With California’s roadways becoming more crowded, many commuters are leaving their vehicles for public transportation. In the San Francisco Bay Area, it is no exception and transit groups like BART are feeling the crunch with increased ridership. Earlier this year, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) customers had the opportunity to see into the future when BART toured a mock-up of new equipment that is expected to enter service in a few years.
When the BART system first opened in 1972, Ronald Reagan was California’s governor, The Godfather was in theaters and Atari was releasing its seminal video game Pong. Many of the original cars are not only still in service today, but are rapidly approaching the end of their useful lives and need to be replaced.
In the late ‘90s the oldest train cars were successfully rehabilitated, adding 15 years to their life and increasing their reliability to some of the best levels in the fleet. Both the rehabilitated cars and their newer counterparts, however, will reach the end of their useful life within the next 10 years. At an average age of over 30 years old, BART is currently running the oldest big-city fleet in the United States.
Another reason that new BART cars are needed is to add capacity to the BART system to serve more riders. In the four decades since BART started service, annual ridership has steadily increased. Weekday ridership is projected to increase to 500,000 in the next 5 years and 1 million in the next 40 years. The current fleet is not capable of handling this many passengers. It will be necessary to add new cars to the fleet in order to meet growing demand.
BART started looking into new equipment and the first step was to design the new train cards from the ground up. BART is a unique rail system that has the lightest train car for its size in the United States. While this makes BART cards the most efficient, it also means that a typical off-the-shelf solution will not meet the needs of the Bay Area.
In 2012, the Bombardier Transit Corporation was chosen to build BART’s Fleet of the Future. Earlier this year, BART worked with Bombardier to construct a mock-up of a new car to give riders the opportunity to walk through, observe and give their feedback about the design, comfort, features and accessibility of the planned equipment. BART took the mock-up on a two-week tour to multiple locations throughout the Bay Area and at the end, nearly 35,000 customers participated in the outreach events.
To further the input of the design of the new equipment, the BART Board of Directors recently voted to allow real world public testing of the remaining design options for BART’s new train cars. In the summer of 2015 BART will receive 10 pilot cards to allow for testing before Bombardier begins to assemble the full order of equipment which will start arriving in 2017.
[blockquote right=”pull-right”]“The Board wants to evaluate data from real world experiences before making such an important decision that impacts all of our riders,” said Board President Joel Keller. “We want to be as responsive as possible. Let’s test out the various options and see if the issues people are most concerned with surface. We want to keep the conversation open and to be guided by actual experiences.”[/blockquote]During the last quarter of 2016, these test train cars will be put into revenue service so the public can experience the 2 options and provide feedback. The Board will need to vote again on the final design, taking into consideration feedback and observations from the test period.
For more information on BART’s Fleet of the Future, visit bart.gov/cars.
[jumbotron heading=”Mock-Up Image Gallery”][/jumbotron]
