Streetsblog San Francisco

Photos: Matthew Roth

AC Transit riders took solace in the news on Tuesday that the agency plans to restore service that was cut twice this year after a labor arbitrator settled a contract dispute. Transit advocates worry, however, about the agency’s long-term solvency and have called on elected officials to develop significant revenue measures for funding buses in the East Bay.

The arbitration panel in the AC Transit labor negotiation reached a decision on a contract between the transit district and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192, which represents 1,750 of its bus drivers and mechanics, saving the agency $38 million over three years. The binding decision calls for increased contributions from the members to their health and benefit plans, as well as work rule and holiday changes.

AC Transit had cut service in March by 7.8 percent, or $10.3 million in service hours and in October by 7.2 percent, or $11.4 million in service hours. Fare increases this year amounted to an increase of 25 cents per trip for local riders and $10 for the price of a monthly pass. Transbay riders have been paying an increase of 50 cents per trip and $16.50 for a monthly pass. Youth, senior and disabled riders saw a hike of 15 cents per local trip and 30 cents for Transbay trips.

Because of the arbitration decision, AC Transit also expects to halt an additional round of cuts approved to go into effect in December, including the elimination of weekend service on lines affecting nearly 25,000 riders, what transit advocates and church groups lamented as a “death spiral.”

“There are no winners or losers in this arbitration,” AC Transit Interim General Manager Mary King said in a statement. “Both AC Transit and the union focused on what is best for the riders and taxpayers of this district and what is in the long-term interest of maintaining public transit for the people we serve.”

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Image: BART

As part of the complicated funding swaps BART staff arranged with regional and state transportation planners to proceed with the Oakland Airport Connector following the loss of $70 million in federal stimulus dollars due to civil rights deficiencies, the transit operator was hoping to get a federal loan with a low interest rate and a favorable interest payment schedule.

Unfortunately for OAC proponents, as reported recently in Project Finance Magazine (subscription needed), the US DOT announced its Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loans for FY 2010-11 and the OAC was not among the projects selected. BART had applied for $105 million from the feds for the $484 million project.

Because BART has enough cash on hand to proceed with preparations for construction and actual groundbreaking in early 2011 (versus the ceremonial event held last month) and because TIFIA loans can be applied for continuously, the agency was not particularly concerned with the news.

“Quite frankly we don’t need the money right now,” said BART spokesperson Linton Johnson, who explained that in BART’s experience TIFIA loans are prioritized for projects that urgently need them. He also pointed to Federal Transit Administrator (FTA) Peter Rogoff’s assurances that BART would get a $25 million New Starts grant when the feds accept its revised civil rights compliance . “This shouldn’t be an indication that we’re not eligible for it or that something is wrong.”

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Image: BART

As transit operators across the Bay Area transition to the Clipper card, one of the bigger challenges each faces is communicating the timeline to their most loyal customers, those who buy high value and monthly passes.

The deadline to transition to Clipper for the  50,000 BART riders who have used EZ Rider cards for transit trips over the past few years has already been pushed back by more than two months, to mid-December, and now BART is concerned the 41,000 remaining EZ Rider account holders will experience an unpleasant surprise when the system is turned off next month.

“We are worried what the impact is going to be on our customers,” said BART spokesperson Linton Johnson. “We’ve tried and tried to gently encourage them to switch over to Clipper because the deadline is coming.”

Though originally slated for October 1st, the transition was delayed due to “concerns pertaining to Clipper system features and technical readiness,” according to a document [pdf] prepared by BART general manager Dorothy Dugger for the board of directors. Directors were expected to discuss the progress of the transition at a board meeting today, but that meeting was canceled due to a lack of quorum.

“Significant progress has been made on key issues pertaining to the EZ Rider/Clipper transition,” Dugger writes, noting that 9,000 EZ Rider customers have already canceled their accounts, presumably in the transition to Clipper. Though there are still 41,000 EZ Rider accounts open, that doesn’t mean all of those customers don’t also have a Clipper card.

