It’s not every day a city holds a toilet paper cutting ceremony, but that’s exactly what happened last week when San Francisco helped celebrate the reopening of two bathrooms in the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s Powell Street station.
“I can’t stress enough how this action today is symbolic of a new era at BART,” Board President Rebecca Saltzman told reporters at the toilet paper cutting.
BART is indeed in desperate need of a new era. Before the pandemic, crime was already running rampant on the trains. An Alameda County civil grand jury found violent crime had doubled on BART in the four years prior to 2019, with more than a 115% increase in aggravated assault, homicide, rape, and robbery.
Then, when the pandemic hit, BART ridership absolutely cratered. And it hasn’t come back. Where Houston and Dallas public transportation ridership has risen back to at least half of what it was before COVID-19, BART ridership is stuck at around 25%. And this has the system facing billion-dollar shortfalls in years to come.
For now, BART is surviving off of the federal government’s coronavirus bailout, but if riders don’t come back, that will change. “Without significant additional revenues, BART cannot continue to operate as it does now,” BART Budget Director Chris Simi told BART’s board of directors last year.
Hence the big production surrounding the opening of the Powell Street station’s two restrooms and a dozen other scheduled openings in the coming months, at a total cost of $14 million.
Mind you, none of these are new bathrooms. They are all existing bathrooms that were closed in the aftermath of 9/11 and then never reopened as BART management quickly realized how much money they could save keeping them closed.
“I have a plate holding in my eyeball because it could fall out if I sneeze or cough too hard,” BART janitor Anthony Delgado told local reporters when he recounted the time he was attacked by a rider who accused him of throwing away his lunch.
BART says it will pay to have a full-time attendant at each one of its newly reopened restrooms — for at least the first two months.
After that, good luck finding a clean place to do your business on the BART system. That is, if the entire system hasn’t already gone down the drain.
