Word came out today that the union which represents the Bart's station agents and train operators plans to strike starting at midnight on Sunday.
This comes after the union's negotiators concluded an agreement with Bart management, which the union's membership proceeded to vote down by a three-to-one margin.
All the reporting I've seen suggests this strike could last some time, since it's unclear who management should even contact to advance negotiations. Union menbers obviously don't have any faith in their own negotiating team, so I guess they'll have to select new negotiators.
A long Bart shutdown does no one any good, including the workers who are striking. As we saw after the strike 10 years ago, some riders are likely to abandon Bart, because they will find better ways to commute. Other riders will choose other options just out of spite.
In the meantime, it's important to remember that the workers who turned down the contract offer are those with the worst ratio of pay to skills. Bart's station agents and drivers are the highest paid in the country.
And, what they do requires virtually no training. The trains are virtually automated -- and have a history of crashes when drivers switch them into manual mode. The station agents are largely there just to say "no" to customers, and in any case their customer service role is not hard to teach.
When I call these folks overpaid, I'm not making an idle point. These Bart employees make high double-digit salaries, when benefits are included. Some make over $100k, milking their seniority and
Beyond the pay issues, there are the ridiculous work rules detailed at Bart management's website -- http://www.bartlabor.com. One example is a rule preventing Bart from asking station agents to work at stations more than a certain distance apart during any given week. Such rules cost the system money and are completely absurd considering the agents can literally ride the train they're supposed to be helping manage to get to their assignments.
I can understand paying a premium for the people who service and repair the trains. Bart uses a lot of non-standard equipment, so there's an important element of institutional memory to protect there.
But the station agents and train drivers just don't add that much value. Faced with a strike caused by these folks, it's time for Bart management to consider firing all of them and starting over with non-union workers.
Admittedly, such an approach will take some time for training, but I doubt the training time would exceed by much the time it will take to renegotiate with the union. More importantly, eliminating the union provides management a clean slate to reduce pay and benefits to reasonable levels.
I'm sure there are people out there with skills similar to those required to perform these two jobs. In the short term, Bart can find a couple dozen of these folks, train them quickly and get a few of the core stations up and running -- West Oakland and Embarcadero at a minimum. That way, we can avoid the scenario where people can't make it into the city for their jobs.
Unfortunately, I expect Bart's management and directors to view this strike as mostly a political problem. As such, they are unlikely to fire the union workers, since our area is full of Leftist wackos who will support a union even as it chokes the lifeblood out of our transit infrastructure -- an ironic situation when you consider that most Leftists are all for commuter trains.
This strike is going to create a difficult situation for people who work in the private sector. It's also going to discourage people about the future of public transit in the area, which can only be bad for the East Bay, which relies on Bart to take commuters into the city.
What's worse, it's not going to buy the union members anything. The reality is their contracts are completely unsustainable. The best they can hope for is some sort of temporary bone funded by a fare or tax increase.
But the public is losing patience with public-employee unions. Eventually that is going to translate into much tougher negotiating stances. Perhaps this strike will be the beginning of the end for these folks, but I'm not counting on it.
The right solution for Bart is the simplest one. Take a page out of the Reagan playbook and fire every one of these workers.
Showing posts with label bart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bart. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Bart's Union Negotiation Website
I usually pay relatively close attention to the ins and outs of local politics, but I complete missed the website that Bart has set up to inform riders and taxpayers about the excesses of its current union contracts.
Bart announced today that it will hike fares in the face of the recession, essentially increasing the fare to ride to SFO so high that I doubt many people will continue to use the service. The high cost of riding Bart is directly related to its union pay and benefits. And, it might surprise many readers of this blog to find out that the Bart station agents and train "drivers" frequently make more than $100k a year when counting pay, benefits and overtime.
I realize that union-bashing is out of vogue with the rise of the Obama administration, but Bart is a prime example of how unions hurt pretty much everyone in the society except their own membership.
Unions even nonunionized poor people, because they make it more difficult for companies and governments to hire new employees. Sure, that's great for those who are already in the door, but for the rest of us it's terrible.
I applaud Bart management's effort to push back against the unions, and I encourage readers to look at that website and provide encouragement to management wherever possible.
I for one would like to see Bart demand real reductions in pay and benefits in the next contract, and I would be more than willing to suffer service interruptions during a strike to get there.
And, needless to say I would be overjoyed to ride a train driven by "scabs." If Bart got rid of its unions, I'd throw a party with all the money I'd save on my tickets.
Bart announced today that it will hike fares in the face of the recession, essentially increasing the fare to ride to SFO so high that I doubt many people will continue to use the service. The high cost of riding Bart is directly related to its union pay and benefits. And, it might surprise many readers of this blog to find out that the Bart station agents and train "drivers" frequently make more than $100k a year when counting pay, benefits and overtime.
