BART Parking Fees Kick In

Your Boulevardier drove by the Castro Valley BART station this morning at around 7:45 a.m. on his way home from yoga class. The parking lot at the station was not full, which is unusual for that time of day. So, with one day's experience, the dollar-a-day parking fee appears to be having some effect on ridership.

So you know, Your Boulevardier is not necessarily opposed to the new parking fee. He does wonder, however, how much of a revenue-generator it really will be. Because someone must check the occupied parking spaces against the records of the parking fee machines, in order to find out which spaces are not paid; then that person must write tickets. (Perhaps he is wrong, but Your Boulevardier assumes this is not done by BART police, who have enough on their hands already.) And then someone at the BART headquarters must process those tickets and send out delinquency notices when they're not paid. All of these tasks take considerable labor hours, which can equal considerable cost. And then there's the lost fare revenue, and the cost to maintain the parking-payment machine, and to keep the new parking space numbers and fee-related signage clean and up to date.

In all, there can be a lot of costs associated with collecting money.

BART Parking Fees

Your Boulevardier noticed on a recent walk that BART has posted signs that, he presumes, announce the new $1 per day parking fee that goes into effect next Monday, April 27.



On that fateful day, the brown paper will be removed.