BART ridership is still down nearly 70% from pre-Covid levels
statecraft.beehiiv.com
statecraft.beehiiv.com
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.
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.
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?
If its miles total, I would chock it up to people doing more leisure travel, seeing family etc.
I don't think RTO is in full swing in such force that its commuter miles, so I'd say you're seeing a big uptick in leisure travel right now, which makes sense, as more and more people are becoming comfortable with this again
If thats when peak hours are
A similar amount of behavior existed of people doing anything to avoid a peak hour BART train.
Now, if you're commuting in, the best times are during rush.
BART numbers will always seem insanely low vs. pre-pandemic because they were unsustainable high back then.
Many transit districts in Washington State have already gone fare free. Removing the barrier of paying helps drive more ridership, particularly on non-peak hours that traditionally see much lower ridership.
The rail already exists, increasing it's utilization by will drive economic growth and help municipalities recover and heal the donut hole that was punched in many urban cores by the pandemic.
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.)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/bay-bridge...
The BART has to pay for everything out of fares and sundry. The highway authority just has to build and maintain the road not the vehicles.
And costs like the drivers and station workers is just split over the 1-per-car drivers across an equivalent road. I don't know anyone who enjoys that commute, likely arriving more stressed rather than less, and you can't read or prep for your real work in any way when driving.
It's a common fallacy to ignore relatively small per-person costs, even if the total adds up to a massive amount due to the numbers of people.
Wikipedia says BART costs about $0.6 bil/year. Which is 10 times as expensive as the bridge. I need figures on yearly maintenance cost for the bridge to make this accurate though.
But so far it's not looking good for BART.
That way everyone can use BART :)
Not to mention in addition to direct costs, you need to look at externalities.
They were comparing number of people crossing the bridge to the total number of people using the entire BART system.
If anything what you say just makes BART look even worse, since a 2 mi stretch of bridge carries a half as many people as a hundred mile long BART system.
So those 1000 people spent that time either way, makes little different if they are passengers or drivers. However driving gets you there faster, so the costs are lower.
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.
Yes, if I don't need to park at the subway and don't need to take commuter rail, it's about $5 but that's not really the norm for a lot of people coming in from the suburbs.
I'm $35 to commute into Boston for the day
San Francisco seemingly hates car commuters and just about every aspect of the city demonstrates that fact. Commuting on BART for work is downright cheap compared to driving.
Also, I checked the fare between Powell Station and 12th / Oakland, it is 3.85 USD one way. So, 7.70 USD round trip. Crossing the bay twice at 100 km/h is pretty cheap at that price.
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...
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...
Are you more likely to be shot on the streets of Chicago compared to Boise? Probably, yes, however you're MUCH more likely to get shot on the streets of Chicago if you're involved in gang related activities.
There are probably similar qualifiers for assault on the BART.
No, not really. Unless you have data to back that up. Source: I was assaulted outside a BART station randomly.
One more data point:
> Rojas added, "It looks like it was an unprovoked, unwarranted, vicious attack."
https://abc7news.com/bart-stabbing-arrest-john-cowell-lee-oa...
One more
You made the argument that attacks are targeted using an analogy without having data.
The logical fallacy here is the fallacy of composition. We've only been given the statistics as they relate to ALL riders of the BART (of which "random commuters" only comprise some portion of ALL riders of the BART). We can't draw conclusions about the likelihood of assault against commuters based on this data alone.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A few years back the city of San Francisco was trying to buy a local hotel in Japantown to use as a lower income housing / shelter. They tried to sneak fast track the process but were still required to have community meetings. I was in these meetings as its my neighborhood and ALL the people who were PRO on this project were OLDER people who were retired or in good places in their lives and wanted to interject their good feelings on a neighborhood they DONT EVEN LIVE IN. All the people against the project were all people who LIVE in or work in the area. It was just incredibly infuriating hearing these people who had no business being there but wanted to give their woke justice opinion.
I think you're reading something into my comment that isn't there, probably because the nature of this site lends itself to reply opposition. I'm not against police enforcement. I'm trying to say, this desire you speak of isn't visible.
While what you say is true about lower income residents, plenty of community groups who perform outreach to lower income communities show up and comment against the police. Pro-bono law forms, homeless volunteers, soup kitchen folks, they all claim that low-income people dislike the police.
All I'm saying is that this disconnect is frustrating. Fundamentally low-income people are just being spoken for. On this site it's high-income people who claim to know what low-income people think, and in public meetings it's community groups who claim to know what low-income people think. I myself grew up low-income but am high-income now and I'm wary (my skin color is dark) of but overall positive (I mean what's the alternative? Lawlessness?) toward the police, but again I'm a high-income earner in a high-income district.
All I can say with certainty is that cops are expensive and that nobody seems to be excited enough to secure the tax revenue needed to fund them. If the only point of contention here was policing attitudes that would be one thing, but transit agencies don't even have enough money to maintain service let alone hire officers.
That line is spot on. Your comment on the data in the original comment felt like it was trying to paint that low income people don't want police. I think if we take a step back, we both agree that the data itself might not be an actual representation of how people in their area/district/transportation system actually feel.
