BART wants to hear your thoughts on how we can make the roads around its stations safer.
Every day, thousands of people bike to BART stations and tens of thousands more walk on transit tracks to reach the trains.
Most people make it through without incident, but there have been traffic accidents that injured pedestrians and cyclists. So far this year, BART police have recorded two incidents where a person was struck by a vehicle on a roadway at the station, a BART spokesperson said.
BART is now seeking ideas from riders and community members to make traveling to and from stations safer and more accessible.
“We want to identify investments that could reduce or eliminate traffic deaths or injuries,” said BART spokeswoman Anna Duckworth. “This is about improving transportation infrastructure on our roads around BART stations.”
Last week, BART launched a webpage for its Safe Trips to BART program, which will initially involve surveys, town hall meetings and public outreach that will be used to develop a safety plan by spring, Duckworth said.
BART hopes that making station roads safer will increase ridership, which is currently at just 43% of pre-pandemic levels.
“We want to encourage people to use public transportation rather than driving and we also want to emphasize how much safer it is to use public transportation like BART rather than being in a vehicle,” Duckworth said.
A $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation will fund the outreach work.
Once the Safe Trips to BART action plan is released, the agency will begin working with cities and counties to apply for federal and state funding to improve safety. The amount of funding and its timing will determine when safety improvement projects begin, Duckworth said.
Duckworth said some of the improvements could include protected intersections to separate vehicles from pedestrians and cyclists, sidewalk extensions to give pedestrians more time to cross streets or changes to crosswalk traffic signals.
While the Safe Trips to BART plan is primarily aimed at making access roads to stations safer, changes could be made inside stations if that’s what the public wants, BART officials said.
Mike Villarreal, a daily BART rider from Richmond, would like to see one change: a resurfacing on the southeast exterior stairs of the downtown Berkeley station.
“When it rains, the stairs, which have small metal strips at each end, are very precarious and dangerous to go down,” he said in an email. “I have seen many people slip here and almost did so myself. The combination of no rain protection, the narrow stairs and the small metal strip making it even more slippery is very dangerous.”
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
