BART budget officials said Thursday that they do not expect the agency’s operating revenue to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024 at the earliest, with growth not expected until late in the 2020s.
While BART officials expect the agency’s budget to be balanced when the fiscal year ends June 30, due in large part to federal relief funding, BART’s revenue during the 2020-2021 fiscal year is only expected to reach $526 million, a nearly 45 percent tumble from the $953 million the agency brought in during the 2018-2019 fiscal year.
That drop in revenue was driven principally by average weekday ridership plummeting to around 10 percent of both pre-pandemic levels and projected ridership figures.
But even with greater access to coronavirus vaccines over the coming months and the Bay Area workforce’s eventual return in some form to office buildings, agency officials don’t expect ridership to return even to 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels until the end of the decade.
BART Financial Planning Director Michael Eiseman told the agency’s Board of Directors that BART’s ridership growth in recent years has been inextricably linked to the economic growth of downtown San Francisco.
“Before the pandemic, two-thirds of our trips had an origin or destination at Market Street station,” Eiseman said. “So if those regional travel trends do shift away from downtown, our recovery may depend on our ability to adapt and serve other markets.”
Board Director Rebecca Saltzman argued the agency should be creative in its efforts to bring back riders, potentially offering group train fare packages and discounts for using the system outside of peak ridership hours.
“We’re not going to have all those five-day commuters,” Saltzman said. “But what if we have two or three-day commuters and they’re also going out at night and on the weekends? Can we get those people back?”
BART has taken multiple steps to cut costs since the pandemic began, including a freeze on new hires, some service cuts, the elimination and deferral of capital project allocations and a retirement incentive program, which resulted in 7 percent of BART’s workforce electing to retire early, according to Eiseman.
Eiseman also noted that the agency should avoid further cuts to train service, which is likely to hinder revenue growth in the coming years, even when assuming the system’s extension into downtown San Jose is completed as scheduled around 2030.
Board Director Janice Li called on the agency to consider how its operating revenue and budget will be broken down in the coming months and years, especially if the rebound of ridership is even more sluggish than expected.
“What does it look like in a world where we are only at, say, 25 percent, 30 percent farebox recovery rate and how do we make up the rest of that pie chart,” she said. “Because that changes our advocacy, our grant strategy, how we’re getting state and federal funding in ways that other transit agencies do.
“What does it look like if we are really dependent on federal funding and how does that make it really, perhaps, unpredictable for budgeting?” she said.
Multiple board members agreed with Li’s request.
“I think that really the next six-to-nine months are going to be very telling about what does BART look like going forward,” board president Mark Foley said.
37 comments
I would like to hear someone who uses BART to give a report on what things on Bart have been like recently. I know empty but what about safety and cleanliness. I may want to use BART to go into the city sometime.
I take BART into the city once or twice a week. No improvement on cleanliness. Still see homeless every time I ride. Sometimes on the train and other times hanging out in the station. Only improvement is the lack of crowding and lines. Plenty of parking too.
Anon
Thank you.
My son’ friend got attacked on BART ( he was going to SF) a few months ago, he said he would not take BART again.
He was a competitive wrestler in high school and was able to handle the situation, fortunately.
mint
Glad he was able to protect himself. No BART ombudsman around I guess.
My FIL, who is vaccinated, took it to SFO this week during rush hour at 8 am, parking garage and trains were completely empty. Hoods don’t get up that early.
Revenue and ridership are way down, but compensation is higher than budget including OT. Bart is going to need to shutdown to bring Unions back to table as prior agreement, which was barely affordable then, is untenable now.
Unfortunately, that will never happen. Bart will hike the fares and parking fees to gouge the folks who need to ride Bart. Then they will float more bonds to borrow the shortfall.
They will cry poverty and tell us the increased costs are necessary to “provide a safe, diverse, and inclusive transit service that is the envy of the world” (or something similar). They will beg for, and receive federal funds because, afterall, “Riding Bart is the best way for concerned commuters to reduce their carbon footprint” One thing they will NEVER do is hold the unions’ feet to the fire and force some tough choices or reduce their budget.
We will all pay for their malfeasance. Maybe Rep. Steve Glazer can force some change, but i really doubt it.
BART budget officials said Thursday that they do not expect the agency’s operating revenue to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024 at the earliest, with growth not expected until late in the 2020s.
2020s? am I missing something
No, not missing anything. This is just the way BART thinks and sees things.
