BART may provide relief for riders by reopening bathrooms

The above ground Balboa Park BART station, in San Francisco, Calif., has working public restrooms available for use, as seen on Wed. June 24, 2015. Public restrooms in underground BART stations throughout the Bay Area system have been closed since Sept. 11, 2001 due to security concerns. The restrooms could reopen if some directors have their way, as the transit system is looking at ways it could create safe, and maybe even sanitary, restrooms. less The above ground Balboa Park BART station, in San Francisco, Calif., has working public restrooms available for use, as seen on Wed. June 24, 2015. Public restrooms in underground BART stations throughout the ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close BART may provide relief for riders by reopening bathrooms 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

For antsy BART riders, forced to hold it for nearly 14 years, relief may be on the way. The transit agency is looking at reopening the closed restrooms in its underground stations.

BART locked the loos at all of its stations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based on the suggestion of federal security officials. It also removed trash cans from underground platforms, installed more security cameras and stepped up patrols. Eventually, restrooms at all but the subterranean stations were reopened.

While commuters have grown accustomed to most of the post-9/11 changes, the padlocked potties still have many peeved.

“The bathrooms should be open,” said Calvin Hearne, 44, a San Francisco city custodian, as he waited for a train in the Powell Street Station, where the restrooms are closed. “You have people with disabilities who need to use the bathrooms, people with kids who need to use the bathrooms. There’s no reason for it.”

BART officials, acting on a request from a number of BART directors, have been studying the possibility of reopening, and remodeling, the closed restrooms. They’ll present their findings, and discuss the issue with directors at Thursday’s 5 p.m. board meeting in Oakland.

Instead of simply unlocking the closed restrooms, which sit in pairs behind tall, stainless-steel doors, BART is considering converting them into unisex facilities that are more open, more easily monitored and could discourage unsavory or illegal activities, ranging from graffiti to drug use to terrorism.

BART will consider testing redesigned restrooms at the Powell Street Station in downtown San Francisco and the 19th Street Station in Uptown Oakland. The so-called open-approach restrooms would use the existing one-person restrooms but would replace the tall solid doors with a semi-opaque door that has gaps at the top and bottom, and would relocate the sinks to an open area outside the toilet areas. The open area would be monitored by surveillance cameras.

Restrooms remain closed at 10 stations: Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell, Civic Center, 16th Street Mission and 24th Street Mission in San Francisco and Lake Merritt, 12th Street, 19th Street and Downtown Berkeley in the East Bay. Most of the locked restroom doors bear signs and stickers, sometimes even police tape, marking the restrooms as off-limits and sometimes directing passengers to the nearest public facilities.

Friendly station agents at some stations occasionally open the restrooms for people with an urgent need to use the facilities, and often use them themselves. At other stations, the restrooms have been transformed into storage closets.

Across the country, some major rail transit systems — including the New York City subway — have open underground station restrooms while others don’t. Some don’t have underground restrooms, some have both open and closed restrooms in the system, and others require an escort to open the bathrooms.

Alicia Trost, a BART spokeswoman, said the agency gets a lot of questions and complaints about the closed restrooms from passengers, many of whom blamed the feces and urine sometimes found in station entrances on the lack of BART bathrooms.

“We hear a lot about quality of life issues in downtown San Francisco and know a lot of our riders correlate that with closed restrooms,” she said. “It’s usually people complaining about the stench of our stations and blaming it on restrooms being closed without acknowledging that it’s part of a deeper issue that affects all of San Francisco.”

Reopening the restrooms would cost about $1 million a year, according to BART: $900,000 to hire six people to clean, monitor and repair the restrooms and about $100,000 to repair vandalism and remove needles and other drug paraphernalia. Remodeling the restrooms would cost between $100,000 and $525,000 per station.

BART Director John McPartland, who has worked extensively in emergency services, said the new designs would allow BART to provide public restrooms at all stations while ensuring their safety.

“The open nature will minimize the attractiveness of restrooms as a target for terrorists,” he said.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan