Tag: bart

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Behind Door No. 1, a $12 Billion Train. Behind Door No. 2 …

Comparisons, anyone?

Brightline Holdings, a company developing high-speed train service from Las Vegas to the L.A. area, broke ground the other day on a system it says will cost $12 billion. The 218-mile route will include four stations. The company says it will begin service in 2028, in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

We’ll see how credible those estimates and promises are, but in a state notorious for obscene infrastructure cost overruns and project delays, the promise of a working train system from scratch in four years seems miraculous. (Yes, hear a voice says, “If it sounds too good to be true. …”)

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation’s Authority’s project to extend BART six miles through downtown San Jose currently carries a price tag of $12.7 billion. Given the project’s shocking recent price escalation, no one will be too surprised to see the cost rise further. And as the price goes up, the VTA keeps pushing the extension’s forecast opening date further into the future. Once upon a time, the agency talked about the line opening by the end of this decade. Now it’s scheduled to start carrying paying passengers in around 2037. 

No particular point here — the facts alluded to above are well known. But no one I know has called out the similar cost estimates for the two projects, which are very different in almost every other way. Brightline will run down a highway median on the surface, for instance. The BART route through downtown San Jose involves a deep, five-mile-long tunnel, construction beneath an urban center, and working in a region where property acquisition costs are extreme, among other differences.

But even given all that, you naturally wonder whether one of the projects here is exceedingly skillful at stretching dollars and the other, not so much.

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A BART Memory

Aboard BART, May 2012.

Back when San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit trains had fabric-covered uplholstery , the seating inspired a story: “On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria).” That piece was published in 2011 by The Bay Citizen, a short-lived regional news site that partnered with The New York Times, and it disclosed that the fabric seats were crawling with the nastiest-sounding of microbes. Soon thereafter, BART installed vinyl-covered upholstery— easier to clean, when you get around to cleaning it — on all trains.

Of course, the fabric seats, whose reported rampant filth I was blissfully unaware of and thus unconcerned about after 35 years riding the system, wasn’t why I took this shot back in 2012. Those origami flowers someone left behind were one of the nicest things I’ve ever seen on BART or any public transit. They also remind me of “Blade Runner.”

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The Loneliness of the Pandemic Parking Lot

North Berkeley BART parking lot, April 5, 2021.

Up through the second week of March 2020, I was a regular BART commuter. That week, it turned out, I was traveling back and forth to downtown Oakland instead of to my office in San Francisco. Instead of covering the news, I was serving on a jury to hear a case involving alleged criminal threats. (Two neighbors had had a falling out over a cat that had gotten into a car; unpleasantness ensued, harsh words were exchanged, and the police were called; twelve of us were charged with determining whether laws had been broken; we decided none had. I also remember that the judge in the case admonished us to wash our hands every time the trial had a break.)

On March 16, with the trial done, nearly all Bay Area counties issued a stay-at-home order in response to the pandemic. Thus ended my routine commute and those of hundreds of thousands of other office types in the Bay Area who had the option of working at home. What happened to public transit at that point is a well-known story. Here in the Bay Area, ridership for most operators plunged to previously unimaginably low levels. Within a month, BART’s patronage was down 94 percent — I’ve kept my own daily spreadsheet — and the agency was forced to end late-evening service for more than a year.

Ridership has returned slowly and unevenly. BART’s recorded its highest weekday pandemic-era patronage a couple weeks before Christmas — 33 percent of its pre-pandemic level on December 12. The two downtown San Francisco stations that used to be the system’s busiest, Embarcadero and Montgomery, are still below 20 percent of their former traffic. North Berkeley, a couple of blocks from our house, is scraping along at just over one-fifth of its old passenger level.

The week the shelter-at-home started in 2019, I strolled over to North Berkeley to see how dramatic the change in the station — did it look completely deserted? — had been. It was pretty lonely looking. The parking lots, which on a typical weekday would be completely filled from 8 a.m. or so until the afternoon rush hour was well under way, were virtually empty. Periodically since then I’ve gone back to take pictures. At some point, I started taking shots looking down the same row of parking spots in the station’s southwest parking lot. I figured that over time I’d get a portrait of a return to BART normalcy as commuters filled the lots again. I’ve gotten a portrait, all right, but one that shows how far from the old state of things we still are.

With all that as preamble, here’s a series of shots of the lot, starting with one that I took exactly two years before the pandemic stay-at-home orders were issued. It is enough to make me wonder whether that old “normal,” which we had no reason to think would change so abruptly, will ever return. (Not to mention that this parking lot is likely to be developed as housing — dense, apartment-style housing — sometime in the next decade.)