“BART High Value Discount product auto load sign-ups have increased from 5,700 in June to 26,000 in September, an indicator that the Clipper High Value Discount product is gaining in acceptance as a substitute for EZ Rider,” writes Dugger. “Some of these 26,000 HVD auto load Clipper users may also still have an EZ Rider account open.”

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Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

When the San Francisco Giant’s won the World Series, fans took to the streets in uproarious celebration, though some got carried away in a boozy frenzy that led to burning mattresses, commandeering SFFD fire trucks and an ugly brawl at 22nd and Mission. Fortunately, when the city held the official parade and celebration on Wednesday, fans did something far more civil: they took public transportation to the Civic Center, in dramatic numbers.

BART announced that ridership was 522,200, obliterating the previous ridership record of 442,100 during the emergency closure of the Bay Bridge when an eyebar snapped unexpectedly last year.

“We are truly thankful for all the Bay Area residents who chose to ride BART to this historic event,”  BART Board President James Fang said in a statement. “I’m delighted that despite the huge crowds in the morning, we continued to shine in the area BART is best known for – and that’s being on-time.”

Despite the crush of riders in the morning before the parade, which required police to temporarily close stations near Civic Center to allow crowds to exit, on-time performance exceeded 90 percent.

“[Wednesday] was not only a testament to the hard work of our employees, it also highlights the importance of the investment taxpayers made in this system decades ago and the faith our riders have in us today and hopefully for years to come,” said Fang.

According to BART, the highest daily ridership on a sustained basis, without special circumstances or events, occurred in September 2008 when BART averaged about 380,000 customers per day. Since that time, ridership has dropped, which the agency attributed to the economic slump and the high unemployment that followed. In recent months, ridership numbers have rebounded and are now approaching 350,000 riders per average weekday. Despite the economic slump, BART says riders have set nearly all of the agency’s top ten ridership days in just the past two years.

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Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

Though the dust is far from settled in the elections from Tuesday, some results will have a noted impact on transit in the Bay Area and the state. We’ll have more coverage of the election results on smart growth in a future installment

San Francisco Proposition G

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition G, stripping the City Charter of the clause guaranteeing Muni operators the second highest salary and benefits package of any transit operator in the nation. The final vote was 64 percent for, 36 percent against. The Transport Workers Union (TWU) 250-A, the union that represents Muni operators, will now have to negotiate wages and benefits with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) through collective bargaining, a maneuver Prop G supporters hoped would compel the union to ditch some of its work rules deemed to be inefficient and outdated.

While the SFMTA declined to discuss its bargaining strategies before it sits down with TWU to negotiate a new contract to replace the one that expires on June 30, 2011, SFMTA CEO Nat Ford released a statement about the results.

“Proposition G gives the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency more flexibility to improve the work we do for San Francisco residents, visitors and the business community,” said Ford. “It will allow us to be more creative in our efforts to improve service and expand our programs for our customers, while at the same time respecting the hard but vital work of our operators and the other employee units covered by the proposition. We look forward to working cooperatively with the unions.”

According to the SFMTA, negotiations with TWU will likely begin shortly in the hopes they are able to negotiate a new contract before next summer and avoid an impasse. Representatives for the TWU did not return repeated requests for comment.

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BART officials and Contra Costa County politicians break ground on the eBART extension. Photos: Matthew Roth

For BART, the past month marks the beginning of two very different extensions, though both have been controversial. After surmounting vigorous opposition to the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC), BART inaugurated the 3.2 mile, $484 million extension last week with great fanfare and a large crowd of construction workers and politicians proud to get the project underway.

Today’s groundbreaking for the 10-mile, $462 million eBART extension was a much smaller affair, though the speakers emphasized job creation nearly as heavily as they did during the OAC event.

“BART is very fortunate this month, we’ve celebrated two groundbreakings, this and the Oakland Airport Connector,” said BART board director Joel Keller, a champion of the eBART project. “I think the important thing to remember here today is, we are building a transportation extension, but we’re also stimulating the economy. When eBART is in operation, there will be 40-80 permanent jobs and during the construction phase there will be 600 construction jobs.”

