Several patrons wonder why BART does not operate twenty-four hours a day or at least later on Friday and Saturday nights to accommodate the high Transbay travel demand to/from San Francisco. A less frequent complaint, but one that is more of a lifeline consideration, is the fact that BART does not begin service on Sundays and holidays until 8:00AM. As the representative of some of the lowest income communities of the BART District and due to the impact this has on being able to serve airport-goers, this is of added concern to me. Inquiries about BART’s operating hours are so common that BART has a webpage
dedicated to responding to these questions. Often times, though, the explanation is not sufficient for customers. They point out that a number of other transit agencies provide this service and still manage to be able to keep their systems maintained.
Aside from there being a number of other subway systems that, like BART, do not offer twenty-four hour service (WMATA, London Underground, Paris Metro, etc), BART is not like the systems customers often compare it to when it comes to service hours for a multitude of reasons. For one thing, BART serves a region, whereas many of the systems that customers compare BART to are metro rail systems that serve a more localized market. One result of this is that there is a lot more area that BART covers, a lot more track that must be maintained (104 miles worth in all), and line lengths that are a bit longer than your typical metro rail service (51.4 miles for our longest route). The significance of line lengths is the fact that any disruption on one part of the line impacts the entire line (i.e., the delay at mile post 1 will be felt at mile post 45 also). And the
longer a line's length is, the more residual delays the line will experience and the more people/stations will be impacted by the delay.
Another impact of BART's large service area and line lengths is its effect on the time window for track maintenance. The time to perform maintenance isn’t from the time the last trains depart (12:00AM) until the first trains depart (4:00AM on weekdays); it’s generally from the time the last trains arrive at their destination and the time the first trains depart. Because BART covers a much larger area and has longer line lengths, those windows are much shorter than they are for localized service providers. Consider that BART's longest line takes about one-and-a-half hours to complete. If you compare this to another system whose line length is just thirty minutes (as an example), that other system could provide a last train as late as 1:00AM and still make it to it's final destination by the same time our longest line's last train that departs at
midnight does.
In addition, BART’s service (and the demand for overnight service) revolves around getting people into/out of San Francisco. As a result, unlike other transit systems, BART has a unique design in which four legs of service from the East Bay converge into a single alignment through San Francisco. In most other settings, the various lines operate isolated from one-another with only a short distance of convergence, if any. So, while other systems have the flexibility to work on one service line and leave the other lines open overnight, BART does not have that type of flexibility since most routes converge onto the San Francisco alignment and all of our routes work together to serve the markets going to/from San Francisco. With so many people going to/from San Francisco from everywhere, we must find a way to accommodate that demand by providing each leg of
service into/out of San Francisco with a sufficient volume of trains or transfer arrangements. Unfortunately, the demand for this service is too significant such that there is no way to provide an adequate volume of service to accommodate the demand while at the same time keeping the volume of service low enough to allow for track maintenance with minimal interruption and with appropriate safety protections for our workers.
A last point of comparison is the technology that BART operates on. Most late night and 24/7 service providers operate with overhead catenary system (OCS) power, in which the trains are fed power through an overhead wire. BART’s utilization of an electric third rail adds complications when it comes to worker safety. Not only does BART need to be considerate of trains passing by work crews; we must also be mindful of workers being in near contact with our power source. As a result, the power must be turned off to accommodate overnight maintenance, further forbidding our ability to provide overnight service.
Last, but not least, there are various rules in place (including state and federal mandates) relating to track worker safety that make the overnight track maintenance hours invaluable for BART. In order to protect the safety of our track workers, BART is not able to perform daytime track work without severally disrupting service. This reality recently became further pronounced (i.e., some of the limited daytime track work we once did can no longer take palce without impacting service delivery) as a result of new state mandates. For one example, BART used to be able to single track (i.e., use one track for service in both directions) at full speed while having a track maintenance crew working on the other (unused) track. New state rules now require that we operate at reduced speeds (27 MPH) even if we are single-tracking through the work area and on the track not
being worked on. Rather than impacting customers' travel experiences with daytime track work, we try to do as much work as possible at night, making those nighttime maintenance hours all the more imperative.
Some systems get around these hurdles by having double tracking (i.e., four sets of tracks throughout a track alignment) so that trains can operate on one set of tracks while work is done on the other. BART does not have the double tracking that affords that flexibility and there is not enough real estate available to purchase and implement this option.
In light of this, what BART and partner agencies have done and are working diligently to improve is the provision of overnight Transbay bus service between San Francisco, the various locations that BART serves, and more. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is a key facilitator of this effort. Learn more about the Regional All Nighter service through this link (here).
Photo Credit: Flickr.com/pbo31
