As soon as you step into a BART station (or more often, its parking lot), the sheer ugliness of the station sticks out at you - many of the stations consist of a cement facade or the median of a highway as architectural elements, and the sometimes airport-sized parking lots don't exactly help.
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| Average exterior design of a BART station (anthonynachor / Flickr) |
It doesn't get much better once you step into the station - although ticket acquisition is easy, the fare system is confusing. Getting the right ticket is hard - the fare is destination-based, not per-ride. This makes financial sense because the system is so long; however, for one-ride tickets, the ticket machines need to ask for a destination, not the amount of money to put on the ticket.
In downtown Oakland or San Francisco stops, signage can be confusing - when on the platform, instead of telling you the destination of the train, it tells you the name of the stop you're at. Platforms are numbered, and you have to wait for the electronic boards on each one to tell you the destination of the train. This wait is long, because the boards are overloaded with useless information, including ads. The boards can only support about five lines of small, monochrome text in the first place.
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| The average platform design of a station (tadd_debbie / Flickr) |
Although the trains are light and go satisfyingly fast, their design leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, the seating arrangement in the trains themselves resembles that of a city bus, with the use of narrow aisles and large, capacity-reducing seats. The seats are made of a sizable layer of cloth, which absorbs anything you put onto it - every single one of the seats looks nasty. The floor is also sometimes carpeted, meaning that there are stains throughout.
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| The average interior of a BART train (LA Wad / Flickr) |
The interior design of the train cars reflects on the history of the BART. The seating arrangement and general design, unchanged since the system's opening, reflects on its original purpose - to get commuters out of their cars and onto public transportation. In fact, the interiors look shockingly like a car - similarly sized and styled seats and a carpet floor.
Since the BART mostly connects suburbs with final destinations of San Francisco or Oakland, almost every suburban station has a massive parking lot surrounding it. Instead of increasing or at least encouraging walkability as transit should do, it directly hinders it. It's hard to even find a pedestrian walkway from the street into some stations.
If there is one thing that BART has done well, it has to be the increased bike access to its stations. Since most of the stops at the moment aren't easily accessed by a walk for most passengers, the stations have increased numbers of bike lockers and racks for rides - a good step forward for suburbs that stretch way beyond the station itself.
Before BART continues creating park-and-rides, it needs to encourage transit-oriented development close to its stations, with direct pedestrian and bike access. This would densify the areas around the stations, create livable spaces and mixed-use development around them, and encourage the continuation of such development away from its stations. It would also slowly reduce car dependency for the residents around the stops.