North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot at 6 p.m., March 19, 2018.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot, 815 a.m., March 19, 2020.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot at 6 p.m., October 19, 2020.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot, 2:07 p.m., April 5, 2021.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot at 10:30 a.m., June 29, 2021.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot at 2:03 p.m., July 29, 2021.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot at 4:19 p.m., September 24, 2021.
North Berkeley BART: Southwest parking lot at 11:05 a.m., January 21, 2022.
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Live at North Berkeley: Winter Evening Rush-Hour Guitar

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Up above, that’s Dave Gardner — I’m not sure I’ve got his last name right — sitting on his amplifier and playing guitar as commuters emerged from the North Berkley BART station last night. I asked him how things were going. “Cold,” he said. Were people responding to his playing, “Some,” he said. Mostly, he let his playing speak for him, and I got out of the way so I wouldn’t deter any passers-by from dropping a buck in his guitar case. I liked the music. I think the two numbers he plays here are takes on “All of Me” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”     

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In Transit: The Audio

Since I’ve been doing the radio thing — actually doing some writing and reporting for the air — I’ve gotten in the habit of recording stuff I hear out there in the world.

Since I got a really capable smartphone a couple years ago, I’ve come to realize what cool little field recorders they can be.

And since I ride public transit (mostly BART) a lot, I’ve long thought about the idiosyncrasies of some of the train operators as expressed in their announcements. The guy who repeats the name of the train and station about six times at every stop. The woman who lectures riders about what station they need to transfer at (I haven’t gotten her recorded yet). The super-happy and the overly dour operators and the ones you can never really understand.

Anyway, I just had a prompt to put together some audio I’ve been gathering over the last few months. It’s not a truly finished radio piece or anything, but it’s got some fun moments in it. Enjoy.

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Live at 16th Street BART

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Here’s Dennis Blackwell, a guy who was playing at the 16th and Mission BART station on Friday. It does not look like a nice spot. The crowd’s hustling by, you have a little pigeon dung to deal with, and station agents who take in the whole thing with a cold eye.

Blackwell says he’s been playing for spare change for about a year. “I’ve been messing around with a guitar for 20 years. I’m 60 now.” He said he “came into manhood” on the streets of Berkeley, that his target audience is “aging hippies like me,” that he worked most of his adult life as a cook, and is on a fixed income now.

He played a little U2 medley, talked to me for a couple minutes, then launched into “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” by Bob Dylan. I didn’t bring him any luck–I didn’t see a single person stop and give him anything while I was hanging around with my camera and recorder. Hope he did better afterward.

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Live at North Berkeley BART

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Probably a feature of every big-city transit system: the itinerant musician who shows up to play at the stops along the way. The North Berkeley BART station a couple blocks from where we has a cast of folks who show up semi-regularly. There are three guitar players I can think of whom I’ve seen out there: a middle-aged guy who plays a nice classical guitar and always seems to land a decent pile of bills from the from passersby; a young guy who has sung himself hoarse thrashing out folk-rock tunes and looks ragged, like he’s barely hanging on; and the woman above.

Her name is Lily, and she plays slide steel guitar. I’m not a music critic, but I heard some nice touches in amid some scrambling to find the next logical note or chord. (Disclosure: I’m not sure I could find a single chord, logical or otherwise, on any kind of instrument.) I had my sound kit with me and recorded a little bit and talked to her briefly. The audio is below:

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‘Good Morning, BART Riders’

I’m sitting at the forward end of the car, the last coach on the train, riding backward, on my way to work late Tuesday morning. The door from the next car opens, and a voice says, “Go on–get in there.” A girl of 12 or so and a woman maybe in her 30s come through the door and walk down the aisle, then stop about a third of the way through the car. The woman starts up, and I realize immediately I’ve heard her spiel before.

“Good morning, BART riders,” she declaims. “My daughter and I have been homeless for two and a half months because I am a victim of domestic violence. We’re getting put out of our shelter at 11 a.m. My daughter hasn’t even eaten today. I have a hearing today at 2 o’clock, and I’m trying to raise forty-three ninety-nine for food and a place to stay.”

That’s it. The number catches my attention: $43.99. It’s part of the hustle–a number that’s supposed to be more persuasive for being so oddly specific. I’ve closed my eyes because I don’t want to see what happens next, whether or not anyone forks over some money. When I encountered the mom and daughter a few months ago on BART, I thought the girl looked stricken, humiliated.

The train pulls into the West Oakland station, and the pair get off. Most people in the car are sitting alone with their thoughts about what they’ve just seen. Several people sitting near the door discuss it.

“She does that all of the time,” a man says. “Every day. It’s a good scam.”

“But her poor daughter has to go through that every day,” the woman across the aisle says. A second man: “Her baby should be in school.”

“They use them kids,” the first man says, “they use them kids as a lure. It’s a good scam. She’s probably got more money on her than you have in you bank account. Yeah, she’s got a stash on her somewhere. She’s probably over on the other side right now getting on another train.”

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Today’s Red Herring: Oakland’s ‘Outside Agitators’

Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts, along with other city officials and community leaders, wants to find someone to blame for the vandalism and looting that followed the verdict in the Johannes Mehserle trial last Thursday night. And they’ve found someone: outside agitators and faceless anarchists. Friday, the day after the mini-riot that followed an emotional but peaceful post-verdict gathering outside City Hall, Batts made a big show of breaking down the hometowns of the 78 people arrested. The police said 19 of those arrested were from Oakland, 28 were from the Bay Area outside Oakland, 19 were from elsewhere in California, and 12 were from out of state. “There’s a time that we have to say that people coming from outside that impact our city, our town, the place that we live, that we work, that we play in, needs to stop,” Batts said.

