It's been a great year for Bart--first, the Oscar Grant shooting; then, the Oakland Airport Connector fiasco; and lastly, a near-strike.
Regular readers know that I am often a critic of Bart’s policies. I have written before about Bart’s failure at transportation planning with Bart to SFO, Bart to San Jose, the Oakland Airport Connector, and other suburban-oriented projects at the expense of infill stations. But as I read the following passage in the latest lawsuit against Bart’s OAC project, I realized the issue goes way beyond bad transportation planning:
TransForm obtained documents from BART under California’s freedom of information law, the Public Records Act; these documents included an e-mail dated May 8, 2009, in which Thomas Dunscombe, the OAC project manager, urged four separate BART consultants to provide any information “to put holes in” and “discredit this ‘paper’,” stating that “another delay from the [BART] Board and we are practically dead.”
Dunscombe’s arrogance and malevolence in limiting public participation speaks to a terrible culture of selfishness and stubbornness that permeates almost the entire agency. The mismanagement of Bart starts from the top and trickles down. Bart’s top leaders are notoriously uncooporative when it comes to working with other agencies, such as stalling the rollout of TransLink cards for years. Bart’s board of directors is clueless to the actual issues facing the Bart system, and only has one rational boardmember in Tom Radulovich. Bart’s lower-level employees are extremely overpaid and had the nerve to call a strike when some workers are making triple-digit salaries for sitting in a booth all day and being rude to riders. Things are so bad that whole sites, such as www.bartrage.com, www.bartsucks.com, and others have been dedicated to venting people’s discontent with the system and its employees. And don’t even get me started on the Oscar Grant shooting and poorly-trained Bart cops.
Transit agencies shouldn’t generate this much controversy. There’s something fundamentally wrong with Bart, from the upper-level management to the lower-level cops and station agents. Working as a train operator should not pay three times what a teacher makes and twice what a police officer makes. It should be a regular job with regular pay. Extensions should be based on cost-effectiveness and increasing Bart’s ridership. Politics and pet-projects should be left out. And Bart should have security guards, but not cops. If there’s a problem, then Bart’s security can call properly-trained police for backup.
Bart is completely broken, and the only way to fix it is to start over. Bart needs to be abolished and folded together into a comprehensive transit agency that puts the “public” back in “public transit.” Otherwise, Bart will continue to be a drain on taxpayers and an obstacle to progress.
4 responses so far ↓
lyqwyd // September 4, 2009 at 1:37 pm |
Hear Hear!!
Totally agree with this post, BART is horribly mismanaged and some drastic steps need to be taken to fix the many problems, top to bottom.
Cassidy // September 4, 2009 at 3:37 pm |
Couldnt be in any more agreement with you! As an SF resident who works in Oakland, ive been forced to submit to BARTS [expensive] inadequacies on the daily.
We’ve all pinpointed the issue, now we need to come together to fix it!
Steven // September 9, 2009 at 5:44 pm |
Your right on!
Definitely fold BART into another agency or agencies, like AC Transit and some other agencies. Create a new elected board that focuses on real transit needs for the urban core.
Samsonian // September 11, 2009 at 3:49 am |
Great post.
There’s too much cost in BART. The whole thing seems designed to transfer money from taxpayers to BART’s management, employees, and contractors.
Transit isn’t that complicated. Move as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, with the least cost possible. Not that hard. Rail operators the world over do it, particularly well in Asia and Europe.
BART needs to be seriously reorganized or blown up. Perhaps something like New York’s MTA is in order, which is composed of appointed board members representing NYC and surrounding communities, and is ultimately responsible for NYC’s transit system. Seperate divisions/orgs within the MTA run each operation like buses, subways, Long Island Railroad, Metro North Railroad to CT., etc., but all are regionally, state, and federally funded based on needs. MTA is building the East Side Access to Grand Central Terminal for LIRR and the 2nd Ave. Subway. The MTA’s main problem is that it doesn’t have a dedicated funding source/stream.
A Bay Area MTA could have a Peninsula division (CalTrain) which could cross the Bay in a new tube along with HSR, a North Bay division (SMART) which could cross the bridge to Richmond Amtrak/BART, a legacy metro/subway division for the existing BART cluster mess, and could work with other regional rail like Altamont Commuter Express and Capitol Corridor. The board of such an organization should be made up of the region’s local transit authorities, not directly elected officials (although local authorities do have some elections).
BART’s existing governmental structure contributes to its problems. The fact that it’s a “Special District” under CA law (like a school district, or municipal utility district), makes it an independent government entity with state powers (encourages bloat). It performs specific functions in its geographic territory (but not necessarily limited by it, SF runs Hetch Hetchy across NorCal), and has the power to raise taxes in its territory (also encourages bloat). Direct elections only seems to aggravate the problem, as directly elected politicians tend to not understand transit. BART’s electoral districts also make little sense and appear to be gerrymandered. The BART special district incorporates all of SF, AC, and CC in its territory. Areas like eastern AC and CC probably shouldn’t have been included in the original BART district, as they’re difficult to serve with a metro/subway system (this is the problem with using a metro/subway as commuter rail).
Compare this to a Joint Powers Authority or Board (JPAs/JPBs). JPAs/JPBs are simply a consortium of various existing government entities (usually various local entities), that perform functions that its member want it to do. Its authority is largely derived from its members, and has little independent authority separate from them.
These different structures give a different set of adv./disad., comparing BART and CalTrain (PCJPB) is a good example. CalTrain is dependent on its peninsula member counties funding it, and it doesn’t have a dedicated funding stream (although that could be fixed). As a result, it lives on a shoe string budget, and can’t afford to make critical upgrades, or increase frequency, to boost ridership.
BART has dedicated funding and independence. But it’s gotten bloated, expensive, made/makes bad decisions from conception to present, and doggedly pursues bad projects. With BART’s independence, comes the independence to make dumb decisions.