Did BART address disability access in rolling out its new gates? 

Last year, to great fanfare, the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency began installing new hardened fare gates. BART said they’d make the system safer and save millions of dollars in fare evasion. BART also said the designs would enhance accessibility. But The Oaklandside has learned that several concerns raised by BART’s Accessibility Task Force were not incorporated into the new designs. Advocates say design flaws make the $90 million gates worse, in some ways, than the old ones. 

Emily Witkin is a member of the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities and was a member of BART’s Accessibility Task Force during the period when the new gates were being developed. She told The Oaklandside that while BART did take some of the task force’s advice, including making the see-through doors a little easier to spot for visually impaired people, other concerns raised by members of the task force were shunted aside. For example, task force members suggested Clipper tags on both sides of a gate to facilitate wheelchair access. The final gate design has tags on only one side. 

“They said they would take it into consideration, and as far as I know, they considered against it, which is always frustrating,” Witkin said. 

Nikki Brown-Booker, an Oakland resident who sued and won a class-action lawsuit against the city for its deteriorating sidewalks, raised the issue of the one-sided Clipper tagging in an extensive interview with The Oaklandside last month, among other issues with the new gates.

“I drive with my right hand, and the reader is on the right,” she explained. “So I have to stop, and sometimes I can’t reach it because of my wheelchair controller. I turn around, go backward to tap, then turn and go through.”

She also said she’s found that the card readers at the new fare gates are less sensitive than before. “Sometimes it takes extra tries and about 10 seconds to open,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t open at all, and then the call button isn’t answered. I’ve had to wait for another patron to tell the agent to open the gate.”

We put these concerns about the fare gates to the transit agency. BART acknowledged by email that the entry readers into the system, known as Clipper and run by the Concord-based Cubic company, are not as fast as the tags on the old gates.

“Riders need to hold their payment for a beat,” BART spokesperson Alicia Trost wrote. “We are working with the Clipper vendor (Cubic) to speed them up. As we move towards the full transition to the Next Generation of Clipper, we are told they will speed up.”

On the problem of the one-sided tagging, Trost said that the new wide gates — sometimes called accessible fare gates — include a Clipper reader “on the side as well as the top” of the column gate. 

“Our previous gates only offered a reader on the side, so this new design offers more options at the wide gate,” she said. 

As for agents’ availability, she noted that lower staffing has affected some stations. High-volume stations, she told us, “are staffed with multiple agents during peak periods,” while less-used stations have a single agent, which means there’s no agent around during their breaks. She said anyone who needs help can press a call button or pick up the white courtesy phone to request assistance, as the gates can be opened remotely by staff from BART’s control center in Oakland. 

Trost said BART will continue to make adjustments as more people use the new gates and provide feedback. That feedback can be provided through BART’s comment page. Trost said BART is specifically seeking comments from people who are visually impaired about whether the gates’ chime tones are allowing for easy navigation.

BART’s task force updates were infrequent

Trost confirmed that BART worked with its volunteer Accessibility Task Force in the development of the new fare gates. The task force, which meets monthly and has more than a dozen members, has been part of BART’s customer feedback system for 50 years, since its inception in 1975. 

Witken said the task force typically received updates about the fare gate planning a couple of times a year. She said the task force routinely offered feedback — but BART didn’t always take their advice into account. 

A review of task force minutes by The Oaklandside shows that during one meeting in April, a task force member, Daveed Mandell, suggested that the new fare gates should have directional sounds so riders with limited vision would know where the gates were located. The minutes record notes that he said his advice was ignored. Clarence Fischer, another task force member, said in a task force meeting in March 2024 that he was concerned that the task force was not invited to test-run the gates and give feedback before the first ones were installed at the West Oakland BART Station.

The Oaklandside reached out to both Mandell and Fischer; Mandell declined to comment, and Fischer has not yet responded.

Witkin told us that BART began to show the task force images of what the gates would look like as far back as 2019. Witkin said it was clear to the task force early on that there would be an issue with not placing card readers on both sides of the wide gates, especially for people in wheelchairs. But she recalled that BART officials told them that would pose technical issues. 

“That could have been overcome with more effort,” Witkin said. “In the previous generation gates, they were able to do that. And generally, you do not lose functionality by improving technology. But we were told it was technically easier to do it on one side. [We said] it would be more accessible to put it on both sides.”

Witkin said that there is another issue with the gates: the visual screen reader at the gate doesn’t display a person’s fare balance.

Witkin said that BART never thoroughly explained why Clipper couldn’t add that feature, since the software system reads balances and determines whether it’s enough to trigger the opening of the gates. What the task force was told, she said, was that the Clipper card payment notice would move to a new centralized system, which allows people to switch between transit agencies on a trip — from BART to MUNI, AC Transit, or Caltrain — rather than the information being stored on each card, as in the past. Wilkin suggested that communication with the central system may be a reason why the doors sometimes take so long to open. 

“That’s a downside to the Clipper system,” Witkin said. “But it used to take a day before the new balance would update, so that’s a significant improvement there, too.” 

According to BART, its general manager has asked Clipper vendor Cubic to “explore solutions to see if anything can be done to enable an accurate balance to be shown once again.”

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