I realize that union-bashing is out of vogue with the rise of the Obama administration, but Bart is a prime example of how unions hurt pretty much everyone in the society except their own membership.
Unions even nonunionized poor people, because they make it more difficult for companies and governments to hire new employees. Sure, that's great for those who are already in the door, but for the rest of us it's terrible.
I applaud Bart management's effort to push back against the unions, and I encourage readers to look at that website and provide encouragement to management wherever possible.
I for one would like to see Bart demand real reductions in pay and benefits in the next contract, and I would be more than willing to suffer service interruptions during a strike to get there.
And, needless to say I would be overjoyed to ride a train driven by "scabs." If Bart got rid of its unions, I'd throw a party with all the money I'd save on my tickets.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Bart Tragedy A Tragedy For All
There's nothing worse than running across a story like the one from this past week, where a Bart police officer "shot and killed an unarmed rider" at the Fruitvale Bart station.
Any way you slice it, this situation is a tragedy. The last thing Oakland needs is more gun violence and death. And, the fact that a cop is the one who pulled the trigger makes the situation all the more concerning.
Naturally, I hope police conduct a thorough investigation of the situation, and I hope the DA files charges where appropriate. Our city cannot and should not tolerate summary justice at the hands of rogue police officers (if that is indeed what occurred).
Unfortunately, alongside this tragedy is another potential tragedy -- the family of the dead man in the case has already retained an attorney who has indicated he plans to file suit against Bart for $25 million.
Now I realize that there is an adage that says you can't put a value on a human life, and I'm not going to argue here whether this young man's life is or is not worth $25 million.
What I would like to point out, however, is that a judgment for this amount of money would cause pain for every single other rider on the Bart system -- probably for years to come. According to Bart, 100 million people rode Bart in 2007. That's 50 million round-trips. So, if a $25 million judgment were paid out in a single year, that would cost every rider $0.50 per round-trip ride, an increase of more than 10 percent in average fares.
This is not even to mention the fact that ridership would inevitably decrease if fares were to increase. That would increase the burden on the remaining riders, and it would cause other problems such as freeway congestion.
The basic problem here lies with the notion that civil lawsuits against the government can redress civil-rights violations. In a typical lawsuit which does not involve the government, the lawsuit serves as a disincentive to other potential defendants from engaging in future bad behavior.
Not so when someone sues the government.
Because the government's actions are mediated through an agent -- the police officer in this case -- it's impossible for the government to prevent the action which precipitated the lawsuit. This is evident in the fact that all police officers undergo extensive training to avoid bad shootings, and yet they still happen.
The right person to sue is the police officer individually. If the shooting was bad, that means that he was acting outside his role as an officer, so he should answer for his actions.
But the standard strategy here is to go after the "deep pockets," and that is always the government.
So, while I hope that justice is done by the police and DA investigating this case, I do not hope that the attorneys for the family manage to wrest $25 million from Bart.
Because what that really amounts to is taking the money from all of us. And we are not the ones who pulled the trigger.
Any way you slice it, this situation is a tragedy. The last thing Oakland needs is more gun violence and death. And, the fact that a cop is the one who pulled the trigger makes the situation all the more concerning.
Naturally, I hope police conduct a thorough investigation of the situation, and I hope the DA files charges where appropriate. Our city cannot and should not tolerate summary justice at the hands of rogue police officers (if that is indeed what occurred).
Unfortunately, alongside this tragedy is another potential tragedy -- the family of the dead man in the case has already retained an attorney who has indicated he plans to file suit against Bart for $25 million.
Now I realize that there is an adage that says you can't put a value on a human life, and I'm not going to argue here whether this young man's life is or is not worth $25 million.
What I would like to point out, however, is that a judgment for this amount of money would cause pain for every single other rider on the Bart system -- probably for years to come. According to Bart, 100 million people rode Bart in 2007. That's 50 million round-trips. So, if a $25 million judgment were paid out in a single year, that would cost every rider $0.50 per round-trip ride, an increase of more than 10 percent in average fares.
This is not even to mention the fact that ridership would inevitably decrease if fares were to increase. That would increase the burden on the remaining riders, and it would cause other problems such as freeway congestion.
The basic problem here lies with the notion that civil lawsuits against the government can redress civil-rights violations. In a typical lawsuit which does not involve the government, the lawsuit serves as a disincentive to other potential defendants from engaging in future bad behavior.
Not so when someone sues the government.
