The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.
BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.
In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years.
“New revenue will be required to sustain BART service after American Rescue Plan funding is exhausted,” says the presentation. The presentation suggests increasing non-fare revenues (such as advertising and parking fees), asking the federal and state governments for more operating subsidies, and increasing taxes.
One thing the presentation does not consider is reducing service. Instead, under “manage expense” it proposes to increase spending on capital replacements in order to provide a “top customer experience.”
Though December ridership was 25 percent of pre-COVID numbers, BART was providing 75 percent of service. Originally, this was justified by the need for social distancing, but now the justification is to “maintain reliability and restore frequent service.”
One of the possible fiscal strategies suggested in the presentation is to “adapt to changing commute and growth patterns.” But the presentation makes clear that such adaptation would be bad for BART.
“Bay Area office occupancies remain lowest in the country,” it says, and “Commute-oriented services like BART recovering slower than local bus.” Indeed, bus ridership in December was at 53 percent of pre-pandemic levels and buses carried more than three times as many riders as BART. While BART is focused on downtown San Francisco, local buses serve job centers in other parts of the region. So adapting to the changing travel patterns means spending more on buses (which are run by other agencies) and less on BART. Needless to say, that isn’t something BART wants to do.
Thanks to BART, transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area was lower in 2019 than it had been in the early 1980s. As a transit advocate argued in 1997, BART was a “vampire” that “sucks the lifeblood out of every transit agency with which it comes in contact,” namely bus agencies such as AC Transit, San Mateo Transit, and Golden Gate Transit. Because it got the lion’s share of federal and state funding for capital improvements such as the BART lines to the San Francisco Airport and San Jose, the region lost more bus riders than it gained in rail riders.
Now BART’s problems have been exposed by the pandemic and it is acting selfishly, trying to remedy them with even more subsidies. Instead of demanding more money from taxpayers, BART should reduce its service to be more consistent with its ridership.
If BART has lost basically 75% of it’s ridership..Transit ridership was down by 66 to 75 percent in systems across the country. The political left spent the last 8 months up-playing fears to Germaphobia which intimidates people to even getting on mass transit in the first place. Driving has bounced back. Transit has not, NOR WILL IT as long as they’re indoctrinating people to perpetual germaphobia. If “Lockdowns” keep private businesses closed; WHY do we need mass transit to get to places we no longer need to visit? Transit hasn’t just declined because of fear; they government LOCKED DOWN THE PLACEs transit was meant to serve. Leaving many transit agencies in financial ruin. It’s like a city economy dependent on ladder manufacture, in a town that mandates one story buildings. Reap what you sow.
If BART has lost basically 75% of it’s ridership…..why are they in any position to demand more money to cover at a operating loss……………
Because cars are still subsidized the most by getting the most dedicated traffic space even relative to its modal split. Drivers need to pay the full price of their emissions (i.e. noise).
BART is a great system by North American standards, it just needs far more routes. The current network is way too small.
UTISOC, do you have anything interesting to bring to the table? Your rhetoric is more vapid than most NPCs. Sad stuff.
Here is another interesting fact: The same people who love their cars do not want cars in their neighborhoods, because cars are loud and dangerous for their children on the streets. The car free city using transit and micromobility is the eco-friendly and affordable solution to noisy cars.
One thing COVID has been a catalyst for is how dependent many of these rail lines are on upper middle class commuters going downtown.
It’s almost as though for generations they’ve been focusing on serving those who need transit the least.
This is a problem of transit in the United States, where rail was built to subsidize car-dependent suburban living. In other countries around the world rail serves mostly everyone.
It’s a troll or a shill or both. Best to ignore?
That’s strong given that you are all shills for the oil industry.
Yes, best to ignore. Productive discussion will not take place.
You mean we should ignore people who smear transit, rail, compact cities and the public sector? I don’t think so. The best is to counter their talking points with facts. For instance…
(1) Compact cities with high transit use are highly correlated with less transport energy consumption: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Transport_Energy_and_Population_Density_by_City.png
(2) Cars still receive way more dedicated traffic space than other modes of transport, even relative to its moal split and even in cities with relatively low car use: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Allocation_of_Space_for_Transport_Infrastructure_-_Example_of_Berlin.png
(3) Cars use space inefficiently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Road_Space_Requirements.png
(4) Transit and especially rail can transport way more people per unit of space than cars: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Passenger_Capacity_of_different_Transport_Modes.png
(5) Sprawl costs way more money than compactly built environments: https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/03/sprawlurban.jpg
(6) Overcrowding is a problem of SFHs: https://www.itdp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/density-vs-overcrowding.png
(7) Most people underestimate the costs of car ownership: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01118-w
(8) “urban sprawl costs US economy more than $1 trillion per year”: https://newclimateeconomy.net/content/release-urban-sprawl-costs-us-economy-more-1-trillion-year
(9) NYC is the only city in the US that has a dense urban core: https://marketurbanism.com/2021/12/16/los-angeles-is-dense-st-louis-is-varied/
(10) The internet was invented by the government: https://www.govtech.com/archive/who-invented-the-internet.html
(11) Austrian School Economics is nonsense: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm
(12) US city governments are not leftist: https://www.theurbanist.org/2020/08/21/u-s-city-governments-seattle-included-not-as-left-as-reputation/
(13) Most US cities have been destroyed: http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/
(14) LazyReader will come here and post modal split by passenger miles instead by trip to deceive you.
