Why bart is expensive

Individual transit agencies operate trains and buses, they do not plan or construct their own expansions. To bring rail to the new Salesforce Transit Center downtown, the Downtown Extension will create a short subway from the San Francisco Caltrain station. In April, the city proposed an additional subway that would add 1.

Rose cited reasons for high costs in San Francisco, including building three stations and tunneling under a big city. But in Paris, the 14 Line has stations, too, and the city is three times as dense.

However, he insists it costs far too much. California applies two cost control methods that may actually drive up costs: awarding contracts to the lowest bidder and extensive outsourcing.

Both practices are handled differently in countries with lower costs. California law requires awarding nearly all construction projects to the lowest bidder. That benefits Tutor Perini, a construction company that builds many public projects in California. In April, the city ordered Tutor Perini to rip out much of the steel track it laid because the firm deliberately substituted weaker rails than those specified. The San Francisco Examiner reported that this is likely to delay the opening of the subway and that Tutor Perini may file additional claims to recoup their costs.

Levy says agencies should disqualify contractors who engage in dodgy practices. One way to do that would be to follow an example set in Spain, where regional governments award contracts by weighing factors other than price, like technical merit and speed of delivery. But in California, much more than construction is outsourced.

Large, politically-connected construction firms routinely provide initial designs, cost estimates, and construction management. Even if the firm is excluded from a project it estimated, the practice is a conflict of interest: The entire industry benefits when public projects cost more. Trains will be added to peak hours on Saturday as well.

And finally, it's also hiring 10 "unarmed ambassadors" and 20 "crisis intervention specialists" with social work backgrounds to provide additional safety presence in the system and connect with people riding BART in need of resources, the agency said on Twitter.

While this is a sign riders are returning, ridership remains far from pre-pandemic levels, with more than , riders a day on average in It seems like BART is increasing the fares every single year.

BART Employees are overpaid! The employees who get paid very good for sitting in a box all day think that they should get paid more. I think BART should lower the fares and do something about overcrowded trains. Employees want a 5 percent annual raise over the next three years. It seems to me they are making a LOT more on overtime and these guys are balling out of control for doing nothing. What exactly DOES a station agent do? As far as I know, they talk all day, read, and adjust a fare from time to time.

Train operators? They stick their head out, make sure no one is in the door and press the button to close it. BART is dirty! About that, the trains are disgusting. I would never sit on those seats because I see some of the dirtiest people on earth sitting on them. I have even seen a guy piss and or crap himself on the seat, get up, leave a wet spot and someone else a few stops later unknowingly sit in that seat.

You just have no idea who was there before you. Oh well, just watch your BART seats! Incurable bacteria have been found on the seats! Sure one can say BART is trying to replace the seats with the new vinyl-like material for easier cleaning. But how often are those even cleaned? BART is overcrowded! My trains are so crowded in the morning that it is shoulder to shoulder standing room only. People smell, sick people spreading SARS everywhere and of course the jerk or two who snuck their bike on the car and took up 4 or 5 spaces worth of standing room.

People line up in front of the yellow lines waiting for the next train to arrive, but when it does not all of them are getting on that train so they sort of just stand there in your way. These people are just lining up to try and get on first so they can sit down and play Candy Crush or play some game on their laptop.

If you are standing still like a fat lazy American, you must stay to the right. Do not block the left side! People like me want to not only walk up these escalators but double step while running! BART hates bikes! BART can easily fix this. If they gutted the last car of every train so that it was seatless and just had a bunch of bike hooks, racks, nothing, whatever, we could all ride our bikes to BART and to the office.

But now a lot of us are forced to take buses to BART stations and leave our metal horses at home. Get on it noobs. How can you promote public transportation, saving the environment and all that but then seem so against bikes, the best form of green transportation? BART loves cars! Because of the bike problem, you are encouraged to bus or even drive your car to the station and find and pay for parking.

Most of these stations you have to get there at the crack of dawn to even find a parking spot. But if you do, you pay the parking fee and then leave your car all day. There have been many car break-in and thefts in BART parking lots.

I myself had my car broken into, in broad daylight at the MacArthur Station. I had only left it there from about noon till 2pm. The whole ordeal cost me a lot of money. BART Police may just very well be worthless. Yes, fake. However, the truth came out after someone was shot and murdered on BART. So now here we are shoulder to shoulder from the East Bay to San Francisco after leaving our bike at home and overpaying for a ride, the train stops in the Transbay Tube!

Not really. But come on get it together. I hear you have medics on stand by at Embarcadero or at least I read this. Somehow this has to be more efficient. Maybe they should be down on the platform waiting and you can get said person off the train in a matter of seconds and keep trains running on schedule.

BART trains are so loud! Is it possible that we have the loudest most deafening public transit in the country? They are loud because of imperfections in the track and they do have rail grinding machines but hesitate to do this often cause it causes them to have to replace the tracks more often. I say, because we pay such high BART fares, our ears should be the bigger priority and they should work on reducing the noise levels as much as possible.

They claim that the trains average a noise level of 70 to 90 decibels, which can indeed cause hearing loss at sustained levels. I feel as if my hearing has suffered directly as a consequence of using BART to get to work. If there is ever any sort of class action lawsuit, I would like in because of my hearing loss from BART.

Living next to a BART track does indeed bother a lot of people but many are used to the noise levels. I myself, no matter where I have lived in Oakland could hear the trains. BART is even more expensive then it appears due to the subsidies it receives from Property Tax Payers as well as a portion of the gasoline tax it receives. We did a class assignment study on BART many years ago which found that Bart was only economically viable when compared to single occupant cars, combined with the cost of bridge tolls and SF parking fees.

Originally Posted by Ultrarunner. Originally Posted by sonarrat. I thought it was subsidized through a quarter-point cut of the sales tax in Alameda, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties. Or is that in addition to these? Slauson Rosecranz. I only know what I've read in the news Ridership and the quarter cent sales tax do not come close to meeting the operational funding requirements. Here is a quote from an October Oakland Tribune story: BART and the bus systems can't charge their riders a decent price because they don't have enough funding to make it cheaper, and they certainly aren't seducing more travelers from driving cars when they have no means of making their services more efficient or appealing.

The City of Dublin had to contribute 2. If BART riders had to bear the full cost of the operational expenses Capital Expenditures have historically been bond measures that Tax Property Owners.