OAKLAND — BART’s Oakland Airport Connector — the sleek trams that whisk riders from the Coliseum station — seems to be falling victim to the ride-booking phenomenon that has also bedeviled taxis, shuttles and other airport transit services.

The $6 one-way fare may not be helping fill seats, either.

Rather than making a projected $2 million profit in its first two years, the service has cost the agency $860,000. And ridership dropped 4.5 percent during the three-month period ending Sept. 30 from the same period a year earlier, as ride-booking services tripled their numbers over the same span.

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Social justice advocates blasted the service when it was first proposed as a “shovel ready” candidate for federal stimulus funds, calling the automated people mover a “boondoggle” that does little to benefit the mostly low-income East Oakland communities the trams pass over. And several groups challenged BART’s assumptions that it could use the connector’s high fares to cover its operating costs.

Data recently obtained by this newspaper show those concerns have come to fruition, though not for reasons anyone suspected at the time. The introduction of ride-booking services, such as Uber, Lyft and Wingz, at Oakland International Airport last year have consumed nearly all of the new business from the airport’s growing passenger traffic. Related Articles Buses replace BART trains between Bay Fair and South Hayward stations this weekend

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The precipitous rise of ride-booking took everyone by surprise, including the staff at Oakland International Airport, said Stephen Gordon, the airport’s business manager.

“Anybody who said they saw this coming is full of baloney,” he said. “Every month, we continue to be astonished by the growth in the use of (ride-booking).”

At the same time, the total number of passengers at Oakland International Airport grew more than 6 percent, meaning ride-booking services not only won new passengers’ business but also stole some potential customers from other transit options, Gordon said.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been an increase in the number of riders using BART to get to the Oakland airport since the trams went into operation — there has. But it has not been enough to meet expectations of the service when BART’s governing board approved the $6 fare in June 2014. And that was after BART staff had already lowered proposed ridership projections from initial estimates in 2009, when the project was first approved.

Standing at the curb to grab an Uber, Las Vegas resident Ryan Mitchell said the cost of the connector was one of the main factors in his decision to hail a ride, rather than take BART.

“Six dollars is steep,” he said, adding that even though Uber cost more than his trip on BART would have, taking BART would have doubled his time in transit.

Contemplated since BART’s inception, an extension to Oakland International Airport had been studied for decades and was ready to go when Congress approved the release of stimulus funds, said Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the regional transportation-planning agency in charge of distributing that money.

But transportation and social-advocacy groups balked at the proposal, especially in light of the steep service cuts and the fare increase that AC Transit was contemplating, said Rev. Scott Denman, the rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland and a representative for the advocacy group Genesis.

“They wanted to take (the money) and spend it on people who could afford airline tickets instead of giving it to people who could barely afford bus tickets,” Denman recalled.

Public Advocates Inc., on behalf of Genesis, Urban Habitat and TransForm, two social justice organizations and a transportation policy advocate, launched a formal civil rights complaint against BART on the grounds it failed to analyze how the service would affect minority and low-income residents, a requirement for any project receiving federal funds. The groups won, and the Federal Transit Administration pulled $70 million it had dedicated to the connector, forcing the MTC to redistribute that money among transit operators in the Bay Area.

BART ultimately took out a larger loan to pay for the $484 million project, which is costing the agency $6.4 million a year. It hasn’t committed as much money as it said it would for future capital repairs on the connector, setting aside $1.42 million, or $80,000 less than it had planned.

Still, BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said the airport connector has been a success. In the last fiscal year, which ended June 30, it had a 96 percent farebox recovery rate, meaning 96 percent of its operating costs were covered by the fares riders pay, compared with 76 percent across the entire BART system.

But with competition from ride-booking services showing no signs of abating, it’s unclear whether the service will meet its ridership goals anytime soon. Since February this year, the portion of riders taking the connector has dropped compared with the prior year, indicating it is losing some of its share of the ground transportation market at the airport, according to data from the Port of Oakland.

BART board directors Rebecca Saltzman and Joel Keller both conceded that the high cost might be driving away some riders. They said the board would be looking at restructuring fares, not just for the Airport Connector but for the entire BART system, sometime next year.

“It’s generally been a good service,” Keller said. “But there’s still some refinements to get it to the point where we can attract more riders and get it as close to covering the costs of operating as possible.”