…
BARY is a great transit system….mind the feces and syringes
What happened to your Disqus account? Have seen you spamming the streetsblog comment section for many years.
Sprawl does not cost a trillion…
Why people drive. Because they make compromises. 1 million people do not or may not have access to what they desire in a given location accessible by foot. More sidewalks would not change that. With freedom comes indecision…and spontaneous decisions and chaos.
Chaos theory, in mechanics and mathematics, the study of apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws. Also a new law… law of economics. A location may change location…. because of prices determined to be advantageous at a at a different location. If your dentist moves his office 2 miles further…. it’d be disadvantageous….for you customer aka traveler. But if cost of doing business is lessened upon consumer what’s two more miles for a transaction that may possess
– more convenient parking
– better lightning
– better location (aesthetically, financially etc
– reduced congestion
– accessibility to adjacent facilities……
Urban planners envision cities…then try to impose cities then watch the people flee cities. Economist Thomas Sowell Sowell said it ever so nicely. “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs”
Paris is 2.1 million in a nation of 67 million apparently We are not all Parisians. Yes American cities are dumps due to lack of adequate pedestrian infrastructure, decent livability and deferred housing stock. Not to mention a govt whose policies made the cities trainwrecks as they pilfered treasury and rewarded cronies.
Sprawl costs the US economy more than 1 trillion USD a year: https://newclimateeconomy.net/content/release-urban-sprawl-costs-us-economy-more-1-trillion-year
You missed the point. Cars require road and parking space. This leads to sprawl, which in return means longer walking and cycling distances. A walkable and car-dependent city are mutual exclusive.
You want to tell me from your suburban bubble what compact city life looks like? You talk about Paris, but I doubt you have ever lived there.
*BART….had to be shut down from feces had inundated it’s escalators.
Thanks for exposing your political bias, but haven’t seen feces on my trains. Riding all kinds of trains and buses daily for more than 30 years.
@utisoc…
ROADS predate trains by 10,000 years. Advocates push for a U.S. transportation system as it existed in about 1920s when trains were the dominant mode of intercity transportation. Trains were not the dominant mode of transportation, the horse and buggy were. Now they want to use the taxing and regulatory powers (rather than logic of convenience) of government to return us to those blessed days. What they fail to realize was train utilization was a very limited affair, back then was a profitable enterprise in lieu of lack of competition of anything else. Despite this, Very few people rode trains, average American only rode a train a few times in their lives.
Roads existed for centuries as commerce trails for wagons and horse carriages. When cars were invented. They took advantage of infrastructure that already existed…trains had to build their own.
Cars emerged as practical consumer goods in 1910s. Even when only urban roads and streets had paving…. rural roads were gravel or just dirt. In just 10 years automobile ownership rates Octupled. There was no subsidy swindle… cars were emerging technology took advantage of a preexisting public good.
I also said it before. Trains running on electricity where most power comes from fossil fuels…..
Rail transit could never hope to serve the same geographic areas as cars can. Rail is monolithic, linear and time oriented. Cars are modular, cellular and even time insensitive.
You are forgetting the part where pedestrians were removed from roads by law to make room for cars. When roads were transferred from pedestrians and cyclists to cars only, when cars became the most dedicated traffic space, when traffic lights and road markings were installed, when jaywalking became illegal, when the automobile was given a quasi monopoly of the road, this was the point when the automobile became successful. And you are wrong, before the automobile became the dominant form of transport, it was rail especially the tram and other modes of transport such as walking and cycling, which are not mutual exclusive to trains, but mutual exclusive with cars, which further spread out communities and are a safety hazard.
Trains can run on renewables and when fully utilized need far less energy than cars on a per capita basis.
With 21th century technology it should be a no brainer to build more rail than ever before.
No, UTISOC, I did not mean “we should ignore people who smear transit, rail, compact cities and the public sector.” I meant we should ignore you because you do not appear to be rational and trying to take part in productive conversation with you is futile. If a fact does not support your position you deny it is true.