I do think Bart, San Francisco, and of the like are going to now need to think of how to make people want to use and be active in the systems they created. They use to have the privledge of people being forced to use what was provided and didn't care about the quality or level of service it needed to have. But now people have a choice. AThey don't need to ride bart to go to work and feel uneasy around unsafe people. They don't need to go shopping in downtown SF because they can just amazon everything they need and don't need to interact with shady people outside the west field mall. People are speaking with their actions and hopefully governence are paying attention to why.
The public transit system is frankly an embarrassment across the country. If Morocco can have bullet trains, the Bay Area can have a safe, smooth intercity transit system.
See a crazy person? Cross the street. Notice every ride on BART is dangerous? Don’t use BART.
Simple pattern matching can save your life.
Here, just look at this table of crime counts and rates per 100,000 people in various states and regions of the United States: <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...>.
You can see that in 2019 the murder and non–negligent homicide rate varied from 23.4 per 100,000 people in the capital city of Washington DC down to just 1.5 per 100,000 in the state of Maine. Note well that DC has just over half the total population of the entire state of Maine, and had 166 murders where Maine had 20. That’s an 800% difference! DC is a little weird though, because it’s a city rather than a state. Suffice it to say that within each state there is a wide variation between different areas of the state.
“Mass shootings” were only 11% percent of homicides in 2019: <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...>. Note however that not every “mass shooting” is some dramatic spree killing in a public place. This count also includes crimes where one member of a family kills several others in a private place, shootouts between gangs where both sides were armed, etc, etc. All very tragic of course, but not something that you’re likely to be a part of.
Overall, Americans are more likely to be killed by a family member or acquaintance than by a stranger, and we’re more likely to be killed in a non–felony situation than as a part of a felony. We’re mostly likely to be killed in an argument with a family member, but arguments with acquaintances are a very close second. See <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...>. But I suppose that if you are a European who has recently moved to the US and has no family here, then you are rather unlikely be murdered by a family member after all. You’d better keep an eye on all those acquaintances instead. :)
I’ll grant you that the average of 5 homicides per 100,000 is higher than the average for most European countries (which run around 1 or 2 per 100,000, iirc), which is a point in favor of Europe. But recall again that not all parts of America are the same. I said before that crime and violence are concentrated in hot spots, and I stand by that: <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Homicide...>. There are definitely parts of America that you would not be advised to move to, but most places are fine. Look closely; all of New York City, the largest city in the US, is green or the lightest tan. LA and Houston, #2 and #4 respectively, are light tan and perfectly fine places to live. Chicago (#2) and Philadelphia (#6) are worryingly pinkish. Maybe move somewhere else. San Antonio (#5), is spread across three counties that range from light green to very slightly pink; a mixed bag but overall pretty nice. San Jose (#10) and the actual location of Silicon Valley is light green.
You could live a lifetime in one of those green counties and never encounter a violent crime, let alone be victim of one. Even most of the light tan places are great places to live, with homicide rare enough that you’ll probably never be personally affected. It’s just the red ones that you have to avoid.
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 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.
Low ridership feeds on itself since low ridership leads to even less ridership and the accompanied decrease in the budget to run it.
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.
BIG MISTAKE! On the second day I took a car, and it took 1/3 the time, and 1/10 the cost EVEN with searching and paying for parking.
Public transit should be free.
You have to do something like tag all driver licenses/IDs in the "area" with "free ride".
I used to go to conferences in downtown SF a lot and I would wind up riding the BART from SFO, I would always meet Europeans doing the same thing but all the other Americans I met would take the SuperShuttle or an Uber. I thought the BART was great.
I ride the bus from rural Tompkins County to Cornell, the one problem is that you have to plan your schedule around just a few trips, but it drops me off right by the cafe on the way to work, if I drove I’d have to spend another 15-20 min finding a parking space and walking to my office and might need to move my car mid day or pay for parking.
The bus has been in bad shape lately, we used to get a full size bus (often electric) now often it is a mini-bus, sometimes a mini-bus where 1/3 of the seats have been replaced by a wheelchair elevator that gets used once a month. A few years back there was a utopian proposal to not charge fares, it seems to have become a reality because some vendor screwed up and now 90% of the fare boxes are busted. I think the service is great but it surprises me how few people use it because it stops at some very transit friendly development.
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 think BART is generally tolerable, but you're dismissing how obviously fucking terrible the BART experience can be and regularly is. A lot of people aren't willing to deal with that roulette, nor should they have to. Other transit systems aren't this bad.
By the way freeway shootings in the Bay Area tripled to more than one every day and plenty of people still use the freeway.
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.
Embarcadero <-> Coliseum both ways.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11934347/will-casual-carpool-ever-....
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.)
He returned to the US (for his kids), and is now running Amtrak high-speed rail.
Of course, there's also the option of "fuck it, I'll just stay home."
Why's that? Long, boring, no footpaths, dangerous?
I love to walk in urban and wilderness settings, but it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that people walking in the suburbs can't afford an alternative.
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.
> "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?
Please remember that we are all one missed paycheck from smoking meth and jerking off on the train