BART Follies

Watching the new fare gates at Powell last night for a few minutes was a sadly entertaining spectacle as various people were either briefly trapped inside the paid area while trying to exit without paying or anxiously trying to enter and catch their train without paying.

One lady slithered on her back like a limbo dancer under the bottom of the gate. This is a new move I've never seen before but sure to catch on. A new form of breakdancing perhaps we can call the BART beat. One mentally disturbed looking man in a perplexed stagger quietly went from gate to gate methodically like a bumble bee on a flowering plant gently pushing each gate one after another in quiet frustration.

Almost like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn you could almost root for his escape from BART! He finally saw a golden opportunity to piggyback behind another passenger in order to exit stage left. Some fare evaders seeing this new entrance to the transportation cave of wonders below  quickly gave up and scattered to parts unknown.

One determined fare evader coming in on the departure of an exiting passenger man- handled the gate from completely closing and held it firmly like a fisherman trying to gain control of a fish on the other end of the line. Then slowly he reeled it in it  inch by inch step by step and he wedged himself through the jaws of the fare gate beast to the blade of an emergency alarm for the untold damage effected on the device.

Meanwhile back at the ranch  in another section of the now three ring circus a desperate couple is seen  trying to exit and looking around testing gates and side doors frantically realizing their predicament as there was seemingly no way out! "This is dope. There's no way out , one of them exclaimed in a line straight from a horror movie.

At one point they went to the station agent. Cue the crashing cymbal.
--Drum roll please !
Will our protagonists now get a get out of jail card free? But the BART Nero  evidently gave them the thumbs down and they continued on their hopeless quest. I left them at the end of this cliffhanger episode now having dredged up some worthless clipper card they had and were trying to go to the add fare machine not even understanding the concept that you had to tag the card at the separation in order for the machine to calculate the fare to add. I literally couldn’t continue this agony and Stacy any further.

Turning back to the main ring I watched a speeding figure dart out of nowhere to follow on the heels of another fare paying passenger but the gate was too fast to close and he literally was splattered with all limbs briefly frozen in all directions against the plexiglass of the gate in a scene straight out of a roadrunner cartoon when Wiley E. coyote is once again foiled with his acme rocket. But he quickly rebounded in the next scene and on this occasion the side gate was open for him to enter perhaps by a more lenient agent.

The whole circus act before me did take me back to my psychology 101 class long ago where we watched a movie of rats trying to navigate a maze of booby traps and slides to see if they could find the cheese or some other psychological reward . Some mice found the cheese and others sadly would suffer less desirable outcomes or positive or negative reinforcements in the parlance of that field of study.

In this current human lab study I suppose some evaders will think twice next time before getting themselves in such a humiliating predicament and purchase a clipper card perhaps for the first time in their life. Indeed I did notice a few people who looked the part of a fare evaders if I'm allowed to say it but to my surprise we're now are paying like most everyone else.

I then entered into the system myself ( yes I paid on my clipper card) and then talked to the elevator attendant on the other side of the 4th street side of the station who I had noticed was was being asked questions previously by some of the fare evader detainees as to what they could do to get in or out.
I asked him upfront specifically about the BART police role if any in all this. Had he seen the police at all during his shift? I asked.

I've been here since 6 pm and I saw them once" (It was now about 11:30) "What did they do?" I asked. "They just walked by did nothing about the fare gates ", he replied.

Where are the BART police now is a question I asked him and an agent on another occasion regarding this matter. Each time they exude a confused wandering look and say they have no idea where they are or what they are doing.
In the case of an agent I had spoke to on another day before this night she said the police are in " another department  as the reason she didn't know their whereabouts or activities when I had suggested "why can't they come out of their office in the Powell St station at random intervals to observe and enforce the fares, refer some cases to homeless services or mental health, etc.. "

I joked they could still have time to eat their donuts and she said I was so funny. Funny and sad all at the same time. Clearly their has to be concern that all this chaos at the new fare gates runs the risk of spinning even more out of control as frustration mounts from people being detained from whatever they were otherwise trying to do that might make them late for work, to school or their medical appointments.

You woukd think that since BART was spending 90 million dollars to harden the gates against fare evasion it woukd have planned better for this predictable set of scenarios detailed above and others undoubtedly more serious to come. The safety and security of BART staff, passengers and property is no laughing matter however amusing it might be for people like me observing in the peanut gallery,

But to characterize this as a shit show doesn't begin to describe it. How can the management of BART be this incompetent or willfully negligent in the face of all this and not do what is common practice in most every subway system in the world outside the Bizarro world of the Bay Area, namely have law enforcement stationed at fare gates to enforce the laws on fares and other common offenses seen on BART such as smoking, riding scooters or bicycles at fast speeds inside the station, abuse of BART property , mentally ill people threatening others by words or actions among other things.

It's  high time for a lot of people to start growing  up including BART itself. Pull it together folks before it's too late to save BART from the ash heap of history.

Submitted for publication by “N.Y.”