As the article states, the reason why BART is so heavily impacted is because it was mostly designed as commuter rail. BART is unique in that historically it paid most of its costs in farebox revenue. While peak-hour (morning and evening commute) ridership is catching up again (BART publishes numbers so you can check the work here), usage outside of peak hours is at an all-time low because of the increase of WFH jobs. Since the rail alignment of BART can't be changed now, we'll probably settle on a new normal with BART.
BART along the same alignment still moves 2x more people than the Bay Bridge does though, which is something to remember as non-users of BART clamor for its defunding.
When I looked recently, Boston was still at just over 50% of pre-COVID transit utilization though some commuter rail and subway lines were a bit better--and bus lines were a bit better yet. Anecdotally traffic at rush hour is at least as bad as ever so it at least appears that some people switched back to (or started) driving who hadn't before.
Boston has had some well-publicized transit issues due to long-delayed transit maintenance but, at least short- to mid-term, it's lost a bunch pre-COVID commuting which has switched to driving.
> BART along the same alignment still moves 2x more people than the Bay Bridge does though, which is something to remember as non-users of BART clamor for its defunding.
Any source for that?
For BART numbers:
1. Is it traffic across the bay?
2. Or total traffic?
Edit: Digging up some data, I think it is #2, which seems a weird number to use.
BART total per day: ~400k
Bay Bridge per day: ~200k
>BART is unique in that historically it paid most of its costs in farebox revenue.
Because it's expensive as hell, and the only sane option for commuting into the city during rush hour. A $10 round trip to go 5 miles from the east bay to downtown is absolutely crazy. Easily double the price of any other metro in the US.
> BART along the same alignment still moves 2x more people than the Bay Bridge does though, which is something to remember as non-users of BART clamor for its defunding.
How much does BART cost per year (or per decade) vs the Bay Bridge?
A huge advantage of roads vs public transit is you don't need staff. (Maintenence is needed on both, but even then I suspect roads are cheaper to maintain.)
In my social circle there is a perception that the BART is increasingly unsafe and some people who previously used the BART to commute from East Bay to SF are now driving.
Their perception seems to be born out by the data:
From the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department [1]
Aggravated Assault (2019): 112
Aggravated Assault (2022): 114
Relative increase (2019 -> 2022) adjusted for ridership:
This follows a general trend of roads becoming unsafer since COVID.
Traffic Fatalities in CA:
2019 -> 2020: +3.4%
2020 -> 2021: +7.6%
Unclear about 2021 -> 2022, I'd have to run the SWITRS data myself. Keep in mind these are just fatalities. I'm guessing crash data will show an even larger effect.
Is it possible that the amount of assault is relatively unrelated to total ridership? Like the number of criminal assholes in the community is about the same regardless of how many people use mass transit?
The core problem is assholes on the trains. People stopped riding because there’s either someone dangerous, someone crazy, or someone tweaked out. Literally on every Bart car, probably 2/3 of the time I ride. I end up using the Bart watch app to report this stuff every other time I ride.
One guy tried to light a seat in fire. Another tailgated me through the gates and proceeded to push past me. Another was slumped over in a wheelchair (someone called 911 in that case).
To their credit, the cops on the other end of the Bart watch app respond to almost everything submitted. They don’t have enough officers though to cover the whole system.
How do you fix it? Add more cops. No ticket, no ride. Two cops on every train. One at every other station. Arrest anyone who is there without a ticket more than once. Arrest anyone jumping the gates. Enough with the nonsense.
I agree, it goes beyond danger which I see some people debating elsewhere in the thread. A tweaker might not be dangerous to me but I still won't enjoy being stuck in a tin can with him. Societies generally try to police antisocial behavior for a reason, but I guess some people think anything short of actually violent behavior should be tolerated. And "it's a city" shouldn't be an excuse.
Cops are expensive. You can run a bus line all day for the cost of 3 officers. If you want cops everywhere, aside from the fact that the HN demographic is much more open to this than lower income folks, you're gonna have to deal with a much more expensive transit system which will cost taxpayers more.
