Background
As you may know, BART partners with AC Transit to provide late night bus service on Friday and Saturday nights so that you can "BART in [to San Francisco], bus out." As explained on BART's website, unlike other 24-hour rail providers that have double-tracking, which allows them to perform maintenance on one set of tracks while operating on the other set overnight; BART has just one set of tracks throughout the system – the result of which is that providing all-nighter bus service is the best 24-hour transit option we are able to offer so that we have the small window of time that we do to maintain our tracks.
Between 2005 and 2006, as a result of Regional Measure 2 funding, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) required (and funded) various bus operators of our region to operate overnight bus routes as part of the region’s All-Nighter bus program. The program originally served as a lifeline transit service during the overnight hours. AC Transit became the overnight operator of transbay service.
Last year, BART paid to supplement the AC Transit overnight bus service on Friday and Saturday nights so that the service was extended into San Francisco’s Mission District and ran every twenty minutes rather than every thirty minutes on several of the routes. We also introduced a route that connected San Francisco to Oakland, Central Contra Costa County, and the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART Station.
Last Week's Decision
Recently analyzed ridership data showed that the vast majority of riders who boarded the 822 route to Central and East Contra Costa County in San Francisco disembarked in Downtown Oakland; very few customers rode the service into Central and East Contra Costa County. Ridership on the “core” routes that served the inner-East Bay (i.e., between San Pablo/Richmond and Hayward) showed more sustainable ridership numbers. Based on this information, staff’s recommendation and the Board of Directors’ action was to discontinue the service to Central and East Contra Costa County and to use those funds instead to improve marketing of the remaining routes. Staff was also instructed to assess the market of Central and East Contra Costa County travelers to see if there may be other times (e.g., the early morning as opposed to the late evening) when travel is
more demanded.
Why I Voted "No"
I voted against this decision because I felt the marketing directive lacked strategy. A key issue with this all-nighter bus program is that it attempts to (unsuccessfully) serve two purposes: provide local overnight service to local travel markets and serve as a BART substitute. That is, while is provides relatively quick service across the Bay Bridge, within the East Bay, the service makes several stops like most local bus routes do. Because of this, several constituents and BART riders report to me and others that the service does not succeed at the latter goal of serving as a BART substitute.
In order to do strategic marketing, we need to better-understand who this service can work for and what we need to do to make the service viable for others. Only then can a marketing strategy that targets audiences that will respond to the marketing be effective and only then can we make improvements or adjustments to the program to capture other markets of travelers. Without this effort in understanding the various travelers out there, the marketing can be poorly targeted and financially wasteful.