Rebecca Saltzman reflects on her 12 years as a BART director

How were your last few days at BART and what was on your mind as you said your goodbyes? 

I was in the BART boardroom up to the last minute attending meetings and I was going through emails. There’s a BART meeting this week and it’s odd that I’m not there. 

I’m glad I’ll continue to work on some projects in El Cerrito that I began as a BART director, like the development of El Cerrito Plaza where we are going to have 743 homes and will break ground next year. We leveraged tens of millions of dollars to get that done. BART is also starting work on a similar project at the El Cerrito Del Norte station and there are other transit issues I will be focused on in my position as a councilmember. 

Let’s go back 12 years. What did you want to change when you were first elected to BART’s board, and do you think you were successful?

I was working on my own time as a transit advocate and we weren’t getting the results we wanted from BART. There was a lot of focus there at the time on expanding the system and not on investing in the system we had. It was becoming less reliable. The infrastructure was very old and it was not going to survive the coming decades without a shift in priorities. The board wasn’t listening. 

People encouraged me to run and my No. 1 goal was ensuring we could get the system into a state of good repair. I think we achieved it. I think it sometimes gets lost in the conversation about the current financial crisis that BART passed a $3.5 billion bond measure where nearly 100% of the funding went to just reinvesting in this current system. Most of that money now has been spent down and those projects have been completed.

What were some of those projects? 

Things like bringing in the new trains but also the stuff people can’t really see like replacing the track, which almost all of it was the original track from the 1960s and ’70s. Replacing computer systems, some of which were operating on floppy disks, replacing the electrical equipment. If we hadn’t replaced them, there would be major delays pretty much all the time. I’m proud we convinced voters that they should invest in that and then leverage bonds for matching funds at the federal and state levels.

What was the most unexpected aspect of the day-to-day job, starting at the beginning into your last few years?

Even though I knew a lot going into the position, I think anytime you go into a very large agency or company, you don’t fully appreciate how complex it is until you’re there. You don’t realize how many different employees make the system work and how many different people are needed to get things done. 

Then there are all of our external stakeholders and voters. When we passed our measures in three counties, it was a whole lot of folks you’re thinking of as stakeholders. I don’t think I had a full appreciation for it until I was there, how incredible it is, just how many people it takes to keep it moving. 

Can you explain to readers why you chose to repair tracks before other projects or needs, for example, and also why there isn’t enough money to go around sometimes, which then leads to project postponements?

I think the reality is we all wish there was more transit funding. If there was, BART could do a lot more. Sometimes as funds become available, more is done. I think we did a really great job on the capital parts of the system by having a plan that involves the funds that we have now and then creating priorities if we have more funds. It keeps the agency focused. 

There’s no sense in building a new extension if it’s going to connect to a system that is crumbling because an extension depends on the rest of the system. BART has been really transparent about how we’re using our funds with an oversight committee for Measure RR that meets several times a year and produces a report about how funds are used. 

What’s a project or two that has unexpectedly been really important that people don’t think too much about? 

It’s been gratifying in the past year to see the reliability of the escalators and elevators because when I got to BART, they were at crisis level, going out of service constantly, especially in the downtown San Francisco stations that get the most use. We replaced and repaired those and their reliabilities are at like 98% or 99%. We look at data on what needs to be done and that’s the bar for funds to make sure those problems are being addressed.

In terms of ridership, I pulled up data about what was happening in 2012 and it looked like there were about 120 million riders that year. Right before the pandemic, you got close to 118 million. Taking out the issues the pandemic brought up, how much higher can ridership get if it’s more efficient and cheaper or is there an optimal number of people that can ride the system? Is that number the max? 

Pre-pandemic, the reason ridership was kind of flattish was because, during the peak commute hours, it was at capacity. I talked to a lot of people then who started taking the ferry instead or started to work remotely some days per week if they had jobs that allowed that. People were also taking AC Transit buses. BART trains that I wanted to get on were just too crowded. So I think that limited BART’s ability to grow. There was still capacity at off-peak hours, but at peak hours there just was no capacity. 

BART had a plan to address that through new train cars. The different layout within the new cars created more room overall. And new trains would have more cars. 

The longer-term plan, still in progress, is the new train control system. It will improve reliability and increase the capacity substantially.

How will the new system do that?

Right now, BART is limited and how close the trains can run to each other because the system sees the trains in a city block, but it can’t tell if the trains are at the beginning of the block, the middle of the block, or the end of the block. So sometimes there is a whole block of space between trains, which is quite a long space. This means you can’t run them as close together and keep them safe with the train control system. The current system is very safe, but it’s not efficient. 

The new train control system will be able to tell exactly where the trains are in relation to each other and you can run them closer together. Right now there are about 20 cars per hour during peak hours through the Transbay Tube and the new system would allow 28 or more, maybe up to 30, so that’s a big increase in capacity.

When do you think that’ll go online? 

It’ll be dependent on funding because of drops in ridership during and post-pandemic. But there are plans as ridership increases. We have the capacity to support a lot more riders. 