The disconnect is frustrating though. Middle and low income people do not trust the police. Don't believe me? Just listen in on any public meeting. Multiple community members and community groups call in to talk about how much they hate the police. Nobody calls in about how much they were helped by the police, unless they live in a wealthy district.
I can corroborate this experience. Last time I rode BART, someone lit up a joint while we were in the airtight car under the waters of the San Francisco Bay. The time before that, I had a crazy guy screaming the whole ride.
The San Diego Trolley used (haven’t been there in 20 years) to be crawling with cops; you’d be hard pressed to do a longish ride without seeing at least one.and they responded fast.
The latter being important; if you see a situation, report it, and see it handled it fades away as a memory; if each time you see it it never gets resolved and you just leave, it stays as a bad memory.
I've ridden BART sometimes recently, and they are much more aggressive about requiring tickets and making freeloaders exit now. Feels like they're cracking down.
I haven't had an unsafe experience yet, while I have been attempted carjacking. Granted that was at midnight, a time I wouldn't try to ride BART. And I would probably avoid most stations at night, especially Civic Center anytime.
I'm one who lives in the east bay (oakland/emeryville area) and don't use BART anymore because I'm WFH now.
I also choose to drive into the city on weekends and off commute hours because the BART always has sketchy people, homeless, some weirdo moving up and down the carts and there's never enough people in the off hours to make it feel safe and worth it.
It's a bummer because I'm down the street from Macarthur and would love to take it more often but I always have to be on guard which is not the travel experience I need in my life right now.
I don't think this is unique to BART. My local news regularly highlights what an S-hole our subway system is. It has become a good place for the homeless to spend their day and no one has found a satisfactory fix for now. Right now you only ride the Subway if you absolutely don't have an alternative.
Low ridership feeds on itself since low ridership leads to even less ridership and the accompanied decrease in the budget to run it.
I think the analysis here tends a bit pessimistic. Bart just had its biggest day in years at Pride and its recovery is in line with the other agencies in the bay. If you're a fan of BART, I'd also like to invite you to the premiere of my movie about BART, playing at July 18th, 630pm at the Roxie. Here's a trailer: https://youtu.be/7eH3FfIGp8w, and you can grab tickets at https://roxie.com/film/tunnel-vision.
London Underground has reached over 90% of pre-pandemic passenger numbers as of April 2023 [1], and Transport for London expects to achieve an operating surplus in 2023-24.
Notably, while peak-time commuter travel is still down on pre-pandemic levels, weekend passenger numbers on some routes has hit new all-time records.
I live in Oakland and am frightened of taking BART after hearing many horror stories from friends. If I, a healthy man in his 20s, am afraid to take BART, imagine how intimidating it must be for women and the elderly.
I live here and take BART all the time. My partner has some car crash trauma so unless I'm driving, she's using transit to get around and she generally feels safe. It can get sketchy at night on the weekdays but otherwise neither of us have had problems on BART.
FWIW people complain about sketchy people and odd comments on BART, but I've also been followed by a driver I merged in front of who circled the block, cut me off, tried to follow me home, then flashed a knife on me and threatened to shank me. Last year someone got mad at me on the freeway then brake checked me at an exit. People run reds here all the time too, which is scary on both car, bike, and foot. As long as I use BART before 11 PM on weekdays I never really feel more unnsafe than I do when driving, but I also am not the type that likes to live away from people. I enjoy cities.
Ok but this is not the reason. People don’t ride BART because half of working professionals now work at home and don’t need it. You can clearly see this in the fact that weekend BART riders is most of the way back to pre-COVID levels. Riders are not afraid of the system. It just doesn’t serve their weekday needs right now.
By the way freeway shootings in the Bay Area tripled to more than one every day and plenty of people still use the freeway.
I road BART on Tuesday and it wasn't scary. You repeating what you heard might just create an echo chamber that amplifies something that isn't true and gets other people to believe it.