Because the government's actions are mediated through an agent -- the police officer in this case -- it's impossible for the government to prevent the action which precipitated the lawsuit. This is evident in the fact that all police officers undergo extensive training to avoid bad shootings, and yet they still happen.
The right person to sue is the police officer individually. If the shooting was bad, that means that he was acting outside his role as an officer, so he should answer for his actions.
But the standard strategy here is to go after the "deep pockets," and that is always the government.
So, while I hope that justice is done by the police and DA investigating this case, I do not hope that the attorneys for the family manage to wrest $25 million from Bart.
Because what that really amounts to is taking the money from all of us. And we are not the ones who pulled the trigger.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Want Free Bart Rides? Just Take The Elevator
I know election season is in full swing, with other local bloggers offering endorsements of the various propositions. I may do so before the election next Tuesday, but in the meantime I want to discuss something that has a more direct impact on my everyday life.
From time to time, I need to ride the Bart elevator to get from street level to the platform. In certain stations -- generally those without a mezzanine section -- this requires first entering into the paid zone and then getting on the elevator. Not so in stations such as those along Market Street in San Francisco.
In those stations, probably to save money, the elevator runs from the street level, to the mezzanine and straight through to the Bart platform. This means that someone who rather not pay to ride Bart can simply take the elevator.
I'm sure my readers know what's coming next. I sometimes encounter honest users of these elevators -- those who take the time to stop on the mezzanine level and run the Bart ticket through the reader before proceeding to the train. However, more often I get on the elevator to find someone riding straight to the platform level, obviously not intending to pay.
I'd say this happens more than 50 percent of the time I use the elevator on Bart. I've noticed a similar experience with Muni in San Francisco. Needless to say, a casual inspection of these criminals reveals common threads. Most are young males, and none of them appear either to notice or care that they're doing something wrong.
I've asked a few friends why they think these people are so oblivious to the clear criminality of their actions. The response I found most compelling was simply that they have nothing to fear from society.
What if they find a police officer waiting for them on the platform? Well, so what. They'll probably get a ticket which they'll then refuse to pay.
What if they then are arrested? Well, so what again. Maybe they'll spend a few days or weeks in jail.
To me, this behavior is an excellent indication of the Bay Area's need for stricter enforcement of day-to-day "quality of life" crimes. Not only do these criminals deprive Bart of revenue; they send an exteremely negative message to everyone else about what we are willing to tolerate.
Essentially what toleration of this behavior says to the average citizen is the typical liberal message: Everyone must abide by the rules except for certain classes of the "downtrodden," defined by economic circumstance or ethnic background. This then demoralizes those who follow the rules, and it attracts children who might be attracted to the anti-social lifestyle.
By the way, I've noticed a very strong Bart Police presence throughout the system. This is probably an overreaction to supposed terrorist considerations. But what a shame it is that no one can be bothered to make sure everyone plays by the most basic of rules -- paying your fare.
From time to time, I need to ride the Bart elevator to get from street level to the platform. In certain stations -- generally those without a mezzanine section -- this requires first entering into the paid zone and then getting on the elevator. Not so in stations such as those along Market Street in San Francisco.
In those stations, probably to save money, the elevator runs from the street level, to the mezzanine and straight through to the Bart platform. This means that someone who rather not pay to ride Bart can simply take the elevator.
I'm sure my readers know what's coming next. I sometimes encounter honest users of these elevators -- those who take the time to stop on the mezzanine level and run the Bart ticket through the reader before proceeding to the train. However, more often I get on the elevator to find someone riding straight to the platform level, obviously not intending to pay.
I'd say this happens more than 50 percent of the time I use the elevator on Bart. I've noticed a similar experience with Muni in San Francisco. Needless to say, a casual inspection of these criminals reveals common threads. Most are young males, and none of them appear either to notice or care that they're doing something wrong.
I've asked a few friends why they think these people are so oblivious to the clear criminality of their actions. The response I found most compelling was simply that they have nothing to fear from society.
What if they find a police officer waiting for them on the platform? Well, so what. They'll probably get a ticket which they'll then refuse to pay.
What if they then are arrested? Well, so what again. Maybe they'll spend a few days or weeks in jail.
To me, this behavior is an excellent indication of the Bay Area's need for stricter enforcement of day-to-day "quality of life" crimes. Not only do these criminals deprive Bart of revenue; they send an exteremely negative message to everyone else about what we are willing to tolerate.
Essentially what toleration of this behavior says to the average citizen is the typical liberal message: Everyone must abide by the rules except for certain classes of the "downtrodden," defined by economic circumstance or ethnic background. This then demoralizes those who follow the rules, and it attracts children who might be attracted to the anti-social lifestyle.
