Support for BART in Question After Labor, Technical, Public Relations Problems

Eleven BART passengers had to be treated for medical problems in Wednesday morning's incident in the Berkeley Hills Tunnel when a parking brake malfunctioned and filled some train cars with brake dust.

The incident is the latest in a string of recent problems for the transit agency, including a systemwide computer failure last month, and a train fire in October.

BART provides an average of over 400,000 rides daily, and in November that number was up to 415,000. But there's a marked change from the very favorable view that Bay Area residents had of the system back in April, said Michael Cabanatuan of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cabanatuan wrote last week that BART riders are losing faith in the system. He told KQED's Mina Kim they're disappointed and frustrated over BART's unpredictability.

"In some ways it's like BART can be its own worst enemy. They deliver very reliable service – often as high as 96 percent of trains on time, one of the highest rates in the country," Cabanatuan said. "But when there are times – for example, the two strikes, or the computer failure or even today's incident, where you just don't know if a train is going to show up – people start to lose faith even if it is a relatively small number of times or relatively few occurrences."

A KTVU story last week quoted BART riders about the system's ongoing issues:

Given all of BART's labor, technical and public relation problems, many passengers have become cynical about BART.

"I get up extra early because you don't know with BART what's gonna happen. Don't know. Escalators either running, elevators don't run. I mean now, a computer glitch," said stranded rider Cynthia Yarbor.

"It's just a big problem.  If it's not one thing it's another," said rider Michael Paris.

Another report in the San Francisco Chronicle that ran in late October after labor and management came to an agreement said political observers think many commuters will not forget their overall frustration with both sides in the dispute, and that frustration could spill over into wider political issues:

Those issues could range from policies directly related to BART — such as proposals to ban transit worker strikes, or future tax measures to improve the agency's infrastructure — to ones more generally tied to public employees, such as the burgeoning support for a statewide ballot measure to curb pension benefits.

"There's disgust with both sides — people want government to work, they want infrastructure to work, and in the Bay Area, when strikes happen, people are immobilized," said Barbara O'Connor, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State Sacramento.

Cabanatuan agrees that a potentially serious issue for BART may come when the transit system tries to raise money through the ballot to modernize its stations and systems.

"A lot of the routine maintenance, including modernizing stations and doing general repairs and that sort of thing, are going to require them to go to the ballot and either ask for some kind of a bond measure, which would raise property taxes or a sales tax measure, and the less favorably the public looks at BART, the less likely it is they're going to be able to get the majorities they need to pass that," Cabanatuan said.

What can BART do to win back its riders and the larger public? KTVU's story quoted advice to BART from public relations strategist Sam Singer, who spent two decades consulting for the transit agency before his contract ended earlier this year. "BART has to push the reset button on its communications," said Singer. "They’ve got to not make any more errors and they've got to communicate even more with the public to overcome what's going on now."

Listen to Mina Kim's  conversation with Michael Cabanatuan here.