BART – Now Less Service For More Money
Last year in 2010, BART management and officials surveyed customers to find out how they wanted a surplus of funds to be spent. For some reason unknown to me, a majority of customers chose not to get a rate discount in order to get more amenities. So far seats have been eliminated, carpets have been removed, and vegetation has been decimated at the San Leandro BART station and that’s about all I see for what might be considered improvements.
Unfortunately, these so-called improvements have not made life any better or easier for riders. Now there are insufficient hand-holds for riders on nearly every car on every train, yet the management cannot send out workers to install more straps. The vegetation removal did not address the trash the still collects and the landscape in the parking lot is an eyesore and unsanitary. Speaking of unsanitary, BART officials still absolutely refuse to send a worker to the parking lot in San Leandro to hose down the bird crap under the track. It is disgusting, but they don’t care.
But the biggest abomination is the imposition of the one dollar parking fee at San Leandro that now makes the cost of my round trip to San Francisco over $9.00 a day. I have now noticed that the parking lot is never full and most of the cars that used to park there are no longer parking at the station. I hope that the measly amount of revenue that BART is hoping to collect on the backs of the riders makes their bloated salaries justifiable now.
Today, a whole train load of people probably wanted to kill the train operator. Not only did the Richmond train pull some strange and unexplanable incident that caused the San Francisco train to be delayed pulling into San Leandro, but a rider caused the doors to jamb, which in turn made the train operator force everybody onto the tracks until the problem was solved. I was a half hour late for work.
And for this wonderful service I now have to pay an extra $5.00 a week.
