Dear BART,
You were conceived in the 1950s and hatched in the heady 1960s, back when America was undaunted by challenges like putting people on the moon or building underwater tunnels. Business and civic leaders put together a plan that called for concentrating the Bay Area’s white-collar workers in San Francisco’s downtown core and shuttling them in and out of the ’burbs.
President Lyndon Johnson came for the ground-breaking in 1964; little more than five years later, the Transbay Tube was complete. (That’s lightning speed compared with infrastructure projects today. Don’t get me started on how many decades it takes to upgrade a city bus line.) When President Richard Nixon took a ride in 1972 from San Leandro to Lake Merritt, he remarked how you reminded him of the NASA space program. (Apparently he paid no fare but also did not “manspread.”) You were light, aerodynamic and carpeted to boot. Far out, baby!
BART, everyone’s salad days are full of brightness and potential. Since then, you have wilted plenty and are now rotting from the inside out. Electrical spikes shut down stretches of track for mysterious reasons. Delays of 15 minutes or longer appear to be growing by double-digit percentages annually. Trains are being patched with parts bought off eBay. Customer satisfaction with the service is at a 20-year low. Even your escalators are a hair ball.
I could go on, but want to cut to the chase. You need $9.6 billion with a B in capital to stave off death, but such a massive infusion isn’t likely to release you from intensive care. On Twitter you pretty much waved the white flag. In fact, the pricey fixes on your punch list are basically throwing good money after bad. You’re going to have to start over.
The prognosis may be grim but isn’t terminal. You’ve already paid for the costliest parts of the system, such as the rights of way, tunnels, skyways, stations and maintenance yards. You already know where trains have to go and how they’re going to get there. But BART, honey, you are due for a massive make-over. It’s like you’re stuck suffering through the nightmare that is Windows Vista, when what you should have done long ago is upgrade to Windows 7.
Start with your Achilles’ heel, the tracks. Your creators wanted you to be special, to stand out, even when you were just sketches on a scratch paper. Instead of the workaday track gauge that is standard for more than half the train systems on this green Earth, engineers went with a wider track gauge, of 5 feet and 6 inches. (The broadest gauge in the world! “You’ll run the greatest trains, employ the best people,” as the new president would say.)
Maybe they knew you would be the only train system in the country running on this gauge, and maybe they felt that would be keen. What we do know is you’re screwed, because that custom gauge requires custom everything — wheels, brakes, repair gear for the tracks, you name it. Time to call yourself a design and technology fiasco and start over.
No more MacGyver
As the Mercury News pointed out last year, the latest electrical surges on the system fried several $1,000 propulsion-control parts called thyristors, which are rare and usually take 22 weeks to order. BART repair crews had to cannibalize their own rail cars and find workarounds, prompting their bosses to call them “MacGyver-like mechanics and imaginative engineers.” I suppose “MacGyver” has a lot of fans, but they would probably prefer to watch the show at home, not stuck on a train or a platform because a one-of-a-kind, out-of-stock widget went kaflooey again.
The $3.5 billion bond measure that voters passed last fall will replace 90 of your 107 miles of track — with the same custom, troublesome gauge. (The current rails are “flat-edge,” while standard ones tilt inward. They are why BART trains make that God-awful screech once they get going. The broadest gauge in the world! That’s not all: Metallic dust generated by grinding the rails down to reduce noise may be what’s frying the thyristors in the first place.) You’re also going to pay for a new signaling system, replacing “the No. 1 cause of delays.” Now you’re looking for at least $1 billion from bridge tolls to buy 306 new railcars to run on this outmoded, broken-down system.
BART, why play chip-away for a billion here and a couple billion there to try to keep MacGyvering a dysfunctional system? Don’t put those cars in your shopping cart. Oh, and that pie in the sky about expanding capacity with a second Transbay tube? ¡Ya basta! That’s Spanish for “enough with the bullshit.” You’re eating Big Macs while dreaming of running 6-minute miles. Get your track and signal issues straightened out and then entertain growth ambitions.
This is an intervention
Yeah, BART, rehab will be a huge, disruptive pain. The more than 430,000 of your daily riders will have to rethink and reorient their commutes, which means their whole life routines.
But other transit systems have gone under the knife; Chicago shut down part of the “L” for five months. You’ve already had several months’ delay for the first set of your snazzy new cars, so go ahead, BART, get your shit together. A member of your own board of directors, even while stumping for the $3.5 billion bond that proved to be your lifeline, says “the time has come to rebuild BART from the ground up.” (Repeating for emphasis: Standard tracks! Stop MacGyvering! Standard tracks!)
The riders, the folks who rely on you and roll with your flaws and foibles, aren’t going to keep covering for you. Uber and Lyft can be hailed at the tap of an app, and Elon Musk is in hot pursuit of transportation nirvana. Take a deep breath, stand clear of your kludgy doors and start over.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus
