BART wants your input on making the roads around its stations safer.
Every day, thousands of people ride their bikes to BART stations and tens of thousands more walk on transit property to get to the trains.
Most get there safely, but there have been vehicle crashes that injure pedestrians and bikers. So far this year, BART police have logged two incidents where a person was hit by a vehicle on a station road, a BART spokesperson said.
Now, BART is looking to riders and community members for ideas on how to make getting to and from stations safer and more accessible.
“We want to identify the investments that could reduce or eliminate traffic deaths or injuries,” said BART spokesperson Anna Duckworth. “It’s all about transportation infrastructure improvements on our roadways around BART stations.”
Last week, BART launched a web page for its Safe Trips to BART program, which will initially involve surveys, town hall meetings and public outreach that will be used to compile a safety plan by the spring, Duckworth said.
BART says it hopes making station roads safer will boost ridership, which is currently just 43% of pre-pandemic levels.
“We want to get people onto transit instead of driving and we also want to stress how much safer riding rail transit like BART is 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 collaborating with cities and counties to apply for state and federal funds to make safety improvements. The amount of funding and its timing will determine when the safety improvement projects begin, Duckworth said.
Duckworth said some of the improvements could include protected intersections to separate vehicles from pedestrians and bikers, curb extensions to give pedestrians more time to cross streets or changes to crosswalk traffic signals.
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While the Safe Trips to BART plan is mainly meant to make the station access roads safer, there could be changes made inside stations if that is what the public wants, BART officials said.
One change that Mike Villarreal, a daily BART rider from Richmond, would like to see is a covering on the southeast outside stairs at the downtown Berkeley station.
“When it rains, the stairs, which have little metal strips at the end of each stair, are very precarious and dangerous to walk down,’’ he said in an email. “I have seen many people slip here and have almost done so myself. The combination of no coverage from rain, slim stairs and the little metal strip that makes it extra slippery is very hazardous.”
