Can someone explain why 162 employees are needed to drive a single station?! This sounds extremely inefficient to me, particularly as it closes as night too.
I'm generally curious what the break down would be.
It's open 20 hours a day, so you're going to need at least 3 shifts. It's open 7 days a week, so you're going to need at least two sets of employees per shift, and there are two stations for the extension. When you start considering ticket agents, janitorial staff, security, etc, having 13-14 people on site per shift seems pretty reasonable.
The Washington Metro keeps a single attendant at each station, so maybe 3 attendants per day. And employed what seemed like less than 1 janitorial person per station, given that you only saw one person cleaning at any one time, and that was only for an hour or two each day. You don't need double those numbers for a 7 day week because employees are a system-wide resource.
I understand you're going to need more maintenance personnel, etc, but 162 additional staff for two stations sounds like a concession to the unions. Which in the grand scheme of the whole system might be defensible--more employees as a compromise for capping wage growth. But let's call a spade a spade.
These are completely separate hires from the rest of the BART system. Because Santa Clara County didn't buy into the system in the 60s, choosing to build a network of expressways instead, VTA is operating these stations completely separate of the rest of the BART network. So that means you're going to need redundancies that you wouldn't need if you had a bigger station and employee pool.
[the VTA] is building the new station and handing off its
operation to BART once complete
Then later on
Alicia Trost, a BART spokeswoman, said her transit agency
will ramp up to hire 162 positions, funded by and dedicated
for the Berryessa extension. She added BART is estimating it
will cost $27.5 million to provide service at the new
stations.
Finally,
VTA will reimburse BART for the cost for staffing the two
new stations.
I missed the last part the first time through. If VTA agreed to reimburse BART for operating costs, then as a union negotiator it would seem an easy sell for BART to hire an excessive number of employees given that they wouldn't be footing the bill. And in any event, it would be in BART's best interest to inflate its operating cost estimates for the two stations to minimize its risk going forward. Inflating the number of positions needed is one way to do that.
