Guv Nuisance wants you to take the train, not a car to work. Guess he does not want you to get to work. The BART system in the Bay Area is a great example—one of three trains are delayed. Think you can trust government to get you to work?
“Jennifer Young’s “most miserable ride ever” on BART was full of extremes: brutal heat wave, scorched Antioch station, malfunctioning electronic arrival board and blistering winds masking station announcements that the train would be late.
“We ended up waiting in the 110-degree heat for at least 20, if not 30 minutes,” Young said in an email. “People waiting to board looked like zombies.”
One part of Young’s story has become disturbingly routine: BART’s reliability is at its worst point in at least two decades.
A string of catastrophic equipment failures, staffing shortages and police activity have contributed to the plummeting rate of on-time trains since July 2021, according to data presented at a Thursday board meeting. In the latest figures available for June 2022, nearly 1 in every 3 trains was delayed.”
There are lots of tax increases on the ballot this year—vote NO on all of them. Government can not provide water, transportation, energy or jobs. It has killed our economy forces higher gas and food prices, higher rent and mortgages. Government is a failure—it can not even control crime. Why give it more money to pay off donors, friends and special interests.
Blackouts, heat waves, and staffing crisis: BART delays at worst level in decades
In June, nearly 1 in every 3 BART trains was delayed
By ELIYAHU KAMISHER, Bay Area News Group. 10/14/22
Jennifer Young’s “most miserable ride ever” on BART was full of extremes: brutal heat wave, scorched Antioch station, malfunctioning electronic arrival board and blistering winds masking station announcements that the train would be late.
“We ended up waiting in the 110-degree heat for at least 20, if not 30 minutes,” Young said in an email. “People waiting to board looked like zombies.”
One part of Young’s story has become disturbingly routine: BART’s reliability is at its worst point in at least two decades.
A string of catastrophic equipment failures, staffing shortages and police activity have contributed to the plummeting rate of on-time trains since July 2021, according to data presented at a Thursday board meeting. In the latest figures available for June 2022, nearly 1 in every 3 trains was delayed.
It’s a dismal rate for the Bay Area’s regional rail backbone, which received $1.3 billion in federal relief money to keep trains running and billions more in voter-approved dollars to revamp 50-year-old infrastructure.
BART’s on-time service rates were presented at an October 13 board meeting.
While BART did not release more recent data for the summer, things do not appear to be improving.
There was a power outage in the Transbay tube leaving 200 people stranded in darkness last month, along with stabbings and a shooting upending train travel for thousands this summer.
Another metric, BART’s “customer on-time” service rate — tracking the percentage of passengers arriving within five minutes of their scheduled time — dropped from around 94% in June 2021 to around 83% this June. That means nearly one in five riders is arriving late.
BART’s board president Rebecca Saltzman said the over-year-long decline in reliability is due to a whirlwind of factors causing severe delays. She cautioned that poor performance rating is driven by severe one-time infrastructure failures instead of more day-to-day problems.
“This year, we’ve just had some really bad things that have happened,” said Saltzman. “It really has an outsized impact on performance.”
Some of the issues plaguing BART are related to the rail system being a microcosm for social welfare problems impacting the five Bay Area counties BART serves. Police actions caused 26% of delays from April to June, and 92 “person on the trackway events” delayed 5% of all trains. In September, a motorcyclist crash in Oakland flung the driver onto the BART tracks where he was hit by an oncoming train.
“Every time you see those police activities, I think it’s just a failure in the city and counties,” said Janice Li, a board director representing parts of San Francisco. Li said she is waiting for more recent on-time service data — likely due in November — before she starts “freaking out.”
Poor staffing, with waves of train operators and other employees calling in sick, is behind 20% of train delays in BART’s fourth quarter. Staffing challenges have led to a now notorious issue of “canceled” trains leaving riders stranded while waiting for the next train — sometimes for over 30 minutes.
Jesse Hunt, president of ATU Local 1555, which represents train operators, said the agency is still scrambling to hire conductors after a hiring freeze during the pandemic. BART train operators are working overtime to supply expanded service to newer stations in Berryessa and Milpitas and to return BART service from 30-minute frequencies during the pandemic to 15-minute frequencies promised to most passengers.
“It’s just a matter of trying to dig out of the hole that we got into,” Hunt said. The rate of train operators leaving their jobs due to promotions, retirements or other reasons has outpaced the number of hires.
But the summer has seen BART come off of a string of disastrous infrastructure failures that forced thousands of riders to scramble through confusing delays, including a June train derailment, power failures, multiple computer problems shutting down service, and ventilation troubles.
“We were brought to our knees on September 23,” BART Director Robert Raburn said, referring to an outage on the electrical third rail inside the Transbay Tube that stranded hundreds of passengers for hours. “We smoked an entire 34-and-a-half kilovolt cable. It takes a tremendous short to blow something that’s that thick — I mean, it’s the size of your thigh.”
The reliability issues plaguing BART are causing outrage among many passengers who are increasingly left waiting at BART stations or without essential Transbay service. Even during the pre-pandemic times, when over 400,000 passengers packed squished into BART cars every day, the average rate of on-time trains did not drop below 84% — BART’s on-time service slipped below 84% around October 2021 and has not returned.
Riders such as Alexia Ayala are fed up. On a recent weekend, her train was delayed about 20 minutes, forcing her to scramble while running errands before work. “You can’t count on it,” she said, hoisting her bike onto a BART train on Thursday.
BART said it is trying to tackle these problems. In 2016, voters overwhelmingly approved $3.5 billion in bond funds for the agency to overhaul its infrastructure. The case of a disastrous power traction cable failure that halted direct service from Richmond to San Francisco in March came a week before BART was scheduled to start much-needed rebuilding work.
“All of the infrastructure that failed over the past nine months to a year and a half is over 50 years old,” said Shane Smith, an assistant general manager who oversees BART operations. “Every single item.”