That's true. Even if I intellectualize a trip on BART as risk-free, it's still anxiety inducing and involves inconvenience I would volunteer to avoid if I had a car.
I took BART the other day to go watch the As v Yankees (missed the perfect game yesterday by one day god damn it). Anyway, it was safe both ways and quite pleasant.
If you are commuting to SF in the morning from the east bay, there's the community driven east bay casual carpool. There used to be a pickup point at most of the east bay bart stations and the common drop off is at the corner of Fremont and Howard in soma. When I used to commute in, there were a few people in line and it only took a minute or two for the next car to pull up. It's a little weird at first to jump in a car with two random strangers but I never felt unsafe. You get through bay bridge toll plaza in seconds as you are in the carpool lane.
Nobody uses this any more. It is effectively not possible to cross the bay with the casual carpool. For the same reason nobody rides BART: those trips are not necessary these days.
I think BART is the perfect storm of commuter railroads that aren't going to recover. San Francisco is tech heavy, and tech still seems pretty work-from-home heavy. A problem I always wondered about is whether or not BART was the right system for San Francisco, as it seems a lot of the big companies are out in the suburbs and never had public transportation. I walked from the Mountain View train station to the Googleplex once. Nobody does that twice. (These companies have their own transportation networks, which is kind of a shame for visitors.)
I don't know what other cities look like. I've ridden the subway in New York on and off throughout and past the pandemic. This week was the first week that seemed normal to me. I don't commute, but have ridden the subway at commuting times, and it's definitely a little more chill than it used to be. (Easy to get a seat! But the train does eventually fill up as you get farther into Manhattan.) Looking at the commuter railroads, which I think is the fairest comparison to BART, they seem to be 50% of their all-time peak capacity. Not ideal, and I'm not convinced that 50% of the New York metro will be allowed to work from home forever.
It will be interesting to see what congestion pricing does to people that used transit before the pandemic that drive now. When I worked in Manhattan, I had a friend that drove every day. He showed me the spreadsheet that he used to decide between a monthly pass on MNR versus driving, driving was ever so slightly cheaper. With a $20 a day charge to drive into the city coming in the next couple years, that might be the edge that the railroads need to make it a financially viable decision.
I always thought we should make mass transit free and see how the numbers do. If 400,000 people drive into the city every day, and 2,000,000 people take the train, it's clear where the tax dollars should go. But I think as soon as you charge someone that first $1 to take the bus, pretty much everyone decided "fuck it, I'll just drive". The costs are a little more insidious, wear and tear on your vehicle, gas once a week, etc. People count that as free. (For example, do you ever turn on electrical appliances without thinking about the cost of electricity? That's driving.)
I had high hopes for NYC when they hired the new MTA guy before Covid. But then he got pushed out by Cuomo and it seems like he was prevented from carrying out the reforms needed to fix the subway properly. I highly doubt the state, which controls the budget, will ever make the subway free. I am doubtful they will even pony up the cash to perform the maintenance the system truly needs.
If no one else has mentioned it yet this headline is false/misleading. Ridership is down 30% not 70%. That is, all transit systems are operating at about 70% of nominal ridership.
Highway traffic on my commute never got back to as bad as it was pre-COVID. I imagine a lot of transit expansion projects won't make sense anymore. (Or less sense than they did before re: induced demand.)
In my area the subway system has still not recovered from pre-pandemic ridership levels. It has made me wonder if the kind of people who rode the subway were more likely to work from home. But at the same the the roads are also less busy than they were, at least judging from the amount of congestion delays we experience on a day to day basis. This is good and bad. The good is that I can almost always get a seat on a train that used to be packed shoulder to shoulder standing room only. The bad is that the fare went from $3.10 to $5.50 each way.
Measuring pixels on the chart it looks like BART is at 40% of pre-Covid levels (so down 60%). Public transit ridership nationally is at 65% and the MTA is at 70%.