That’s a good line, especially for a guy who just moved here from Long Beach, but it’s meaningless. For one thing, it ignores how easy it is to turn the arithmetic around: You say three-quarters of those arrested came from out of town? I say three out of five of them came from our own backyard. You say there were dozens of anarchists armed for trouble? I say that of the 78 arrests you made, 66 were on misdemeanor charges, mostly failing to obey police orders to clear the area.

Batts and others also ignore that people communicate with all sorts of little devices, including cellphones with video cameras, and that lots of people from lots of places heard about and saw tape of Mehserle, a young white transit cop, shooting and killing a young, black, unarmed train passenger, Oscar Grant. The shooting, and law enforcement’s initial ham-handed response to it, enraged many–even people who live outside Oakland. News travels, and people travel, too. The killing of Oscar Grant was not an Oakland tragedy, though it was played out there.

The biggest flaw in trying to point the finger elsewhere for the troubles that have attended the Grant case is that it tries to whitewash the issue of who was actually out on the street smashing and grabbing. Check out pictures of some of the looting that broke out Thursday night--here’s a slideshow from the Oakland Tribune–or read the accounts of what happened out on Broadway. One business owner the crowd victimized told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I feel like they were familiar with the store. They knew what they wanted.”

Let’s disperse the mystery about why the hell-raising happened. It wasn’t a conspiracy, and it wasn’t a bunch of out-of-towners out to ruin Oakland. It was a crowd of thugs, opportunists, and recreational miscreants from a variety of ZIP codes and demographic profiles seizing their moment–again. Beyond the destruction and stealing, the hell of it is that this is what most of the media–meaning me and people in my line of work–end up focusing on. That, instead of the fact the thousands of people who feel wounded by the case and are doubtful of the quality of justice the system is handing down are trying to deal with the disappointment and anger in a contemplative and constructive way.

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Bikes on BART: An Inconvenient Truth

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Once upon a time, the Bay Area Rapid Transit district required bicyclists to obtain a permit to ride its trains. You could get the permit by schlepping down to BART’s Lake Merritt station, or you could obtain it by mail. Our recollection is that you had to sign some paperwork stating you understood BART’s bike rules–most notably, to our mind, NO BIKES ON STATION ESCALATORS OR ON THE FIRST CAR OF TRAINS–and agreed to abide by them. Those were the days before the still-unfolding Cycling Enlightenment. Some years ago, BART dropped the permit requirement and pretty much welcomed all two-wheeled comers as long as they STAY OFF THE ESCALATORS AND PLEASE SIR WITH THE BIKE IN THE FIRST CAR MOVE TO ANY OTHER CAR ON THE TRAIN.

In theory, it’s swell to be able to travel with one’s velocipede on the BART system. Many’s the time we’ve ended rides at the far-off Dublin/Pleasanton and Fremont stations and taken the train back home. BART also provides a way of getting across the watery impediment known to locals as The San Francisco Bay. It’s not the only way of course–you can get a bike shuttle (a trailer service that hauls bikes across the Bay Bridge), take AC Transit (which has front-mounted bike racks), or, best of all, take the ferry. But BART is the most available option.

In practice, we’ve found the trains to be less than ideal for traveling from the East Bay to the city or back. The main reason is that the cars just aren’t designed to accommodate full-sized two-wheeled machines. If one sits, one almost by necessity takes up two seats. Not a big deal if it’s not a busy time of day; if it is, then taking the extra seat seems a little inconsiderate (this is a sermon delivered from the perspective of an offender).

The bigger problem with bikes on BART is that so many of the cyclists who bring their two-wheelers on the trains appear so lacking in care or respect for other passengers. For instance: If you’ve ridden the system at all, you can anticipate which door on the cars will open at which stations. But it’s common to see cyclists crowd their bikes into the exit door and block it when they have no intention of exiting (oh, sure, we see other passengers doing this too; we just expect cyclists to exhibit a little less lameness than the dopiest rapid-transit rider). It’s also typical to see riders station their machines in the aisles without regard to how it affects other passengers.

Take the specimen above (at left), photographed on a recent Sunday. He parked his bike in the exit door and for bonus points positioned it most of the way across the aisle. When someone sat opposite him, it was just possible for other passengers to squeeze by. He situated himself thus even though several other seats were available that would have allowed him to stay out of the way. After planting his rear end in his seat, he either affected obliviousness (or actually was oblivious) to all around him.

Part of the problem is that BART cars aren’t designed to accommodate bikes in the first place. A few have been refurbished with a sign that says “bike space.” But if more than a couple passengers bring their bicycles on board, the usual awkwardness ensues. Seeing that the physical space isn’t quite fit for bikes and passengers to co-exist, something’s got to give. The change has got to happen in the social space. Cyclists on BART need to be attentive to how their presence affects other passengers; just as attentive as they want the rest of the world to be to them and their needs.