Another day, another poopy BART and Muni station story. Today, it's the Civic Center Station stairs that gets the fecal-expose treatment, plus the news that there's only a single person tasked with keeping the station clean during BART's hours of operation.
Two years ago, we learned that human waste was responsible for the breakdown of at least one Civic Center Station escalator. Then, in May of 2013, BART reportedly began enforcement of Assembly Bill 716, which, SF Weekly reported at the time, allows BART staffers to ban folks who do things like crap and pee all over the station. (Let's not even talk about what they found on BART seats back in 2011.)
In any case, media attention and increased powers were apparently not enough to clean up the stairs of Civic Center Station, which the Chron today reports, remain a "minefield of garbage and much, much worse."
And by "much, much worse" they mean defecation:
A reporter who visited the Civic Center Station one afternoon this week saw what appeared to be feces on the steps and on nearby walls. On a return visit the next morning, the steps had not yet been cleared of the waste.
The scent of urine greeted riders in multiple stairwells, while urine pooled at the bottom of one flight of steps. On a morning visit, garbage — apples, scrap paper and soup cans — was heaped on steps leading to Market Street.
Yeah, sounds about right.
So what's the deal? Has BART somehow missed the piss? Apparently not, for BART spokesperson Jim Allison tells the Chron that "the agency is well aware of the problem" but that because of recession-era budget cuts, at each downtown station there's only one worker per shift to clear the filth — and those solitary staffers only work when BART is running. A second employee, Allison said, has occasionally come in "on overtime" to help with the Civic Center mess.
Offering a stopgap solution, Allison says that a whole three staffers will be deployed next Monday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to clean the entrances and exits of all downtown stations. So, be sure to hit those stations after 4:30 p.m., so you can enjoy the fruits of their labors before it all reverts to shit.