Karrot_Kream|2 years ago
BART along the same alignment still moves 2x more people than the Bay Bridge does though, which is something to remember as non-users of BART clamor for its defunding.
danhak|2 years ago
You state that peak (commute) traffic is recovering but off-peak is still low, due to WFH?
Wouldn’t WFH be impacting peak hours, with off-peak at all-time-low due to other things like leisure travel?
ghaff|2 years ago
Boston has had some well-publicized transit issues due to long-delayed transit maintenance but, at least short- to mid-term, it's lost a bunch pre-COVID commuting which has switched to driving.
cscurmudgeon|2 years ago
Any source for that?
For BART numbers:
1. Is it traffic across the bay?
2. Or total traffic?
Edit: Digging up some data, I think it is #2, which seems a weird number to use.
BART total per day: ~400k Bay Bridge per day: ~200k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Brid...
https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/June18FactShee...
ramesh31|2 years ago
Because it's expensive as hell, and the only sane option for commuting into the city during rush hour. A $10 round trip to go 5 miles from the east bay to downtown is absolutely crazy. Easily double the price of any other metro in the US.
ars|2 years ago
How much does BART cost per year (or per decade) vs the Bay Bridge?
A huge advantage of roads vs public transit is you don't need staff. (Maintenence is needed on both, but even then I suspect roads are cheaper to maintain.)
bquinlan|2 years ago
Their perception seems to be born out by the data:
From the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department [1]
Aggravated Assault (2019): 112
Aggravated Assault (2022): 114
Relative increase (2019 -> 2022) adjusted for ridership:
114/112/0.3 = 3.39x
[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2023-01%20Mont...
Karrot_Kream|2 years ago
Traffic Fatalities in CA:
2019 -> 2020: +3.4%
2020 -> 2021: +7.6%
Unclear about 2021 -> 2022, I'd have to run the SWITRS data myself. Keep in mind these are just fatalities. I'm guessing crash data will show an even larger effect.
Source: https://www.ots.ca.gov/ots-and-traffic-safety/score-card/ and other OTS resources.
jandrese|2 years ago
camel_gopher|2 years ago
One guy tried to light a seat in fire. Another tailgated me through the gates and proceeded to push past me. Another was slumped over in a wheelchair (someone called 911 in that case).
To their credit, the cops on the other end of the Bart watch app respond to almost everything submitted. They don’t have enough officers though to cover the whole system.
How do you fix it? Add more cops. No ticket, no ride. Two cops on every train. One at every other station. Arrest anyone who is there without a ticket more than once. Arrest anyone jumping the gates. Enough with the nonsense.
mcpackieh|2 years ago
Karrot_Kream|2 years ago
The disconnect is frustrating though. Middle and low income people do not trust the police. Don't believe me? Just listen in on any public meeting. Multiple community members and community groups call in to talk about how much they hate the police. Nobody calls in about how much they were helped by the police, unless they live in a wealthy district.
MikeTheRocker|2 years ago
bombcar|2 years ago
The latter being important; if you see a situation, report it, and see it handled it fades away as a memory; if each time you see it it never gets resolved and you just leave, it stays as a bad memory.
reducesuffering|2 years ago
I've ridden BART sometimes recently, and they are much more aggressive about requiring tickets and making freeloaders exit now. Feels like they're cracking down.
I haven't had an unsafe experience yet, while I have been attempted carjacking. Granted that was at midnight, a time I wouldn't try to ride BART. And I would probably avoid most stations at night, especially Civic Center anytime.
poisonarena|2 years ago
that will never ever happen.
I remember 15 years ago reading about how much BART police get paid, was supposed to be way up there to the point people got upset about it
TheBigSalad|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
StickyRibbs|2 years ago
I also choose to drive into the city on weekends and off commute hours because the BART always has sketchy people, homeless, some weirdo moving up and down the carts and there's never enough people in the off hours to make it feel safe and worth it.
It's a bummer because I'm down the street from Macarthur and would love to take it more often but I always have to be on guard which is not the travel experience I need in my life right now.
