As the sun peeked over the horizon on a recent Friday morning, only a few people stood on a platform in Pittsburg, Calif., to wait for a Bay Area Rapid Transit train that would whisk them nearly 40 miles southwest to San Francisco.
The working-class town with industrial roots sits on the edge of Suisun Bay and is known as a more affordable suburb. BART made it possible for Pittsburg residents to live in the farthest reaches of the Bay Area and avoid a cumbersome drive to San Francisco.
Seven years ago, BART trains would fill up quickly each weekday, with passengers taking every seat, jostling for space in the aisles and clutching every pole. Now, the trains often lumber into the city with a trickle of commuters rather than a crush.
BART’s future is dire. Its ridership cratered during the pandemic and remains less than half of what it once was. And the very future of the familiar white and blue trains, which have zipped around the Bay Area since 1972, is in doubt.
BART directors say that only Bay Area residents can rescue the system by passing a new sales tax in November. Absent that, the board recently warned that it would take eye-popping actions out of desperation in 2027.
Fewer trains. Higher fares and parking fees. Ending service at 9 p.m. instead of midnight. Laying off a quarter of its work force. And shrinking the system almost back to its original footprint by shuttering 15 stations, including the one in Pittsburg and others at the farthest ends.
Critics suggest the contingency plan is a scare tactic. But BART officials say that these are desperate times and they are serious about cuts that could lead to a downward spiral that kills the entire system. That outcome is unimaginable in a region that prides itself on environmental values and car-free lifestyles.
“This is about putting BART on life support,” Barnali Ghosh, a member of the BART board of directors, said at a slash-and-burn meeting in late February, noting that the system could shut down completely. “BART is not too big to fail.”
Transit agencies around the country have struggled as federal pandemic aid has expired, but BART has been particularly badly battered. Before the pandemic, it was successful enough to rely mostly on fares instead of the heavy government subsidies that sustain transit elsewhere. As ridership numbers plunged, however, that meant its budget was hit particularly hard.
In January 2020, BART stations had an average of 388,910 exits on weekdays. This past January, that figure was 170,543, less than half of the pre-pandemic ridership. The agency now faces an ongoing $400 million annual structural deficit.
A glaring culprit has been the slow recovery of San Francisco’s downtown. About a third of office space remains vacant, and the offices that are leased do not tend to fill up five days a week. Despite the return-to-office urging of some politicians and employers, remote work culture in the tech-centric Bay Area has firmly taken hold.
BART’s struggles amount to a “post-Covid keyboard economy story,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and an expert in transit systems.
“The jobs disappeared from downtown in favor of people’s home offices and wherever they could set up a laptop,” he said.
For decades before the pandemic, the system was a way of life for generations of Bay Area residents. With each whoosh of opening doors, office workers spilled out of train cars downtown, baseball fans roared on their way to Oakland A’s games and revelers headed home after a night at clubs in San Francisco.
BART remains a lifeline for those who must show up for work and do not own cars or recoil at the thought of braving the maddening crawl of Bay Bridge traffic.
Jornie Macalalag, 43, boarded a train in Antioch to head to the skilled nursing facility where she works in Daly City, a town nearly 50 miles away, just south of San Francisco. A home near her job would cost $1.2 million, so she saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by buying one near Antioch instead.
She does not know how to drive and calls in sick when BART service is disrupted. The closure of the Antioch station and others nearby would upend her life.
“I need to pass my driving test now,” she said, widening her eyes in worry.
During and after the pandemic, as fewer commuters rode BART, the system gained a perception for being less safe, and the rate of crimes per rider rose through 2023 before falling in subsequent years.
Some riders recently said that BART’s frequent service disruptions — including occasional meltdowns — and unsociable behavior by some passengers made riding the train an exercise in fortitude.
“There should not be people smoking crack and cutting their toenails on BART,” said Justice Laub, the chief executive of a pet care app called Boop.
A campaign committee is gathering signatures to qualify the sales tax measure in five Bay Area counties. The revenue would support Caltrain, the commuter rail line from San Francisco to the Silicon Valley, as well as local bus and light-rail networks.
Voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties would be asked to add an extra half a percentage point to their sales tax rates. Those in San Francisco would be asked to approve a full percentage point that would also help Muni, which desperately needs money to run the city’s local buses, subway trains and street cars. (Muni, like BART, has also threatened dire measures, such as no longer running the city’s historic cable cars or ending service at 9 p.m., before San Francisco Giants night games end.)
Steve Glazer, a former Democratic state senator, accused transit agencies of using a “Washington Monument Strategy” by threatening to kill off their most treasured offerings absent more money, a reference to the National Park Service’s two-day closure of the Washington Monument amid budget cuts in 1969.
Mr. Glazer lives in Orinda, an affluent community nestled into rolling hills in the East Bay, which has its own BART station that is not on the closure list. He said that rather than asking for a tax hike, BART should do more to control its expenses by renegotiating labor contracts, cutting its public relations team and trimming administrator salaries. He pointed to 200 BART employees making more than $250,000 annually.
“Most of what BART has done has been token reductions and paper shuffling,” he said. “BART is like an out-of-shape runner who wants credit for tying their shoes.”
Sebastian Petty, the senior transportation policy adviser for SPUR, a San Francisco think tank focused on urban policy, said that BART could be more efficient, but that the trims suggested by Mr. Glazer were too small to overcome the revenue losses from a pandemic that upended the way Bay Area residents work.
“What we’re seeing really is a revenue problem,” he said.
He said that the disappearance of BART would only hamper San Francisco’s downtown recovery by discouraging daily commutes. And it could drastically affect the rest of the Bay Area, too. Residents might flee some neighborhoods that have been built around BART stations, which could become empty shells with rails to nowhere.
Tyler Bond, 32, was on an escalator at the Glen Park station in San Francisco on a recent morning, carrying the bicycle he would ride to his job at a medical device start-up after taking a train to the South San Francisco station. The South San Francisco station is among those that could be closed.
“It seems insane that a place as flush with cash as this town can’t keep things like this that allow society to function,” Mr. Bond said, shaking his head.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
The post The Bay Area Considers the Unthinkable: Life Without BART appeared first on New York Times.
