BART carries over 400,000 daily riders on 1960s infrastructure. The transit agency passed a $3.5 billion bond to rebuild aging track and escalators, then shifted to cloud-based systems and social media tools to handle maintenance requests and engage riders directly about safety and service.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and when you grow up in the Bay Area, you grow up around bart. You can actually hear the BART train from your home, depending on where you live. My sister and I, we would stand in front of this big window at my grandma's house and we could see the tracks and we would have a contest. Whoever sees the BART train first yells out bart and then we win. BART is the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District and we serve over 400,000 riders every day. Our mission is to provide reliable, safe, clean and customer friendly public transportation in the Bay Area. If you're not talking with your customers, you're failing your customers. In the last six years, the biggest customer complaint would have been what's going on with the system. Things seem to be breaking down a lot of.
We have 177 escalators. The average useful life of an escalator is 12 to 15 years old. And the average life of a barred escalator is over 35. We still had a significant amount of our track that was original dating back to the 1960s and it just needed to be replaced.
We got a $3.5 billion infrastructure bond passed and that's been able to get us in there and basically rebuild the system. And what's happened is reliability has gone through the roof. There's fewer breakdowns. We see it in the data. Our on time performance is in the ninet again, it was instant gratification almost for us.
Seven, five feet in the future, coming in with four cars. We'll just be in and out. E Raleigh. I've been running trains for about 15 years, starting in 2003. You know, we have professional commuters out there, so, you know, I enjoy just looking at the people and watching them take their own particular seat every time they board the train. And if somebody's in their seat, you know, you can see the look on their face like, okay, that person's in my seat. But as long as I can move this train and keep it going and you can get from A to B when you want to, that's rewarding.
Today, I would say safety. It's something that's top of mind for all of our riders. With the region struggling with a homeless crisis, with mental health problems where people aren't getting the services they need, those problems, they're starting to push themselves into our stations, onto our trains. As a trans agency, it's extremely difficult to figure out how do we solve that problem when our Bay Area regions haven't figured out how to solve it. And so that made us turn to social media, naturally, because these conversations were taking place on social media.
Traditionally, government asks people to show up to a public meeting on a Thursday morning in an office. We need to, as a government agency, make sure that we're meeting people where they are so that we can be really active listeners to be able to understand how people are experiencing Bard and what they really want us to focus on.
When I came in, a lot of our systems were on premise systems. We looked at and said we have to be nimble and we have to move as fast as our line of businesses and the region need us to move. And if we continue to do on premise solutions, we are always going to be behind the eight ball. The cloud gives you industry best practices and processes that you don't have to recreate.
We're using Social Studio to see what are our customers asking us right now, what's going on in terms of service, who do I need to reply to first? What should be escalated. So if somebody tweets us that an escalator's down, we're using Social Studio not just to respond, but also to request maintenance. So we just got a case. There is an escalator out at 24th Street Mission. I'm going to send it to Salesforce and create a case so that we can and forward it over to our escalator team so they can take a look at it. We have influencer alerts set up where I get an email. Any spokesperson gets an email when someone that has a large voice tweets about us. And then we can take that opportunity to then push out a message. I can track what people are talking about, those main themes, and then if what I'm pushing out my marketing messages, don't go back to those main themes. I'm talking about the wrong thing.
Instead of being like, don't worry, everything's under control. We got this, we just told it straight. No longer did people feel like they were shouting into a void. They felt that there was someone coming to the table, meeting them where they were and having a really just sort of honest and open and frank conversation within it.
A lot of people don't think it impacts the community. They believe that it is a back office and it's the operations component. But something that we have worked together on is really bringing value not only to the district, but, but to our communities and to our regions. Because I could see the voice of the customer. That's what got me excited. I was just like, wow.
Going to the cloud was a huge Return on investment, because we were able to have an extremely tiny team basically do the work of a large team.
Everybody from the folks who go out and clean the stations every day, to our mechanics, to our train drivers, to the folks in the office, we're all really just sort of centered on how we can provide a better experience.
Now we're actually humanizing our service when we're engaging with our customers on the cloud, either through Twitter, Facebook, whatever platform, you're getting a very personalized response with actual context and data. That's most important when I hear our writers explain, hey, I love that I got an actual response from BART today, and I understand a little bit more about why things are the way they are. That's really rewarding to me, and hopefully it's rewarding to the user as well.
If we're going to really be able to drive the changes that we need to continue serving the Bay Area, we need to be so much more data driven. So often government operates in a data vacuum. And I think that we have an obligation to show people that we can run government more effectively by using all the talent and the creativity and the solutions that are being developed in the private sector in this region to make our government work better and to make our government live up to the expectations that people have.
From an OCIO perspective, we want to know our line of business partners a lot better and what they're doing in their operations. But not only that, we want to also understand our customers, our patrons, the region, so that we stay ahead of the curve.
At bart, we don't always get to know our customers because they're always going somewhere. So we don't get to stop and have that conversation with them. Now moving towards the cloud, I can have those conversations with them. And so being able to use technology to engage our writers on their time and on the topics they want to talk about, that's truly responsive government. I love going into the classrooms and talking to my kids classes. I bring a BART map and I teach them. This is how you write, this is how you make a transfer. We also do some fun things where I have the students pretend they're a train operator and they're making really silly announcements like, there's a delay because Elsa's on the track and she's freezing everything.
