BART weighs options as lower ridership results in financial woes
Once celebrated for its financial independence, BART is now facing a financial crisis. In large part because of just that, its dependence on riders.
"I do not enjoy driving in traffic. I easily could I mean, it's probably about the same amount of time," Pamela Herhold told CBS News Bay Area. "Every afternoon I see the traffic slowdown on 24 and I'm just super glad that that's not me."
Herhold takes BART to work every day. She's the assistant general manager for performance and budget at the agency.
"It's a quick 16-minute trip on BART. So it's a great time to catch up with some emails and do some reading," she said.
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Herhold is tasked with keeping BART's budget balanced. It's no easy feat as BART ridership plummeted during the pandemic and hasn't fully bounced back.
Before the pandemic, she was one of nearly a half a million people BART moved across the Bay Area each day. Now she's one of roughly 200,000 daily riders, according to BART and there's little evidence of ridership increasing.
"It is disappointing, but I still look around and I see the people riding but I knew the type of the people that are commuting, you know, we provide an extraordinarily wonderful service from Antioch all the way into San Francisco, where a lot of low-income transit dependent riders use the system. You know, even at 200,000 trips a day, not 420,000 trips a day, we're still very important to the Bay Area. We can still be a wonderful, usable system and 200,000 trips a day," she explained.
But the question of returning ridership is a problem without a clear solution. People can't be forced to take BART, as more people work from home.
"Now that the pandemic has hit in our ridership is down to 40%," Herhold explained. "We are about $300 million short in fare revenue. But the interesting thing is, that puts us in line with just about every other transit operator in North America."
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In 2019, transit agencies across the nation recovered an average 36% of their revenue from fares alone as New York and Chicago metro transit agencies saw roughly 40% farebox recovery according to the Federal Transit Authority.
In 2022, that average hovered around 21%. But the challenge BART faces is relying less on rider revenue like other major transit agencies.
Before the pandemic, BART was seen as a nationwide model of self-sufficiency. In 2019, fares accounted for 86% of total operating revenue and covered 61% of its operational expenses.
At the height of the pandemic, Bart could only cover 7% of its operating expenses with fares. In 2022, that number climbed to just 17%.
Even as ridership sank, the transit system continued operating at a high level, ready for communities to bounce back.
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"When ridership drops as it has dramatically, and that farebox revenue is not coming in, you have to make the adjustments to ensure your system is running efficiently and appropriately under the circumstances in which you find yourself and BART didn't do that," said State Senator Steve Glazer (D-7th District).
Glazer's district is home to six BART stations and a huge portion of BART's ridership. He's long been a watchdog of the massive transit agency and is now a vocal critic.
"I've been a close observer of their financial shenanigans for quite a while," Glazer told CBS News Bay Area. "They're really important to us, not just to people, but to our environment. And we need them to get their act together and so far, it's not a pretty picture."
And some riders agree. Phil Maisel used to ride Bart regularly a decade ago but today chooses to ride sparingly like to get to the airport.
"I try to avoid it to be honest," Maisel explained. "To me it's an awkward system, it's not a commuter train, it's not efficient for getting in and around the city of San Francisco."
He says since the pandemic the biggest improvement he's seen is the cars themselves and rider Eddy agrees.
He and his dog London take BART at least once a week with no plans to stop. But says his biggest concern lies with security.
"It's good we got new trains and they feel more secure than the old ones," Eddy said.
As the pandemic began to hit, BART leadership widely agreed to sustain operations and continues to withhold cuts despite strikingly low ridership.
But this is where Glazer says his frustrations have boiled over. After being appointed to a Senate Select Committee on Bay Area Public Transit at the start of the year, he lasted just weeks before resigning.
"I wasn't going to be part of that dog and pony show," Glazer explained. "The pandemic was not of their choosing, it happened. But what they failed to do was make any of the adjustments in the system with the collapse of ridership. They didn't cut back trains, it didn't cut back staff. They were running everything as if nothing had changed."
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And the spending didn't stop. BART's transportation and maintenance expenses have exceeded $550 million since 2018, topping $650 million in 2022.
After receiving a federal bailout that's expected to dry up in mid-2024, the system moved forward with existing capital projects like a $90 million fare gate program that assistant general manager of infrastructure delivery Sylvia Lamb calls a "game changer" for BART.
"It's the number one capital project that we have right now," she explained.
A game changer aimed at boosting ridership and combating fare evasion that BART said accounted for up to $25 million annually in lost revenue pre-pandemic.
"Almost anybody can push through them and lift up those sleeves, they can jump over easily. They can climb under them easily and we see that if we stood here for four more minutes, you'll see at least a few people that are doing that," said Lamb.
But it's projects like these BART that is confident will bring back riders, again putting their self-sustaining model in the spotlight
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"In addition to stopping fare evading or alleviating fare evading the biggest thing is to bring riders back and if they feel safer, and they it looks cleaner, and that we feel like we're gonna get more ridership back," said Lamb.
It's a high-risk-high-reward scenario, one nobody could have seen coming.
"Never a dull moment," Herhold explained. "It's you know, it's just this very thorny problem that we spend every day trying to solve, trying to identify how we can be better."
Herhold said that BART is working to change their revenue model away from dependency on riders, but it could still have taxpayers footing the bill down the tracks.
"BART is the backbone of the bay area," she said. "We touched five counties who served you know, we connect to I think over 20 transit agencies, but there's not one single solution as often up together as a package."
That backbone fighting for use across the Bay Area. Keeping trains and residents moving forward.
Relief could be on the horizon.
In mid-November, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission – which is responsible for Bay Area transportation coordination – will vote on sending an additional $352 million to BART over the next two years.
If this is approved, Herhold said it's expected to extend Bart's financial runway significantly and give them extra time to restructure their funding model to become less reliant on ridership ahead of a 2026 ballot measure that could add a tax to subsidize local transit agencies including BART.