I think the other thing is the bar has shifted to make sure we’re serving off-peak riders as well. I think as we move further and further out of the pandemic, ridership is not going to just grow during the peak times. It’s been growing even more during the off-peak times and that’s sort of a new opportunity that has been created and that BART has leaned into.

Let’s talk about the train changes. What are your thoughts about the new train cars? Do they match your original expectations? And what was the hardest part of the process to finally switch all the old cars out for the new ones? 

Honestly, you probably should talk to our staff to find out about what’s the hardest part of it because they were the ones dealing with it. I mean what what made it better was that in the past a company had to manufacture them just for BART and then if there were issues, they sent it back to the manufacturer to fix, but with this project, we did a lot of the servicing of them working with the company, but also doing the work in house, which saved a lot of money. 

In terms of results, I think it’s phenomenal. I think everybody in the Bay Area agrees it’s a huge improvement. Having the electronic displays on the outside of the train cars and inside, having the automated announcements so that you can actually hear them. The seats are standard height where they used to be pretty low. The space for bikes on the train is so much better. That’s more important now because more and more people are bringing their bikes on the trains.

Let’s talk housing. We’ve seen a rise in housing projects around stations. The agency makes money from land leases, and the new residents in these buildings next to BART stations reduce greenhouse gases by riding trains — not driving. What was the biggest challenge to advancing these projects?

I don’t know that there’s one big thing but you know, policy and practice both at the BART level and at the state level has been important. When I got to BART, we had already done several transit development projects, and some were in progress. And they were taking forever. BART had been working on the Millbrae project for several years. There was just so much back-and-forth between the board. We realize that part of that was BART’s fault because we didn’t have clear enough policies and guidelines, so developers didn’t know what they were getting into with us. 

So staff initiated an update of our transit-oriented development policy and I worked closely with them on that and then on the affordable housing component to make it clear what our goals were. We made it very clear that at minimum there had to be 20% affordable units at every BART station and the systemwide goal is for 35%. That meant we’re gonna really look more kindly and give more points to projects that had a higher level of affordability. 

That allowed us to set an ambitious goal of building 20,000 housing units at BART stations by 2040 with 35% of those affordable. I don’t think we are quite on track to meeting that goal, but probably at least that many will be in progress by then which is exciting. 

What are some of the things you learned working on transit-oriented developments that can be used for future BART developments?

I think as BART has done more of these projects, the staff and the board learned how to work with communities and how to work with developers. I think we also learned how to create a partnership that is not steamrolling a community but working closely with them, asking about what they want, which is really different everywhere. 

At Lake Merritt, it was very important for there to be not just affordable housing but also affordable office space for nonprofits in Chinatown. No one else asked for that, but that was important to them. In El Cerrito, they wanted a library. 

Some people are still upset that there isn’t more affordable or low-income housing in these developments. 

Yeah, there were people asking for it to be 100% affordable. I understand that request since it’s on public land. It is a place where we can maximize affordability. 

The reality is, though, the funding is challenging and to get it to 100% it might have taken like 20 years. And so you know that didn’t really fit in line with the goals of the city, which is to get the housing now. 

We have to be realistic about what we can provide in a reasonable timeframe. The other reality is that market-rate housing is needed too.

What were the state and regional partnerships that were most important for BART over the last 12 years? 

The most important thing, even though it’s not necessarily the biggest thing, was what the state and the federal government did during the pandemic. They allowed BART to exist today. If we hadn’t been able to secure the hundreds of millions in state money and more than that in federal funding through several different bills, BART would’ve had to immediately just lower service levels to such a tiny level that, ultimately, I think all riders would’ve been lost. It wouldn’t have been a useful system. If you’re running a one-hour service many stations would’ve closed. Right now it’s at 50% ridership, but it was much lower. It would’ve been so destructive not just to BART but to the whole Bay Area. 

Were there any significant cuts or layoffs during the pandemic? 

There was a hiring freeze immediately, within the first couple of weeks of shelter in place. There were a lot of positions that were downsized based on what was needed at the time. We had a lot of capital funding, but we didn’t have a lot of operating funding. 

So BART worked very closely with its labor unions and figured out how to move employees around between capital projects to operations. This actually allowed BART to accelerate some projects by having more people work on them. We got very creative. 

You mentioned earlier that expansion was not the right thing to do. There was an opportunity to expand to Livermore, which was voted down. What do you think about that attempt in hindsight and should there be a renewed focus on expanding into cities outward from the central Bay Area, or should the focus continue to be bringing riders back and maybe adding infill stations between other stations? 

BART still needs to figure out how to pay for service for the coming decades, and we need to pass a regional measure to do that since no more money is coming from the federal government, and the state government probably doesn’t have enough money to do it. That has to be the financial focus moving forward. 

But it’s funny because the Livermore vote is both one of the proudest and most disappointing moments I’ve experienced while in office. I think it was absolutely the right vote to not build BART out to Livermore because it was to the middle of the highway — nowhere near the downtown, nowhere near the Livermore lab, nowhere near where anybody lived or worked. 

But Livermore is a significant population center that does need to be served. If it were happening, it still would not be a completed project. It would’ve sucked. What I’m disappointed in is we had another proposal, which was to do bus rapid transit out to Livermore and we could’ve easily gone beyond Livermore and that would’ve served downtown Livermore and the labs. I think it’s hard for folks to live out there in the Tri-Valley area to not be well served by transit. 