By the way, when I visited Paris with my family the morning we arrived we saw what appeared to be a homeless man taking a dump in a Metro Station. This is only a incident and proves nothing but it was an interesting introduction to “the City of Light.”
Sorry not living in Paris. You violated your own rule. You are not ignoring me. What do we learn from this? Apparently you are not sticking to your own rules. Why should we trust in what you say about transit and cities?
I am actually living in a dense city and it is great and reading all this nonsense about cities from this oil lobby website is pretty amusing.
The logic of this website is as simple as nonsensical. It works like this:
– places designed for cars are not good for transit and rail (low ridership, not very well connected blabla)
– therefore it is a waste of money and we should defund transit and rail
No you are dead wrong, we have to design places for transit and rail and fund more of it, because transit and rail is (1) ecological and economical, (2) works very well together with walking, cycling and micro-mobility and (3) enables compactly built environments that provide proximity to shops and services.
This website and the libertarian philosophy in general is reductionism, which means you are taking things out of the bigger context in order to criticize it. You are criticizing rail, because it does not work under specific circumstances, ignoring the fact that rail works very well if the circumstances change in favor of a holistic approach that makes more sense than the current circumstances. Reductionism is the original failure of the libertarian free market ideology. Urbanists are holists, your criticism of isolated things without looking at the bigger picture will not convince urbanists.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-metro-video-man-urinating-subway-car-20181
There isn’t a day goes by….news doesn’t have stories. Filth, depravity, or hygiene faux pas. Sexual harassment on Japan’s legendary punctual rail systems is ubiquitous. Outside Tokyo Japan is a car lovers dream. They have meticulous roads smooth highways and potholes are repaired in mere days or even hours. You whine car users don’t pay full share…yet every year states pilfer 20 to 50 percent of highway fees and gas taxes for non highway purposes.
1: It sends the wrong political message, in essence, they’re saying/admitting “We need auto drivers” to spend as much money as possible so we can stay afloat
2: If they succeed in reducing drivership rates, it doesn’t leave much for transit if revenue declines.
3: Transit infrastructures overall maintenance debacle is not result to lack of funds. States pilfer 20 percent of gas taxes and highway toll, other user fee revenues to pay for non-highway activities. If ticket fares and tax revenue and Highway user fees are insufficient to pay for it’s upkeep……..what more can we do?
LazyReader, apparently you are too lazy to read my arguments. Your focus on financial aspects is deceptive. The car has a quasi-monopoly of traffic space. The car has way more dedicated traffic space than users. Even in a relatively transit friendly city like Berlin, 79% of traffic space is given to cars, despite making only 44% of the modal split. A slight decrease in transit space means way more transit ridership.
*A slight decrease in automobile space means way more transit ridership.
@utisoc
No it doesnt…otherwise BART would be full.
I’m all for fewer highway lanes, more bike and pedestrian friendly cities. That’s not gonna stop transits decline. They adopted a monolithic business model.
If you’re too poor to afford groceries you receive a subsidy (SNAP) and spend it how you see fit. Education reform advocates argue in favor of vouchers to allow parents to assign school choices. Even where subsidies are concerned FREEDOM OF CHOICE yields more positive results. With transit we subsidize the agency. In other words a government agency takes money from u and gives it to another government agency to spend on your behalf. Because they’re so good at making financial decisions…..
BART operates in the Bay Area, the Bay Area does give way more traffic space to cars than cars are used there. A slight decrease of traffic space for cars would increase the transit use by a lot. We have seen this in NYC and other cities around the world, where transit is used way more often.
There was No “Golden Age” of rail travel in America, if there was you need “Gold”. The history of rail in Europe and the US is very, very different. In Europe rail was built to link existing cities that’d been around for centuries, even millennia,, to one another. Much of the., US rail system was built to encourage the settling of the interior. Rail companies in the US were given huge areas of land not only to build a line but also to develop population centers in the interior.
Cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, etc. There’s a saying that on the East Coast, the cities built the rails but in the West the railroads built the cities. Where a railroad laid their tracks could determine the future fate of an area. Dallas, TX is a city that grew around a rail junction.
In 1926, a trip from Chicago to Seattle with a berth in a sleeping car cost close to $300. That doesn’t sound like much, but compared to then wages; and inflation; in today’s money it is $4,900. This high cost kept most people from ever using the trains. The vast majority of people who rode trains, at most, once or twice in their life times, and didn’t even enjoy amenities like hotvwater or ac, Air conditioning wasn’t available to anyone until the end of the 1920s, and most trains didn’t have AC units until the end of the 1930s.
– The electric streetcar was invented in 1874.
