Something really interesting happened on Twitter recently. Well, at least it was interesting for those who like reading about the intricacies of transportation policy.
Anyway, some folks working for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) network, which services the San Francisco metro area, started getting really honest with riders on Wednesday. After numerous online complaints about delays from riders, the minds behind the BART Twitter account tossed typical apologies or non-replies out the window and instead started laying out some of the major obstacles facing large, popular metropolitan transit systems.
@shakatron BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@tquad64 Planners in 1996 had no way of predicting the tech boom - track redundancy, new tunnels & transbay tubes are decades-long projects.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@cliberti We have 3 hours a night to do maintenance on a system built to serve 100k per week that now serves 430k per day. #ThisIsOurReality
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
Most of this isn't new information. Plenty of people have written doomsday-y articles and think pieces about infrastructure crumbling to little bits under the weight of America's economic growth. A study, released this past October by the Metropolitan Rail Discussion Group, showed a $102 billion maintenance backlog among top transit systems, which included New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., and Atlanta, among others.
But, the problems with Atlanta transit are pretty unique to the city. So what would it look like if our own transit tweeters stopped mincing words? Here is some hypothetical online truth:
Let us stress again that the above faux-Tweets are not real. But it would be awesome if they were.
Have your own idea for what would happen if MARTA officials took to the Internet, guns blazing? Tweet them to @CurbedAtlanta and you could be featured in a future article!
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