WheelsAtLarge|2 years ago
Low ridership feeds on itself since low ridership leads to even less ridership and the accompanied decrease in the budget to run it.
rektide|2 years ago
We have the added shitshow of being a metro system spanning three different states. No one wants to pay, no one feels responsible; it's a mess.
akanet|2 years ago
Reason077|2 years ago
Notably, while peak-time commuter travel is still down on pre-pandemic levels, weekend passenger numbers on some routes has hit new all-time records.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-65821633
gautamcgoel|2 years ago
Karrot_Kream|2 years ago
FWIW people complain about sketchy people and odd comments on BART, but I've also been followed by a driver I merged in front of who circled the block, cut me off, tried to follow me home, then flashed a knife on me and threatened to shank me. Last year someone got mad at me on the freeway then brake checked me at an exit. People run reds here all the time too, which is scary on both car, bike, and foot. As long as I use BART before 11 PM on weekdays I never really feel more unnsafe than I do when driving, but I also am not the type that likes to live away from people. I enjoy cities.
jeffbee|2 years ago
By the way freeway shootings in the Bay Area tripled to more than one every day and plenty of people still use the freeway.
loaph|2 years ago
atleastoptimal|2 years ago
liveoneggs|2 years ago
renewiltord|2 years ago
Embarcadero <-> Coliseum both ways.
arnonejoe|2 years ago
https://sfcasualcarpool.com/
jeffbee|2 years ago
https://www.kqed.org/news/11934347/will-casual-carpool-ever-....
jrockway|2 years ago
I don't know what other cities look like. I've ridden the subway in New York on and off throughout and past the pandemic. This week was the first week that seemed normal to me. I don't commute, but have ridden the subway at commuting times, and it's definitely a little more chill than it used to be. (Easy to get a seat! But the train does eventually fill up as you get farther into Manhattan.) Looking at the commuter railroads, which I think is the fairest comparison to BART, they seem to be 50% of their all-time peak capacity. Not ideal, and I'm not convinced that 50% of the New York metro will be allowed to work from home forever.
It will be interesting to see what congestion pricing does to people that used transit before the pandemic that drive now. When I worked in Manhattan, I had a friend that drove every day. He showed me the spreadsheet that he used to decide between a monthly pass on MNR versus driving, driving was ever so slightly cheaper. With a $20 a day charge to drive into the city coming in the next couple years, that might be the edge that the railroads need to make it a financially viable decision.
I always thought we should make mass transit free and see how the numbers do. If 400,000 people drive into the city every day, and 2,000,000 people take the train, it's clear where the tax dollars should go. But I think as soon as you charge someone that first $1 to take the bus, pretty much everyone decided "fuck it, I'll just drive". The costs are a little more insidious, wear and tear on your vehicle, gas once a week, etc. People count that as free. (For example, do you ever turn on electrical appliances without thinking about the cost of electricity? That's driving.)
Tiktaalik|2 years ago
Vancouver's downtown has a lot more residential than most cities and it seems to have fared much better that SF and other places.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/translink-ri...
Though even here, we can see that transit recovery is slowest in the downtown area and strongest in other parts of the region.
I'd agree with your analysis that this is a tech and wfh related problem where SF is particularly hurt hard.
In the area of this regional map of strongest recovery are the warehouses where working people need to be on site to do work.
cyberlurker|2 years ago
prawn|2 years ago
Why's that? Long, boring, no footpaths, dangerous?
ghaff|2 years ago
Of course, there's also the option of "fuck it, I'll just stay home."
obphuscate|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie|2 years ago
jandrese|2 years ago
Reason077|2 years ago
> "the fare went from $3.10 to $5.50 each way"
I suspect there is a cause & effect relationship between these two observations. But which is which?
stevage|2 years ago
laurencerowe|2 years ago
jeffbee|2 years ago
dllthomas|2 years ago
emmetG|2 years ago
[deleted]
local_crmdgeon|2 years ago
Please remember that we are all one missed paycheck from smoking meth and jerking off on the train
dang|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html