The eBART project will extend from the current Pittsburg Bay Point terminus along the Highway 4 median to a new Hillcrest Avenue Station in Antioch. The extension is expected to carry as many people as an additional lane of traffic on Highway 4.

The eBART extension is funded mostly through bridge tolls and a Contra Costa sales tax measure and will accompany the widening of Highway 4 to six and eight lanes along the corridor from the existing four lanes. As Caltrans widens the highway, it will build infrastructure for BART’s trains in the median.

“For those who sit in traffic every day in this corridor, it’s clear that we need major improvements to address the growth in East Contra Costa County,” said Bijan Sartipi,  Caltrans’ Region 4 Director. “It will take a multi-modal approach, also being mindful of the environment and smaller carbon footprint.”

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The officials who supported the Oakland Airport Connector, in some cases for decades. Photos: Matthew Roth

After decades of political wrangling, BART is on the verge of building the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC), a $484 million, 3.2 mile automated people mover that will connect the Coliseum BART Station with the Oakland international Airport. BART held a ceremonial groundbreaking yesterday with most of the significant East Bay political establishment, two weeks before the agency gives the Parsons/Flatiron/Doppelmayr team the order to proceed with design and construction.

“There’ve been many pitfalls throughout this process,” said U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, a champion of the OAC and part of the California delegation that helped get further assurances in the eleventh hour from Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff that the project was still going to get nearly $25 million in federal New Starts funding. “I just want you to know that countless Bay Area residents, all of you have come together to make sure this day happened.”

Lee led off a round of speeches that went for more than one hour, as each speaker thanked the others on the dais and congratulated everyone for their perseverance. A throng of workers representing the trade unions that hope to work on the project circled the large tent BART erected for the event, roaring with applause every time a speaker mentioned jobs and the project labor agreement with local hiring and zip-code priority guarantees.

The exact number of jobs the project will create has long been a controversy, one that project opponents highlighted to cast aspersions on BART. Even at the groundbreaking, the number was in flux, from several speakers that referenced the 2,500-5,000 direct and indirect jobs over the course of the four years of construction (numbers derived from state and federal jobs creation metrics), to the “several hundred direct jobs” referred to by Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums.

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Flickr photo: AgentAkit

As Bay Area transit agencies transition from paper passes to the Clipper smart card, operators like the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni, are hoping their most loyal customers take the switch in stride. To this end, the SFMTA started selling its November Muni A Fast Passes and disability Regional Transit Connection (RTC) passes online this weekend, and the agency is working overtime with targeted outreach to familiarize the nearly 50,000 A Pass and RTC users how to load their re-usable Clipper cards before the November 1st deadline, when those paper passes will no longer be accepted for Muni service.

“We have more than 40,000 customers who use the “A” pass and more than 7,000 who use the RTC stickers, so it’s critical that they make this transition as early as possible,” SFMTA Executive Director Nat Ford said in a release.

Even before the mandatory switch for A Pass and RTC holders, Muni customers have increasingly adopted Clipper on their own accord. When MTC officially announced the transition from Translink to Clipper on June 16th, Muni realized only 20,000 average weekday boardings using the smart card. As of October 8th, Muni had 108,000 average weekday boardings, a five-fold increase and half of total Bay Area Clipper usage. Of the slightly more than 40,000 current A Pass users, roughly one third already use Clipper. RTC pass holders will automatically be given Clipper-compatible cards when they renew, either online or in person at vendors or SFMTA customer service centers.

The SFMTA began deploying customer service ambassadors in August along with the Clipper street teams that have been providing information and customer service since the end of 2008 in Muni Metro stations. According to the SFMTA, since December 2008, the Muni Clipper street teams have distributed more than 70,000 adult cards and accepted more than 20,000 seniors and youth applications [sample Clipper outreach schedule pdf here for this week]. The SFMTA also noted it has undertaken an aggressive internal campaign to inform SFMTA employees, especially frontline Muni personnel, of the Clipper transition and how to assist customers. This campaign includes an orientation and multiple update videos as well as in-person training, of note after Muni operators on cable cars had reportedly been unable to work hand-held Clipper card readers.

