BART director: We're running out of folks willing to ride again

Board director Debora Allen advocates for smart fiscal management at the Bay's bankrupt transit agency. Here, Allen outlines how to raise revenue via creating repeat customers. Really, if issues of reliability, affordability, and safety (flashing back to Opp Now co-founder Escher's jarring BART rumpus) persist, is it surprising that we aren't even reaching half of pre-Covid ridership?

So there's a menu for fiscal stability.... And then we can return to the basic mission, and that's focused on running good transit. And that really comes down to the public safety area.

So my areas of focus for BART are two right now. It's the customer focus. How do we get people to want to return to BART? And there have been plenty of surveys on this, and I have spent seven years listening to people text me, call me, message me, email me, whatever, and tell me what they experience on the trains. So by the way, when we get to the Q&A, you can't tell me any story about your ride on BART that will surprise me. I've heard it all.

(41:25–43:05)

The customer, what will bring them back? And so I've boiled it down to this: To get riders on BART, first of all, you have to have the pool of people who need it. They have to have somewhere that they need to go that BART goes to or goes close to that they can get to easily on BART. And then, once you have that pool of people, you have an overlapping pool of, of those people, who wants it? And this pot of people, the people who need BART, has shrunk drastically, through no fault of BART.... everything that BART does can impact [who wants BART, out of those who could use its services]. And it is the rider satisfaction; the reliability and the efficiency (BART has struggled terribly with these new trains and the reliability of them); and the affordability (fares just went up again); and the clean environment; but most importantly, top of every survey, do I feel safe?

(43:42–45:12)

So, then we get into the rider experience, the quality of life issues. And these things have plagued BART since when I started, in January 2017. It's the homelessness, the panhandling, the cleanliness, the crime, the drug use....

(45:29–45:45)

Watch the whole thing here.

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