San Francisco’s public transportation system, Bart, is an overcrowded, broken escalator-filled mess. No one ever argues otherwise.
Now, not even Bart.
On Wednesday night, when Bart (ie Bay Area Rapid Transit) was experiencing yet another set of delays due to mechanical breakdowns, spokeswoman Alicia Trost messaged her deputy, Taylor Huckaby, about the agency’s Twitter account: it’s all yours. Huckaby, 27, took control of the @SFBART handle.
Suddenly, the usually staid Twitter feed took a turn toward alarming honesty; Bart was agreeing with its critics. It started pointing to budget shortfalls and infrastructure needs. It called out the tech boom and the deluge of new riders that come along with it. When a rider tweeted that the system was “a truly terrible service”, it agreed.
@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
@scottopia We've been working around the clock to maintain what we have & find ways to move forward - no one at BART has given up. No one!
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
Huckaby tweeted from work and during his commute by car. Then he kept tweeting from home.
His boss, Trost, said government offices in general should respond more honestly to complaints and just admit when there are problems. “We can take bad news and get a show of support as long as we’re open,” Trost, 38, said.
At Bart, the social media desk uses a service that reads and measures web sentiment about the service on a color scale from red (negative) to green (positive). It is usually dark red. But on Thursday, it was green.
“The last time it was in the green,” Trost added, “was when we were taking our model train car around the Bay Area. People were feeling good about Bart for those few days. That was nice.”
Huckaby thinks they hit on a conversation people across the country are starting to have.
“There’s a lot of discussion about America’s crumbling infrastructure, and this tapped into that frustration,” Huckaby said.
Built to handle around 100,000 riders in 1972, Bart today carries more than 430,000 a day. The result has been a system that’s crumbling – prone to delays, overcrowded cars and messy stations. Some station escalators sit broken for years.
Local crisis PR expert Sam Singer – who has represented Chevron and myriad San Francisco power players – says Bart’s honesty on Twitter was the perfect disaster response and described the situation as an ongoing crisis.
“I’m going to label this as genius,” Singer said.
He said the radical tact on Twitter was necessary given the state of the infrastructure and growing public anger: “Bart’s been in crisis for 20 to 30 years,” Singer said.
Bart’s public honesty comes at a time when it is gearing up to ask voters for a lot of money. In November, the transit system is likely putting a bond on the ballet to give it a $3.5bn cash infusion through increased property taxes, an attempt to fill the system’s roughly $5bn in unmet capital needs over the next 10 years.
No other public transit’s social media account has come close to San Francisco’s vocal @SFBART. But then late Wednesday, LA Metro, another beleaguered and much maligned system, quietly responded to Bart with a GIF.
@SFBART pic.twitter.com/9xSwytfty4
— Metro (@metrolosangeles) March 17, 2016
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