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A partial train wrap, known as a "Kong," could bring in additional revenue for BART. Image BART.

Unlike every other transit agency in the Bay Area, BART was able to stanch the economic bleeding over the past year and realize a modest operational surplus at the end of FY 2010 in June. The agency doesn’t have a warm and fuzzy feeling, however, and Board President James Fang has asked staff to present additional revenue generating measures at tomorrow’s board meeting.

Though Fang said BART’s fiscal stewardship over the past two years set an “example of how to run a transit system in a recession,” the agency had to anticipate the next economic turmoil with greater diversity of revenue sources. “We can’t rest on our laurels. Any way you can get more revenue into the system, that means you don’t have to lay off people,” he said.

Over the past month, BART staff looked into numerous best practices from transit operators around the world and narrowed the more realistic options to five [pdf]. Two of them would involve setting up video monitors in stations and train cars, though both have differing benefits and challenges. According to BART spokesperson Linton Johnson, Titan’s current contract for advertising in stations gives them the right to bid first on station monitors, which they are expected to exercise with a proposal.

Johnson was clear to highlight the monitors in station and cars, if they were voted on by the board, would be video only and primarily provide BART arrival and delay information, as well as some news, weather and advertising.The staff report notes the station monitor option has generated little interest beyond the Titan proposal, so should it not meet BART’s revenue needs, the option might not proceed due to lack of interest. Until the proposal from Titan comes through, BART had no estimate on how much revenue the station monitors could generate.

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Photo: Matthew Roth

At a recent BART board meeting where directors discussed various options for spending or saving an operating budget surplus, Director Tom Radulovich suggested the board consider the ramifications of instituting an unlimited ride monthly pass, which had been previously discussed but never seriously pursued. The issue came up most recently in 2005 and 2006 when BART’s board of directors requested the agency look into the costs and benefits of monthly passes. The staff report [pdf, detailed pdf] recommended not moving to a monthly pass and the board declined to act.

Radulovich wasn’t satisfied with the findings then and he currently laments what he characterized as staff’s intractability on the issue.

“There’s a conservatism in the BART finance group, they’re just very attached to the current fare structure,” said Radulovich, who noted similar conclusions were drawn when considering a Daly City Fast Pass option. Radulovich pointed to the Muni/BART Fast Pass arrangement that has been in place since 1983 as evidence that monthly passes shouldn’t be discounted outright within BART’s fare policy.

BART spokesperson Linton Johnson said BART is reluctant to significantly alter its fare structure because it is working well right now. He said the current fares are a large reason why BART realizes 55 percent farebox recovery (e.g. how much of the cost of a trip is paid for by the fare), nearly double the next best Bay Area agency (Caltrain). He also noted the agency had a multi-million dollar budget surplus in a year when most transit operators cut service and laid off workers, in no small part because it charges a distance-based fare.

“We’re hesitant because we’re so reliant on sales tax and ridership,” said Johnson. According to Johnson, 90 percent of all revenue comes from the farebox and the district sales tax assessed in BART counties. “We’re hesitant to tinker with things that are working right now.”

Johnson pointed to the findings of the 2005 presentation, where BART staff determined offering a monthly pass would only bump ridership by 1 percent, while costing the agency a $2.7 to $5.9 million one-time investment to convert the existing BART fare revenue cards to monthly passes and $5.4 million annually in lost revenue. At the time of the study, 120,000 regular riders accounted for 65 percent of BART’s farebox revenue, while 1.4 million annual leisure or non-frequent riders accounted for the remainder. In conclusion, staff suggested when BART converted over to Clipper, the agency could realize gains and offer rewards to regular riders in numerous ways without converting completely to a monthly pass.

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