San Francisco BART employees were going to go on strike a couple of months ago, but Governor Brown invoked a “60-day cool-off period.” It seems unlikely that 60 more days of negotiations could resolve the issues–and they didn’t, as workers are expected to on strike today.
BART says that it needs $15 billion to rejuvenate its system over the next few years. To cover this cost, it wants workers to pay more into their pension and health care plans. Despite a proposed 12 percent pay raise over four years, the workers refused. Unions offered to go into binding arbitration, but BART management–probably fearing that arbitrators wouldn’t see BART’s maintenance problem as having anything to do with worker pay–refused.
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Even Bay Area commuters who used to love BART are beginning to understand the problems. First, BART employees, like most transit employees, have a cushy deal to begin with, and arbitrators would be reluctant to cut it back. More important, rail transit is just too damn expensive, and the costs never go away. Outside of places with Tokyo- or Hong Kong-like densities, nobody can really afford to run a passenger rail system, and those who try are going to find themselves in the same bind as BART is in today.
During the heart of rush hour this morning, news helicopters were out in force, trying to film traffic. But the google traffic map at 7:52 AM showed normal-looking delays. I took a screenshot and posted it here. 880 North was hellish this morning, but I don’t think the strike was the culprit there. From my house near Hwy 24/Hwy 13, the estimated time w/o traffic was 17 minutes into San Francisco. At 7:52 am, the estimated time was 27 minutes – indistinguishable from normal rush hour traffic.
Traffic was relatively light all day over most of the East Bay, as far I could see. Remember that Fridays tend to be less busy than Monday-Thursday, and a lot of people were spooked by the whole thing and either took the day off or telecommuted, e.g., like the Los Angeles “Olympics Effect” in 1984. The real test is next week; people can’t stay home for too many days without showing up at their regular work.
If you spend billions of dollars on infrastructure and then leave it vulnerable to strikes by public employees who aren’t subject to market forces, then this is what you should expect to get. Since this is predictable, the planners should plan for this, especially in the cost/benefit projections before the investments are made.
Didn’t they just go on strike?