– Automobile in 1886
Streetcars didn’t compete against cars, they were competing against horse/buggy, by contrast which, was “Cleaner” Streetcars didn’t require food, warmth, didn’t suffer colic or have to be castrated or euthanized, Streetcars didn’t shit on the street or attract flies or fecal borne diseases. But they did need dedicated infrastructure. Streetcar suburbs used House property sales to fund the streetcar, fares paid for operation, but fares couldn’t afford reconstruction when they needed replacement track or railcars. Buses were easier to adopt, and by the mid 1920’s cities were tearing up tracks and replacing obsolete streetcars with buses. WWI price fixing and the economy
After led to inflation.. And the Nickel fares were insufficient to ay capital costs of replacement.
passenger train service in the United States peaked in 1920, when there were well over 10,000 trains running per day, not counting commuter trains, the average American rode intercity trains less than 400 miles a year. Even in 1941; 91% of passenger miles were by car.
In 1914, the owner of a Ford Model T Touring Car in Los Angeles realized he could make a little extra money by getting a chauffer’s license and charging people a nickel for a ride. Within a year, more than 60,000 people in cities all over the country were emulating his example. Jitneys, as they were called (apparently a slang term for a nickel), were faster than streetcars, and since drivers were often willing to depart from fixed routes, they were more convenient as well. Immigrants and poor blacks made excellent use of them or became drivers of such jitneys themselves. The streetcar industry felt threatened by jitney competition. While the streetcars were private, they paid franchise fees to the cities and jitney drivers did not. So streetcar companies asked government for regulatory protection against the jitneys, cities gladly complied. The regulations killed the jitney industry, reducing the number of jitneys nationwide by 90 percent by the end of 1916. But eliminating Jitneys did not save streetcars, whose ridership peaked in 1919, and collapsed by 1929. The threat was private automobiles..which could not be regulated out of existence.
Once streetcars dominated local transportation and long distance trains dominated long distance transportation. You have no idea what you are talking about.
”
Thanks for exposing your political bias, but haven’t seen feces on my trains.
” ~utisoc
By that logic, non of the 262 murders in St. Louis in 2020 happened cuz you didn’t see them. #facepalm
For those wondering if utisoc is an egotistical twat, here’s your proof. If he didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.
If you live in St. Louis in some of the dangerous neighborhoods there is a high chance you will gun fires. I am riding transit and rail for more than 30 years on a daily basis and I have never seen feces on a train. Don’t you think if this were a normal thing, I would have seen it at least once? Also I didn’t say it doesn’t happen, I am arguing it is very unlikely here where I live.
Your argument is illogical. The question isn’t if you’ve seen it the once or thrice a day you ride a tiny portion of the system, the question is how often it happens on the system.
The world is bigger than just you and your narrow view.
(1) I do not ride a tiny portion of the system. (2) The question is where is your evidence that it happens how often on the system.
Sweet lord. Your head is so far up your ass you see it in mirror!
And you are wondering why so few professionals are taking libertarians seriously. Your attempt to trash transit failed. It’s working for many many people around the globe and your feces anecdote is worthless.
This is well known and documented problem as has been for generations. YOur denile is either a complete lie or symptom of a sever mental disorder.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-metro-homeless-20180406-htmlstory.html?fbclid=IwAR0Wz8dytej-Z1XXE2OYjFzdezPak330s6MSBBMDjEfmg6eXzfaRwTEnd_A
The Metro system has been a refuge for homeless people for decades. But as Los Angeles County’s homeless population has surged, reaching more than 58,000 people last year, the sanitation and safety problems on trains and buses are approaching what officials and riders say are crisis levels.
People looking for warm, dry places to sleep have barricaded themselves inside emergency exit stairwells in stations, leaving behind trash and human waste. Elevator doors coated in urine have stuck shut. Mentally ill and high passengers have assaulted bus drivers and other riders.
Too bad for LA, but that is no wonder given that the US has no proper social safety net.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/drugs-on-buses-have-become-an-everyday-hazard-seattle-area-transit-workers-say/
Bus and train operators say so many people are smoking drugs on Seattle-area transit that the fumes, and volatile behavior, create a hazardous work environment that discourages ridership.
This has been a problem for _decades_
”
A woman riding the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line in Oak Park told police she was last week attacked by another passenger wielding a sock filled with human feces. “He had a sock full of his poop on me,” the 21-year-old college student told the Pioneer Press. “It was everywhere; on my face, my hair, my clothes.”Dec 19, 2012
”
https://www.nbcchicago.com/traffic/transit/chicago-transit-cta-passenger-attacked-sock-human-feces/1948067/#:~:text=A%20woman%20riding%20the%20Chicago,my%20hair%2C%20my%20clothes.%22