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BART 2015/2016 Budget Highlights
May 7, 2015
Dear Reader:
I wanted to quickly share with you some highlights of BART’s proposed 2015-2016 fiscal year budget.
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May 7 Telephone Town Hall and Upcoming Public Hearing
First and foremost, with sincerest apologies for the late notice, if you have time and interest this evening, BART will be hosting a telephone town hall about the budget between 6:30PM and 7:30PM. The town hall is intended to help answer budget-related questions for the public. You can call into the town hall by phone (855-269-4484) or, if you prefer to just watch and learn, there will be a webcast of the town hall online.
More details about the telpehone town hall and a link to the webcast can be accessed here.
Also, BART will hold a public hearing about the budget at the May 28 meeting of the Board of Directors, which is an evening Board meeting that begins at 5:00PM. BART Board of Directors meetings occur at the BART Board Room, located on the third floor of the Kaiser Center Mall building in Oakland, which is accessible from the 19th Street/Oakland BART Station.
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Budget Highlights
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BART’s 2014 Customer Satisfaction survey highlighted the first time that BART’s customers’ satisfaction dwindled in more than a decade. While a supermajority of BART customers continue to feel satisfied or very satisfied with BART, there were some common concerns expressed by customers, including, most especially, system cleanliness and train crowding. Much the same has been reiterated by the customers that I have connected with at my recent Station Meet and Greet events.
To bring attention to this, BART’s proposed budget includes the following:
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A new graveyard shift of workers at our Daly City yard for train maintenance so that more train cars can be made available on our trains (this will primarily effect trains going between San Francisco and the Dublin/Pleasanton and Fremont legs of service);
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Through funding from the Warm Spring extension project, at least four damaged train cars will be refurbished;
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Twelve additional station cleaners and four more train car cleaners;
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Seven additional Grounds Workers (BART’s version of landscapers);
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Extended hours of the Richmond – Millbrae line on weeknights (now, rather than ending this line at 8:00PM, it will end at 9:00PM starting in the fall).
Click here to access the full budget (PDF).
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Contra Costa Crossover Project Means More/Longer Trains
Apart from the budget, BART has also completed the construction of an interlocking (a location where trains can crossover from one track to another) near the Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station, which will allow our short-run trains from Central Contra Costa County to San Francisco to turnback at the Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station instead of the Concord Station. While this will reduce service frequency from Concord, it will allow us to concentrate service where demand is highest and will also buy us additional train cars and runs to serve that demand. Just the car-hours saved by turning around trains one station sooner will allow us to make fifteen extra runs into San Francisco with just eight trains rather than eleven runs with nine trains. It also means that each train will be longer since the cars of the ninth train will be able to be allocated to
the remaining eight trains.
These schedule improvements will take effect with the fall update to our train schedule.
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