BART revamps Civic Center Station

SAN FRANCISCO - On Tuesday, BART proudly showed off its refurbished, rehabilitated and reborn San Francisco Civic Center Station. It had become one of the most complained about and avoided stations of the 50 stations that BART operates.

For BART, the stations themselves frequently gave riders reason enough to make avoid BART. 

BART called a press conference to update its new Safe & Clean Initiative, that initially targeted Civic Center station. The station has been described as problematic, dirty, unsafe, drug infested and crime-ridden. 

Now it's as if night turned into day. "The Safe & Clean Initiative, to me, has been a turning point. for our agency," said BART Board President Bevan Dufty. "I want the riders to know, I hear them. All the new steps we're taking to bolster safety are in direct response to rider  feedback," said BART Police Chief Kevin Franklin.

BART released a rider survey of regular users. Overall customer satisfaction with Civic Center Station rose from 68% in the third quarter to 77% in the fourth quarter; a 9% increase.

Platform cleanliness rose 17% from 31% to 48%. Interior station cleanliness rose from 32% to 50%, an 18% gain.

BART Fleet of the Future (File Photo). Photo: Bay Area Rapid Transit.

Rider safety rose 20% from 32%, less than a third of riders to over half. "These are all markers that I think demonstrate how hard we are working to have the faith and the goodwill and the patronage of our riders," said Dufty.

However, there is another well researched position. "I think BART is overplaying its hand," said Laurence McQuillanm, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, one of the top think tanks in the nation and a libertarian think tank focused on political, social, economic, legal and environmental issues. "It's trying to turn on survey result into implying that their culture has changed. One period snapshot of conditions is not an indicator of the overall trend of a sustained effort," said McQuillan,

BART has promised all these improvements for years. "You want a system-wide assessment. You don't want to look at just one station," said McQuillan.

With massively depressed ridership, only the long game will do. "They're just gonna have to be, you know, a tighter, leaner operation that's really focused on the customer to bring people back," said McQuillan.

Still to do: Civic Center will be the next station to get fare gates to make sure that all 8,000 daily riders that board here pay.