CA: People are using their laptops on BART. Officials think they know why

It’s become common to board a BART train at rush hour and see several riders pecking at their laptops.

Such behavior would have seemed high-risk or naive before the pandemic, when the rail system saw up to 140 robberies and thefts of electronic devices a month. But now data provided by BART shows people could have a reason to feel more secure. This past March, police counted six electronic gadgets stolen from passengers, down from 117 in March 2019.

The decline is so stark, BART Police Chief Kevin Franklin said in an interview, that “we had to change the Y axis on the graph.” Now it only goes up to 45 crimes as opposed to 150.

At the same time, BART is logging far fewer police holds, which occur when law enforcement asks the operations control center to pause trains for five minutes or longer, so that they can respond to an emergency, detain a suspect, quell a protest or search for a missing child. From January through March, BART riders experienced 955 such delays, a significant drop from the high of 2,996 recorded from April through June in 2023. (BART officials track delay data in quarters of the fiscal year.)

Crime trends are always complex, and Franklin attributes these gains to a number of factors. He credits the number of uniformed police, community service officers and crisis intervention specialists deployed throughout BART, as well as the frequent fare inspections. He notes that BART’s numbers reflect how crime has plummeted regionally and nationally. Above all, he credits the rail system’s new plexiglass fare gates, which are too tall to vault, and now shut fast enough to dissuade piggybackers.

There could be other explanations. Pre-pandemic BART was, in many senses, a photo negative version of present BART. In 2019, the sprawling rail network carried up to 400,000 people on an average weekday. Station entrances had low, pie-wedge gates that people constantly hopped or shoved aside. Street conditions, including homelessness and open-air drug use, persistently seeped into the stations, creating a quandary for transit staff who often had to double as social service workers.

Today, BART ridership is shy of 200,000 people on an average weekday, owing largely to the rise of remote work. Yet despite sustained losses of fare revenue that have led to a budget deficit, the agency has modernized its infrastructure. Entryways now have the look and feel of airport security checkpoints. Riders hop onto Fleet of the Future trains with a neon green and blue color scheme, copious bike racks and ample room to stand. The vibe is institutional and utilitarian, telegraphing that anyone is welcome to turn their seat into their work station.

Some riders say they have noticed the difference.

“I guess that in the past couple of years I’ve seen an improvement,” said Tania Abdul, who was rolling her bike along the concourse at Powell Street Station on a recent weekday morning. She lingered a beat to remember the last time officers had held up one of her trains. It may have been two weeks ago, and the disruption was fleeting, she recalled. Someone was blocking the train doors.

Martin Davis, a recent transplant to San Francisco from Houston, said he’s yet to suffer through a BART police hold.

“I really like BART,” Davis said, with disarming enthusiasm. “Everyone drives in Houston. Here in the Bay Area, so many people take public transit.”

At least one rider said he still sits through police holds on a fairly regular basis.

“Look, if we’re down to a thousand a quarter, that’s still about ten a day — and even that feels high,” said Nevin Long, boarding a San Francisco-bound train from the El Cerrito Del Norte Station.

Long admitted that he finds the delays aggravating, since they are often open-ended. Train operators don’t always tell riders why the vehicle is sitting, or for how long.

“They might get on the intercom and say, ‘Oh we have a medical emergency,’ ‘Oh it’s police.’ Or they might just say, ‘We’ll be moving shortly,’” Long said, raising his arms in exasperation. “And I’m like, ‘define shortly. Are you we talking geologic time? ’”

Yet Long’s train experienced no delays on Friday morning. All around him, riders signaled their general sense of security within the system. Many had plugged earbuds into their ears and remained glued to their cellphones, oblivious to anyone who walked by their seats.

Hours later, a man sat on a bench at 19th Street Station in Oakland, earbuds in, laptop open. He smiled cagily.

“I’ve always been a risk-taker.”

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