Clocking Out: Two Decades at BART and What I Left Behind

Twenty Years and a Locker Cleanout

One week before my 20th anniversary with the Bay Area Transit District, my girlfriend and I had a conversation about retirement. We were on the same page. On October 31, 2025, I cleaned out my locker, packed up my desk, filed two weeks of sick leave paperwork, and walked out of BART for good.

It felt right. Long overdue, actually.

My situation over those final years was far from ideal. Due to divorce, I spent parts of four years sleeping in my car at work before upgrading to a camper on the back of my truck, parked under I-880. There was nothing positive or healthy about that chapter, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

The last two years, I was grinding 12-hour shifts as often as I could. My logic was simple: if I wasn’t going home on weekends anyway, why not make the most of it? In practice, I rarely worked more than six or seven productive hours in those shifts, but the pay — especially double time and a half on holidays — made it worthwhile. Even so, I never felt fully compensated for the level of responsibility and stress that came with the job every single day.

My perspective on BART, and on the role once called train controller and now known as rail operations controller, has shifted since I last wrote about it back in 2014. I still believe leaving United Airlines was the right call — the airline industry has struggled for years and continues to. But what I found on the other side of that fence turned out to be surprisingly familiar. Different company, different industry, many of the same frustrations.

The most concrete positive BART gave me was financial. Over my time there, my pay increased nearly 400%. Even without a single hour of overtime, my base salary grew 167% — and between 2024 and 2026, I logged over 2,000 hours of overtime on top of that. It’s hard to find that kind of wage growth anywhere in the Bay Area. The irony is that even at $187,000 a year, “middle class” felt like a stretch given the cost of living. The raises were contract-driven, which meant everyone got them regardless of performance. There were no meaningful evaluations, no merit-based increases — just across-the-board bumps that rewarded the exceptional and the mediocre equally. If you can get certified as a rail operations controller, the pay is genuinely excellent. Just don’t expect the system to recognize the difference between someone who’s great at the job and someone who isn’t.

That brings me to training — easily one of BART’s most persistent failures. The washout rate for new controller candidates exceeded 70%, and for a stretch of years after I certified in 2006, every outside hire either failed or quit. This went on for seven or eight years, while a core group of experienced controllers were quietly doing excellent work and holding the system together. The training program during that time, and frankly for years after, was never seriously reformed. Management seemed content to keep a broken system in place rather than acknowledge the results it was producing.

Some of the curriculum choices never made sense to me. Controllers were sent through train operator classes before classroom instruction — a meaningful investment of time and money that served little practical purpose, especially now that trains are largely automated and troubleshooting is minimal. Months were spent in the power support role, managing the electrical side of the system, when the only thing a controller truly needs to know in that context is whether the rail is hot or cold. These decisions were defended by management, but the failure rates told a different story. When the people responsible for training never truly mastered the job themselves, the results speak for themselves — and a 70% failure rate is about as clear a result as you can get.

By the end, BART was lowering its hiring standards considerably. Controllers were being certified who had no business managing a single train, let alone an entire rail system. Some, even at that salary, struggled to make basic independent decisions. That’s a reflection of both the hiring process and a broader cultural shift — one where “tell me what to do” has replaced “I know what to do.”

Still, I’m not walking away empty-handed. The pension alone was worth more than I can quantify — a genuine rarity in today’s workforce. The accumulated paid time off had real value too, even if some of the policies surrounding it were unnecessarily convoluted. A handful of colleagues made the years genuinely worthwhile, and I won’t forget them.

But would I go back? Not a chance.

If you’re considering this career path, go in with clear eyes. The pay, when you certify, is hard to beat. The environment has its challenges, and the odds of making it through training are, statistically, not in your favor. But if you do make it through, it’s a livable career — and in some ways, a good one. Just be prepared for the reality that the institution itself may never fully get out of its own way.