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BART delays due to police worriedness seem to be down, equal to a BART report released Tuesday. To be precise: total train minutes lost due to BART police incidents dropped from 9,878 in May to 6,380 in October. “Fewer delays due to BART police incidents not only shows safety is improving but it helps our on-time performance,” said BART General Manager Bob Powers in a statement. “This is a win-win for riders as we unhook on our transferral to ensure BART is the safest way to travel virtually the Bay.”
Of course, BART is once the “safest way to travel virtually the Bay.” A person is roughly 30 times increasingly likely to die on any given trip in a car than if they take rail transit. Nevertheless, if BART treason and thoughtless policies is upper unbearable to deter ridership, that still ways ridership drops–and, ironically, increasingly people will momentum instead, increasing vehicle miles traveled and precipitating increasingly deaths and injuries.
That’s indicated by a separate poll from the Bay Area Council from last spring that showed that “BART riders and others who have stopped using the system or reduced their use dramatically say they would return in significant numbers if crime, safety, and cleanliness issues are addressed.” Increasingly than three-quarters of respondents to the Bay Area Council Poll said they would ride BART increasingly often if it was “significantly cleaner and safer.”
BART has increased police patrols (BART currently has 207 cops) and widow to the department’s twenty Crisis Intervention Specialists and nine Transit Ambassadors. The BART police department is currently recruiting for 28 officers and one increasingly Transit Ambassador. The Ambassador program was launched in February 2020.
Meanwhile, the transit organ is moreover planning to install new and increasingly secure fare gates starting in December. These new gates were piloted at some BART elevators and at Rockridge station (See pic below).
In addition, the new schedule, introduced last month, unliable BART to eliminate near-empty train cars by shortening the least-crowded trains, wrote BART in its statement. People often don’t finger unscratched riding in near-empty cars.
Before the pandemic, BART averaged well-nigh 433,000 weekday trips. Ridership is still only 172,000 weekday trips now, although that number is slowly rising. BART is trying to pivot from a rush-hour commute service to one that is increasingly in tune with all-day transportation needs. The organ has moreover begun discussing a merger with Caltrain to consolidate financing and grow ridership by making transfers easier.
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