By the way, I've noticed a very strong Bart Police presence throughout the system. This is probably an overreaction to supposed terrorist considerations. But what a shame it is that no one can be bothered to make sure everyone plays by the most basic of rules -- paying your fare.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Bart: We Need To Charge More To Reduce Ridership
In an astonishing display of simplemindedness, the folks who run Bart have floated a trial balloon suggesting they might charge higher prices during commute hours.
The purported goal is to "spread out" rush-hour traffic by encouraging commuters to shift their trips outside those congested hours.
My opinion is this is just code for decreasing demand for Bart because they can't figure out how to run the system efficiently enough to handle the influx of passengers as gas prices have skyrocketed.
When you think about it, it's pretty amazing that a public agency in the Bay Area would suggest such a thing. Increasing tolls on area bridges during commute hours makes good public-policy sense by discouraging folks from driving. But why would we want to discourage usage of public transit, particularly as it becomes more cost-effective due to fuel prices?
Anyone who rides Bart daily knows that the system suffers from some issues. It's not uncommon for trains to run slowly or stop running altogther for a period of time. Still, the system works decently, and I think a few minor modifications would enable it to accomodate far more passengers during rush hour, obviating the need for this idiotic price increase.
First, during rush hour, all trains should be 10 cars long -- the maximum the system can handle. It always surprises me to see lines of eight- and nine-car trains during rush hour. These shortened trains create a nuisance for passengers and slow boarding as people must rush over from the edges of the platform where there are no cars.
Second, Bart should change the cars' ridiculous seat placement, at least for the cars used during rush hour. Removing the seats and placing benches along the walls, as they do in New York City, would probably allow 50 percent more people per car.
Third, Bart should actually enforce rules prohibiting bicycles on the trains during rush hour. And, while I'm at it, Bart should also enforce rules making it illegal to use the system without paying. I see dozens of people each week either jump the fare gate or use the elevators to avoid paying.
Finally, I'm sure there are technological solutions which would enable Bart to space trains more closely. I'm no train engineer, but it would seem Bay Area environmentalists and liberals would be willing to figure this element out to avoid steering people away from public transit.
I don't support Bart being free either, by the way. I used to cringe every time they declared a "spare the air" day, as that pretty much meant you'd face throngs of teenagers running up and down the cars as you tried to commute.
I think it makes sense to charge a reasonable price for using Bart. But if anything, the price should be reduced. If congestion pricing is to be implemented anywhere, it should occur on area bridges, with the profits diverted toward mass transit.
I can't believe Bart's plan is even under consideration. What happened to the area's liberals?
The purported goal is to "spread out" rush-hour traffic by encouraging commuters to shift their trips outside those congested hours.
My opinion is this is just code for decreasing demand for Bart because they can't figure out how to run the system efficiently enough to handle the influx of passengers as gas prices have skyrocketed.
When you think about it, it's pretty amazing that a public agency in the Bay Area would suggest such a thing. Increasing tolls on area bridges during commute hours makes good public-policy sense by discouraging folks from driving. But why would we want to discourage usage of public transit, particularly as it becomes more cost-effective due to fuel prices?
Anyone who rides Bart daily knows that the system suffers from some issues. It's not uncommon for trains to run slowly or stop running altogther for a period of time. Still, the system works decently, and I think a few minor modifications would enable it to accomodate far more passengers during rush hour, obviating the need for this idiotic price increase.
First, during rush hour, all trains should be 10 cars long -- the maximum the system can handle. It always surprises me to see lines of eight- and nine-car trains during rush hour. These shortened trains create a nuisance for passengers and slow boarding as people must rush over from the edges of the platform where there are no cars.
Second, Bart should change the cars' ridiculous seat placement, at least for the cars used during rush hour. Removing the seats and placing benches along the walls, as they do in New York City, would probably allow 50 percent more people per car.
Third, Bart should actually enforce rules prohibiting bicycles on the trains during rush hour. And, while I'm at it, Bart should also enforce rules making it illegal to use the system without paying. I see dozens of people each week either jump the fare gate or use the elevators to avoid paying.
Finally, I'm sure there are technological solutions which would enable Bart to space trains more closely. I'm no train engineer, but it would seem Bay Area environmentalists and liberals would be willing to figure this element out to avoid steering people away from public transit.
I don't support Bart being free either, by the way. I used to cringe every time they declared a "spare the air" day, as that pretty much meant you'd face throngs of teenagers running up and down the cars as you tried to commute.
I think it makes sense to charge a reasonable price for using Bart. But if anything, the price should be reduced. If congestion pricing is to be implemented anywhere, it should occur on area bridges, with the profits diverted toward mass transit.
I can't believe Bart's plan is even under consideration. What happened to the area's liberals?
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