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Station Meet and Greets:
The Most Common Customer Complaints (Part I of II)

June 1, 2014

Dear Reader:
During the latter part of April, I did several Meet and Greets at BART stations in District 7.  Perhaps I saw you there (?).  I ran into many customers who voiced varying concerns – many unique and specific, while many others were general and common.  Some of the most common complaints that my BART Board colleagues and I hear pertain to BART train lengths, the lack of police presence on BART, why BART does not operate twenty-four (24) hours a day or at least until 2:00AM on Fridays and Saturdays, and the cleanliness of BART.  Below are some explanations to the former two.  In the interest of e-newsletter length, I will try to address the latter two in a near-future e-newsletter.

BART Train Lengths

I would venture to say that the most common complaint BART receives from its customers relates to train lengths.  Not only do customers feel cramped like sardines and dislike anything less than a ten-car train because of that; they also occasionally observe seemingly empty ten-car trains while their crowded trains are fewer than ten cars in length.  “What the heck?” they ask themselves.

Let me preface by stating this fact: BART does not have a sufficient supply of train cars to give every train ten cars.  Just achieving our 85% rate of stock availability for operation every day is a higher standard than most operators out there set for themselves.  Given these limitations, the question is how can we fairly and efficiently distribute these scarce resources...?

By accepting train crowding as inevitable, what BART tries to do is equalize the pain of crowding across all train runs as much as possible.  BART achieves this through a complicated, unique, and state-of-the-art system that assigns every BART customer to a train based on when and where he/she tags in and out of the BART system.  This information allows BART to ascertain Load Factors, which define the number of passengers on each and every train at each and every station along the run.  Accordingly, the peak volume of passengers on every train is also obtained, which is then used to define train car lengths.  On a semi-annual basis (i.e., twice a year), BART’s scheduling team redefines the metrics used to determine train lengths.  Because the average peak volume can change with ridership, while our train length potential of ten cars cannot, the Load Factor used to determine train lengths has to change along with ridership and peak volume changes.  At the same time that these metrics are redefined, BART's scheduling team also redefines the lengths of the different train runs accordingly.

I underscored the term “peak volume” above because a train’s capacity follows a bell-curve pattern: it generally starts at zero at its origin location, grows to its peak, then falls downward and eventually back to zero when it reaches its final destination.  That peak volume is what train length planning must revolve around and is also a big part of the reason why trains will occasionally appear less crowded than others and still be ten cars in length.  Specifically, you may have observed the train after its peak crowding when its length was imperative.

Other common reasons why you may observe longer, lighter load trains or shorter, heavier load trains include:

  • Different BART lines’ trains can only be coupled (two halves put together) or decoupled (split in half) on one end of the trip.  The Yellow Line, for example, can only be coupled and decoupled at Pittsburg/Bay Point due to there being no storage available at San Francisco Airport.  As a result, the last few longer train runs in the morning to San Francisco will seem unnecessarily long on their way back to Pittsburg/Bay Point.  Similarly, as trains prepare for the evening commute, there will be long trains that run seemingly empty to San Francisco Airport in order to be ready for the crowding en-route back to Pittsburg/Bay Point.  By comparison, the Red Line is able to couple and decouple both at Richmond and at Millbrae since there is storage available at both locations.
  • Due to operational and logistical considerations, there are only two train lengths any train run can have: it's assigned full length (coupled) size or half of its assigned full-length (decoupled) size.  Hence, a train that operates as a ten-car train during the commute can only be converted to a five-car train for the midday.  It cannot be converted to a 3-, 4-, 6-, 7-, 8-, or 9-car train. Similarly, trains that are six cars in their full length must be coupled/decoupled at the three car level, and so forth. Trains are always coupled/decoupled in the middle in order to ensure a somewhat homogeneous variety of train halves in the train yards/storage areas.  This provides flexibility during the coupling/decoupling of different trains by ensuring an “any half will do” circumstance.  The alternative is maneuvering several heterogeneous train halves in a train yard/storage area in order to couple together specific halves – an operational exercise that is simply not feasible.  That being said, during the midday in-particular, you will sometimes observe trains that are longer than they seemingly need to be because the ridership demands something more than a half train, but less than a full train, and of those options, affording the full-length train is the better one.
  • Of course, unforeseen circumstances, such as events and train delays, will result in different trains being more or less crowded than planned.

When BART’s Fleet of the Future starts to arrive in 2017, we intend to expand our fleet from just more than 660 cars to 775 cars.  This will allow us to lower our train length thresholds so that more train runs use ten-car trains.  The expansion will not occur overnight, but it is our intent to first expand and later replace the aging fleet.

Photo Credit: Transit Unlimited Wiki

Police Presence

Another common complaint that BART's staff and Directors receive pertains to the limited presence of BART Police.  Many customers, including myself, seldom see BART Police Officers on trains or at/around stations.  Customers feel (rightfully) that this encourages or, at the very least, fails to discourage, the engagement of illicit activities on BART trains that impact the customer experience.  They would like a greater presence of Police Officers in order to offset this tendency.

The short response is that this is a resource issue.  BART Police Officers are regularly responding to incidents at and around BART Stations and there is not currently a sufficient volume of officers to afford to have “floating officers” on-board trains.  Rather, officers are scattered throughout the District at stations so that they can promptly intercept a train and respond to an incident when the train arrives at a station.  With our current staffing levels, having officers on-board trains would jeopardize officers’ abilities to promptly respond to incidents that call for police action.

The recruitment of police is a very competitive effort and BART has not been able to achieve its budgeted volume of Police Officers since much before I even became a Director.  A police agency’s ability to recruit officers is partly subject to the sort of policing environment that the agency serves (i.e., different prospective Police Officers are attracted to different policing environments).  However, even in attracting officers to the transit-based environment that the BART police agency is subject to, very few officer trainees are able to pass the police academy: fewer than 5%.  These realities make the ability of BART keeping recruitment up with the retiring or transferring of officers difficult.

Because police recruitment is so competitive and there is simultaneously a low success rate of trainees completing the academy, most policing agencies prefer to hire lateral officers (officers who are already trained and transfer from one policing agency to another).  Hence, apart from training new Police Officers, there is an on-going challenge within the police industry of attracting and retaining already trained officers.

The good news is BART is getting slowly but surely closer to its budgeted volume of Police Officers, so will hopefully in the next few years be able to re-evaluate its operations plan so that more Police Officers can be distributed and more frequently visible on-board trains throughout the system .

ELERTS Update:
In the meantime, BART will be introducing a new mobile police reporting system, ELERTS.  This program will be accessible from both the Apple App Store, as well as the Google Play Store on Android devices, and will allow passengers to report illicit activities to BART Police discreetly.  I elaborated on this program in a March 16 e-newsletter and, based on information I received from BART staff at that time, I had suggested that this program would be implemented by last month (May).  The latest information from BART staff is that the program will become active by the end of August due to unforeseen time needed to make the program usable in multiple languages.  We do intend to market the program as the date approaches and hope that, with this additional method for reporting illicit activities on BART, your BART experience will be improved.  However, this program is *not* for emergencies; if you are faced with an emergency, call 911.

Stay tuned for more information as ELERTS' release date approaches.  In a near-future e-newsletter, I will address the concerns I often hear about BART cleanliness and the lack of 24-hour BART service.

Photo Credit: Flickr/k9

Sincerely yours,

 


Zakhary Mallett, MCP
Director, District 7
San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART)