The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) is being pulled in many directions. Ridership is growing at a record pace, straining the aging core system, while communities without BART service are lobbying for extensions. The district has been working on several thirty-year studies on how to reinvest in the core system, but meanwhile, proposals continue to surface for reaching farther and farther out.
There are many potential improvements for BART if financial constraints are not a factor. Depending on who waves it, a magic wand might bring BART around the Bay, through a new under-Bay tube, with extensions into eastern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, to Jack London Square in Oakland and along San Francisco's Geary Corridor.
Reality puts price tags on these projects, on other needed improvements such as repairs and upgrades of current equipment, and on seismic retrofit of the existing system. To accomplish even part of this grand scenario, priorities and timetables need to be clear, so that resources, both district and regional, can be used as effectively as possible.
Even without adding any more miles of track than those already underway, BART usage will still expand. In 2000, as travellers deserted congested freeways for transit, BART carried about 330,000 daily riders, the level originally projected for 2004. Adding service to San Francisco International Airport next year will bring 70,000 more riders a day. The impacts are already being felt in crowded trains and in stations with not enough fare gates and ticket machines. A program is currently underway to overhaul all escalators and elevators, and to renovate the original cars from the 1970s. New "smart card" technology, which could speed entry and exit times, will be piloted at nine BART stations this summer.
Other changes can be made to accommodate more riders, but some depend on how BART sees its future. Under one alternative, BART would continue to serve primarily commuters, with crowding concentrated at peak periods. New BART cars would have fewer seats, and seats would be closer together or narrower to make more room for standing passengers. Cars could be designed with more doors to move riders in and out faster at stations.
Under a different alternative, BART would absorb the additional riders by encouraging off-peak travel and reverse commutes to employment at transit villages. Since there is a typical lead time of five to eight years to acquire new rail cars, planning must be done now to have the right cars in place as ridership rises. The second alternative also means placing more emphasis on public-private partnerships and other techniques for increasing high-density, mixed-use development at BART stations.
Adding more track miles requires other decisions. Currently, there are bottlenecks in the system at both ends of the Transbay Tube which place restrictions on its capacity. New automated train-handling software will let trains travel closer together, but even that improvement will not totally eliminate the problem. The number of trains which can pass through San Francisco and down the Peninsula is essentially metered by the capacity of the tracks and stations in downtown San Francisco. One option would be to build new tracks between the end of the Transbay Tube and Montgomery Street or Powell Street, then possibly from that point along the Geary Street corridor.
A second bottleneck is the Oakland Wye, just east of the West Oakland station. All trains in the system, going in any direction, have to pass through the Wye, and a delay there can affect the entire system. Trains could bypass the Wye on a northern leg through Emeryville onto the Richmond line, or south through Oakland's Jack London Square before rejoining the Fremont line near Lake Merritt station.
New track miles, as demonstrated by the SFO extension, are extremely expensive, costing about $100 million per mile/$400 million per mile for tunnels. Estimates have placed the cost of a new Transbay Tube at up to $10 billion. A car/BART tube, which might be proposed as one option for a new Bay crossing south of the current Bay Bridge, would probably cost $20 billion, although building a new bridge which includes BART would probably cost less than half of that amount.
Despite the high cost of extensions, they are in demand. Residents in Santa Clara passed a tax measure to pay part of the expense of bringing BART south from Alameda County, and residents in Livermore and Antioch have been anticipating the completion of planned extensions for decades. With no timetable or dedicated funding for the Livermore and Antioch extensions, some BART directors and others have proposed using diesel trains on existing rail lines for temporary extensions. An "eBART" line from Pittsburg/Bay Point to Brentwood and possibly to Tracy is receiving more political support than a possible "tBART" line from Dublin/Pleasanton to Livermore with a connection to ACE trains. This is primarily because the tracks which could carry tBART are already well-used, and building more tracks raises the expense and may create other conflicts such as reducing the space available for carpool lanes on I-580.
BART's studies of needs and potential funding sources also include consideration of better integration of BART services with other transit, including a link to the proposed new Transbay Terminal, and a connection with ACE through tBART to Livermore. However, adding more riders by connecting to ACE could simply add to the problems of the existing infrastructure in already overcrowded areas unless expenditures are also made for passenger movement around and through stations. Compared to the expense of a full BART extension, the $200 million to build tBART to Livermore seems small, but it exemplifies the fact that the agency must set priorities or it may invest in small popular projects while failing to amass funding for larger, more critical improvements to the core system. The system is now expected to carry 500,000 daily riders by 2013. Well before that time, decisions must be made on what kind of service those riders will see.
Leslie Stewart
For more information: Katherine Strehl, BART, 510-464-6425