
I do realize that BART’s service scope is limited within San Francisco, but the scope of service has little to do with the fare charged. I touch on this matter some more in the Epilogue.
There are many reasons why bus service sucks in places like Alameda County compared to SF Muni (which is already setting the bar pretty low) - I fail to see how BART has anything to do with that.
1. They pay less half as much as San Francisco does
2. More auto-centric city planning
Sure you could argue that transferring between agencies could be a lot better, but the same could be said about any two bay area transit agencies of your choosing.
Mr. Wad,
I realize now that I did take that statement out of context. While I was reading the article it stood out and I should have gone back and double checked the context before commenting. Looking at the handy fair pyramid you posted - occasional users usually use a destination sticker posted on the ticket vending machine to figure out how much to pay, frequent users use high value tickets - and considering only the cost of the ticket, Oakland also gets a great deal from BART and so do the residents of Berkely and El Cerrito. An SF Muni monthly “fast pas” is also valid for “free” trips within SF although I’m fairly sure that Muni is paying BART every time someone swipes their card.
I still stand by my comments about Muni Metro vs BART through downtown at rush hour although you are of course right about comfort, cleanliness etc.
Robert Manson wrote:
I won’t address the Muni comment because I don’t want to turn it into a who’s better/worse, since Metro is very similar subjectively (L.A. and San Francisco hate our respective transit systems equally) and objectively (very frequent and highly patronized transit service). Plus, I’ve only seen Muni for two of the four days I was up there. Sometimes, our agencies do a lot to embarrass our cities, but some of the factors contributing to lousy service are beyond anyone’s control.
As to why service is worse in Alameda County and suburban districts: taxes are often “omnibus” where one measure covers BART, local transit and sometimes even roads. The taxes raised must be shared among each mode in a formula that’s determined by what was put on the ballot or determined by elected officials.
There may be some more complex details as to the responsibilities for “buy-in” counties versus non-member districts for BART construction and operating costs.
What BART does have, though, is priority for funding. When costs for BART rise, the counties must pay for it, and it’s shifted away from other parts of the budget.
San Francisco is a high-cost city, and the taxes may reflect the high levels of service Muni provides. None of the other counties pay to maintain bus service at Muni levels. AC Transit has maybe a half dozen bus lines with 15-minute or better service. However, the level of service supply is not reflected in claim 2.
L.A. is supposed to reflect the epitome of auto-centric planning, yet we also have bus service at the same levels as San Francisco. Metro does have low frequencies in the suburbs, but very frequent service in a large area between the Santa Monica Mountains, the ocean, the 710 freeway and the 105 freeway.
In Alameda County’s case, there is enough demand for bus service to provide higher frequencies. It does have to compete for funds with BART. The problem is worse out in Contra Costa County, where nearly all buses run hourly or no better than 30 minutes and there’s no single agency for the county.
CCC’s problem illustrates what happens with buses when something like BART is in town. BART provides service that’s both fast and frequent. The buses are neither. So what happens to bus riders? They’ll gravitate toward BART and avoid buses because of the slow speeds and frequencies. Because BART is sapping ridership, expanding bus service is not justifiable since the demand is not there.
Thank you very much for your series.
One of the characteristics with BART that I find most frustrating is that it’s both regional and heavy-rail—so that BART’s outward extensions give the outer areas way more than what’s needed at much higher cost than necessary. As absurd as BART-to-Pittsburg seems, people from even farther out of the metropolitan center state that they’ve been paying BART taxes since the BART District (SF + Alameda + Contra Costa) was founded 50 years ago and therefore they deserve service to their far-flung locale. And in fact the public officials honor their request. Hence, eBART is planned for points beyond Pittsburg. And eBART would do what suburban BART segments should have done, which is to be a conventional rail line, with the major exception that it would only run between distant suburbs instead of running straight into the metropolitan center.
The fact that BART has those “virgin rights of way” you discuss makes it really bad for connection to interregional services—it sticks to the freeway median in Pittsburg rather than connect to the Amtrak San Joaquins; it runs where trains never went in Fremont, crossing an Amtrak/ACE line halfway between two historical conventional-rail stops and therefore omitting a transfer point; in Central Oakland the 1960s-built tunnels/aerials just miss the Amtrak lines, so BART doesn’t connect with them until up north in Richmond and down at Oakland’s southeast edge, where rights-of-way just by chance come within a block; and eBART could run right into Oakland via Martinez and Richmond, but instead it would veer off the established right-of-way to meet BART in the “virgin” freeway median.
I can sum up my thoughts on suburban BART with the statement, “Wish it were Caltrain.”