More to the point: You are likelier to see something or experience something you’d rather not see or experience when trains are largely empty than when they are largely full. But ridership is far lower now, so these numbers are, de-facto, higher. And, not only does BART’s largely suburban ridership not need to go to work downtown or want to go shopping in Union Square, it doesn’t want to take transit to not go there.īART’s own statistics do not show an explosion of crime in or near its stations and trains. And, right now, BART takes you to places people don’t want or need to go. BART is a heavy, fixed-rail system and it goes where the tracks take it. So, it’s not so easy for BART to repurpose away from its founding concept. surge out of a realm entirely devoted to office space is gone, and may never return. Now would be poorer Downtown, as you all know, is in a bad way. The agency and downtown San Francisco have a symbiotic relationship, for richer or for poorer. When Radulovich stepped down from the BART Board after 20 years in 2016, fully two-thirds of the service’s trips were to downtown San Francisco. BART, as former longtime board member Tom Radulovich puts it, exists, in large, part to funnel workers and shoppers from the Bay Area’s outer suburbs into the FiDi and Downtown of San Francisco. A lot of BART’s additional money comes from sales taxes, which are also an extremely volatile funding source.īut it gets worse. Lots of stuff about transit and transit funding is complicated, but this is not: If you’re making the bulk of your money based on ticket-paying riders and, suddenly, everybody stops paying and riding, you are totally fucked. That’s among the highest in the nation ( Muni, as a point of contrast, was at 17 percent prior to the pandemic, and hit a recent high-water mark of 34 percent in 2013). BART’s “farebox recovery,” the percentage of its operating expenses recouped by passengers’ tickets, stood at 60 percent prior to the bottom dropping out in 2020. Without directed funds in the forthcoming state budget - funds that are not presently in place - Bay Area transit agencies are promising draconian cuts of the sort that would cripple public transportation and render it ever more irrelevant to all but the most desperate riders.Īll it took was one global pandemic for BART’s greatest strength to become its most crippling weakness. So, it’s troubling to think that, in the not-too-distant future, we may look upon the current state of things as the good ol’ days. Paying for the bus these days feels a bit like watching cars approach outer neighborhood stop signs: You’re pleasantly surprised when you see people actually following the rules. San Francisco political leaders have called for making Muni free for greater and greater swaths of the population, but rarely back that up with funding.Īs individual riders, we often complain about inconveniences suffered on a public transit trip that, in many other mid- to large-sized cities, would’ve been inconceivable. Other city agencies balance their budgets by raiding Muni’s. If Muni still loves us, this is an appallingly codependent relationship, on par with the one in “The Giving Tree:” We take and take and take and take from Muni, and leave only a stump.
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