I think if BART is going to focus on more stations in the future, infill stations are a good idea. The distance between some Oakland stations is just wild compared to the standard in any other urban area in other parts of the country. So it’s unfortunate that we didn’t do it 20 years ago. It’s been surprising to me Oakland has taken this long to advocate for itself on infill stations because if they had done it 20 years ago when BART was extending to just about everywhere, they could’ve had them. This next round of BART directors will really need to focus on this and figure out how to get infill stations funded to better serve folks.

What do you think of the pace of the progress around getting to San Jose? I remember going to Sharks games as a kid 30 years ago, people were talking about the possibility of BART-ing from the Sharks arena back to Oakland. Yet it’s still not done. 

I think it’s been challenging because although it’s BART operating the extension, it’s been a VTA project and VTA has never done a project of that size. So they were bringing in a lot of outside expertise. They were building something from the ground up with a bunch of extensions, they had to finance it, and BART needed to sign off on it. BART also needed to send it back to VTA for some things that weren’t standard. Of course, you know, financing a project like this is difficult, and figuring out how to make construction workable for downtown San Jose is also hard. I think it will continue to move forward and I know it is disappointing for folks how long it’s taking 

What has been the most frustrating thing about doing your job? 

Either things taking a very long time or things I wasn’t able to get done. 

When I first ran for BART board, I really wanted to make trains run later at night until 2 a.m. They were doing that in D.C. at the time, which was amazing. What happened later was that they had to stop doing it because they had problems with their system breaking down because they didn’t have a long enough window at night for repairs. I learned pretty quickly, talking to other agencies, that there were major trade-offs, and with BART not being in a good state of repair, that would’ve made it even worse. I regret I was not able to do that. 

I think it could still be possible with a second BART crossing between the East Bay and San Francisco, which looks like it won’t be BART technology, but I think having some more redundancy would make that possible. It’s something I campaigned on that I wasn’t able to deliver. Sometimes I need to really hammer on an issue for months and years and work with staff and work with stakeholders, and we make it move forward. If you learn as you go, things might take a long time, but it’s still worth the effort. 

What was the most exciting thing about your job? 

I think it was just the number of different types of people I got to work with and learn from. All of the staff there are phenomenal. I mean what they did through the pandemic, keeping the system running and figuring out how to be creative with the funds that we had, their approach to problem-solving, like pushing for two years to get us to increase our off-peak service coming out of the pandemic — they figured out a way to do it without costing the agency any more money. They doubled the off-peak service. It was inspiring. 

Our city partners, along with the public, were great too. I’d have members of the public come to me and say, ‘This is an issue. I really want to see you address it,’ and I got to then help them make that happen. That was always really exciting when we were able to do that together. 

What was the biggest disagreement you had with your co-directors?

Some board members have been more skeptical about our progress on progressive policing. However, I think some of them have come along as the police department has and fully embraced having unarmed ambassadors and crisis intervention specialists. 

What would you change about the job if you were to do it again? 

If I could just wave a magic wand and change something, I think our directors either need to be paid more or need to have staff because during some weeks, on average, I would spend 15 to 20 hours on the board, but there were intense times where I was spending 40 hours a week on BART work, and since I had a nearly full-time job that meant my nights, my weekends, I was working all the time. I was taking calls on lunch breaks. It was really intense and challenging. 

When I was in between jobs, I regularly dedicated 40 hours a week to BART because there was that much work to do. Some things I couldn’t work on or I needed to prioritize a couple of big things a year instead of the five or six things I wanted to because I just didn’t have the capacity. I learned very quickly I had to say no to a lot more. I could’ve done more with a staff member. In general, local elected officials don’t get paid enough. 

You know Oakland is one of the few cities with a full-time council that is paid a full-time rate with staff. Most city councils, school boards, and local elected bodies get paid a stipend. I became a mom during this time and my daughter is five years old now, so it’s been extra challenging.

Another thing you’ve worked on is developing transit infrastructure, especially for pedestrians and cyclists, around the stations. What are some of the decisions that stand out for you around non-drivers using BART?

We created goals for how many people are going to get to BART by biking and walking and I think when they come out with their next station profile survey, I think you’ll find we reached many of those goals and that we invested a lot of funds into improving access at the station. Bike lanes within the parking lot coming to the stations, accessible areas for people to walk, and then having a grant program to measure is a part of it. I think that has been really important work. 

And then some of the policy changes were also important. In my first year on the BART board, we changed the policy so people could take bikes on the trains at any time. Before that, they couldn’t take them on during commute hours and people were going through a ton of stress going to offices at weird hours to get around this rule. Then just last year, we updated the bike rules to make it so people could take bikes on escalators. Which is funny. I wouldn’t have thought that would become the thing I would be known for. People come up to me all the time and say that the rule ‘has changed my life, to be able to bring bikes on escalators.’ 

Having better spaces for bikes is really important now and will be even more important in the future as biking has just exploded in the Bay Area, and it’s become more important to people as a way to get around.