I do want to know if the automated fare increases are still going to happen as scheduled until 2024.
I stopped riding BART years ago. Just kept getting more expensive and the same time getting more descusting. In the 90s and early 2000s , I would take BART just to walk around Berkeley or S.F for a day. Now I would have to have no other options and a really good reason to get on BART.
BART had just received a huge infusion of funds from a bond measure, as I recall, not long before the pandemic restrictions took effect. I also seem to recall they were mentioned as a beneficiary of one of the recently passed tax-measures increases. What exactly are they doing with all that money? Not enough, apparently.
Bay Area Rancid Transit
When it’s cheaper and safer to drive a car…..
Can people still jump the fare gates. They need to fix that, it would keep the ‘sleepers’ off the trains and less feces and urine would exist around the system.
Yes there the fare jumpers are still at it. The station agents can’t do anything about it. Security is nowhere to be found.
From what I’ve seen most of the sleepers just walk through the exit gate. The jumpers are a younger crowd. I got on a “zombie” car not that long ago on a rainy day. About twelve people on the car all with vacant looks or asleep. I moved toward the middle of the train at the next stop and it was not as bad.
@idiots
Funny how you can be on the worst, weirdest, train, but if you just get up and walk to the door and go to the next car, everything is peaceful and serene.
Also to anyone reading, if you get on a train and your car has broken AC and it feels like a sweatbox, just go to the next car!
Correction: no there intended in first sentence.
My daughter and I drove by Lafayette BART a few days ago before noon and the overflow lot at the southeast corner of Deer Hill and Oak Hill was almost empty. The lot at the southwest corner of Deer Hill and Oak Hill was almost empty. The main lots were pretty full. I would say ridership was down at least 75% on that day at that station.
I used that same station daily in the mid-80s and if you did not get to the outermost overflow lot by 7:15 AM, you were out of luck. Concord, Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill stations were even worse.
I cannot envision BART surviving at that ridership level. It either has to scale down in a big way or become a mini-Amtrak, dependent on taxpayer subsidies to survive.
IMO, they should scale-down as needed, maintaining the cars for future use should things pick-up in the future.
Now that companies realize they can function equally or better with employees working from home, it is possible things will never return to how they were. And all that money saved on office space is a big incentive to keep employees working at home. However, I don’t think being isolated at home does anything good for the employee’s mental health, especially the younger and single employees.
We’re not going to be required to go back into the office until at least July. I have a carpool lined up for then because on the 3 days or so I have to go in, I don’t want to ride BART. I love the group ticket idea though, good god, no wonder it is a failing business.
Cut back on high salaries and benefits.No more gravy on the potatoes.
Dare I ask the actual total cost to transport a person from Concord to San Francisco including parking? Would the board be willing to make that figure public?
They don’t have to – all you need is basic arithmetic.
Take a look at their budget for fiscal year 2019, which was the last full year of “normal” operation. Their operating expenses were about a billion and capital expenses were another billion. Annual ridership was about 120 million trips. So the total cost was slightly less than $20/trip. Make it $15 for a trip from East Bay to Financial District and $30/trip from East Bay to SFO.
Now with Covid their total budget is still about $2 billion, but the annual ridership went down to may be 50 million trips and the cost of average trip is probably up to $40.
Provided your car does about 25MPG and you have free parking when you arrive, it’s basically a wash.
Having just one passenger totally makes driving a safer, smarter, cheaper option.
Pack that car with driver + 3 passengers and they’d be saving something like idk $15-$20 per day?
OFC to be my own devil’s advocate public transportation is supposedly safer than private automobile transportation by a good margin, but does that include being robbed, raped, or otherwise hassled massively on public transportation? No one is trying to grab your butt or take your purse at 75MPH in a Corolla.
I probably have 2000 hours on BART, I saw police patrol through the cars twice.
Have not taken BART in decades. Last time was going to a Clash concert in the city. Lost my wallet on the train with my concert ticket in it. Obviously did not get to see the show but my wallet was returned in the mail a year later with everything in it except the cash, but by that time I had replaced everything.
“BART ridership, revenue likely to lag behind pre-pandemic levels for most of the decade”.
Either these people are visionary, or they have a keen grasp of the obvious.
My guess is the latter.
Since people no longer go to San Francisco for business or travel, its doubtful there will be much of a recovery well beyond the next decade. They either need to lay off staff or continue to milk the feds now that they have a sympathetic White House. My guess is the latter.
