BART - Time Table Change

Introduction to BART

BART is still primarily a commuter rail line that takes people from the suburbs into San Francisco. Similar to the Long Island Railroad or many other commuter rail lines that means ridership is extremely skewed towards commute hours and drops off before and after rush hour and on weekends. The 4 downtown San Francisco stations still dwarf all others in terms of the number of riders exiting those stations in the morning and then boarding there in the afternoon/evening. Special events create little spikes in ridership at odd times and/or at less typical stations: e.g. a 7PM Warriors game on a Tuesday night, a big concert in Oakland on a Thursday evening, tourism from SFO to San Francisco during the summer or for big events like the Super Bowl, NBA all-star game, etc. But being built around the core of San Francisco you can imagine what ridership looks like. Morning ridership from the east builds as it approaches San Francisco and then quickly drops as it passes through downtown towards the airport. Or, if coming from the SFO, ridership builds as it heads north towards San Francsico with the trains becoming less and less crowded as they get further into the East Bay. Evenings would be the opposite. Trains quickly fill in downtown and then continue to add people for 4 or 5 stations either direction. After that, it’s mostly people getting off when they reach the station they started at that morning.

The timetables change from time to time and that can really mess up the shifts and cause hours of work to find the issues (e.g. now a connection can’t be made) and correct the shifts and then flow that information out to the teams.  How would we quickly review timetables and quickly and accurately adjust all the shifts impacted.