They need to back it up . . . . then go have a virtual meeting with Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Who voted last September, 12 to 1 to mandate large employers must have 60 percent or more of their employees telecommute on any given work day.
Oh Gosh, does that screw up that liberal transit village fantasy they’ve been pushing since the late 1960s. But of course back then, that climate guru hadn’t yet invented the internet.
This 60% working from home thing that’s gonna screw bart over,
an this is what’s so great about it, is being done to combat “climate change”.
So mass transit that was going to save us by taking vehicles off the road gets taken out by high speed internet.
All ya have to do just flip open the laptop while you’re still in bed,
no vehicles have to move.
PROBLEM SOLVED
Bingo Ringo
My husband goes into San Francisco about once a week. No parking issues. Cleaning is non existent. The usual suspects still jumping the gates with no enforcement. Hubby did notice these BART (security or ambassadors) in blue uniforms but not sure what their sole purpose was. Hours of operation and train schedules reduced.
Lower the price. The economics of driving to SF with a 25mpg car means you save basically no money by taking bar rather than driving alone. A single passenger means you’ve saved something like $5-$10 dollars collectively, provided you find some place to park for free.
Kick out the homeless and the bums and the dangerous types. We’ve all see some crazy stuff on BART and in BART stations.
Quit being political and politically correct. BART literally refused to release footage of people who violently mugged BART passengers because it would cause racial disharmony and promote racial stereotypes. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholding-surveillance-videos-of-crime-to-avoid-stereotypes/
Provide bathrooms to every paying customer, at every paying station, with reasonable upkeep. The tickets are NOT cheap, after all.
BART has bad ridership because BART is a godless, horrible mess of a public transportation system, not because of COVID.
Totally agree with all these statements. Every station except the rich suburban ones are filthy and potentially very dangerous, and those “nice” ones aren’t nice at all by any reasonable standard, just by BART standards. They’re still hotbeds for car break-ins and other crime.
Imagine being as filthy, unsafe and inefficient as BART is, yet also being so expensive that a 20MPG car with 1 driver and 1 passenger driving into SF and back from Pleasant Hill actually ends up saving the 2 occupants of that inefficient car money? The economics versus the experience is all wrong.
… ridership will never get back to pre-pandemic levels until BART cleans up the trains, gets them on-time and more reliable, and most importantly – much much safer!
Never had to commute on BART but my Wife and I would take it into San Francisco a couple times a month, usually on a Saturday, just to have Lunch and walk around. The last time we went (pre pandemic) most of the seats were occupied by the homeless and their belongings and the cars that we saw were beyond filthy. We determined that the ferry, while more expensive, was a better way to get to The City. Screw BART, build up the ferry system.
ever since that violence several years ago that led to reduced authority by the bart police which has in turn led to homeless defecating in the trains and illegal drugs being used openly on them who wants to ride bart?
in case anyone forgot there were and probably still are gangs riding the trains and robbing people.
https://tinyurl.com/4mvaserj
https://tinyurl.com/2hbv9hr6
Riding BART is convenient to get to SFO or ORD and I would use it if I were traveling by myself. I wouldn’t use it if my wife were with me because with the luggage and backpacks we would be sitting ducks. We no longer venture into SF on BART for dinner and theatre due to the seedy Powell Street & Civic Center stations and surrounding streets. I might drive to the De Young or the Legion of Honor, but that would only be if the Mona Lisa was on display.
The thought of sitting next to a stranger even with a mask, or standing check to check at rush hour is not appealing, especially at these high prices.
The city of SF has made the downtown area a GUD destination. Going to the city to shop, why?
There should be an express train that has no stops after Orinda until Embarcadero.
Bart needs to rebrand itself as being safe, healthy, clean, and civil. The thought of having boom boxers getting onto the car your playing very loud filth, acrobats flying through the air, or beggars with pathetic drugged baby’s begging. I fear that it is past the point of no return. No more transportation bond issues for Bart, perhaps there should be vote to repeal what has been enacted if BART becomes a permanent orphan.
In two weeks, it will be a solid year since I stepped foot on BART. And in two days, it will be 24 years since I began the Concord to Oakland ride round-trip, 5x a week. Count me as one of the many former daily commuters, who will never go back to that previous slog. Every Sunday, I look at my husband and exclaim how wonderful it is knowing I don’t have to BART to Oakland and back. It has been the silver lining of the pandemic.
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