BART officials who acknowledge that filthy stations and trains, the presence of sleeping homeless people and fear of crime may be scaring away riders said this week they have big plans to clean up the region’s backbone transit system.

The strategies coming this year — sure to elicit relief in some customers, skepticism in others — include posting attendants in downtown San Francisco station elevators, closing off parts of stations at night, increasing police patrols inside and outside the busy Civic Center and Powell stations, and even posting colorful signs with pointed messages about the quality of public behavior expected at BART.

The goal is to address a clear decline in BART’s popularity that means less service and lost revenue. Ridership continues a slow dip, down 4.3 percent in the past year.

Complaints about stations that reek of urine and riders having to step over sleeping homeless people in hallways are on the rise, while incidents like last year’s mob robbery on a train at Coliseum Station — in addition to too-frequent cell phone snatchings and bike thefts — have frightened some patrons.

“There’s some scary stuff sometimes on BART,” said Director Lateefah Simon. “We see it. We feel it.”

What to do about it dominated the discussion this week at a two-day workshop at a Pleasant Hill hotel, where BART directors and staffers outlined priorities for the coming year. BART’s turnaround strategy — some of it already under way — involves overhauling the way it cleans stations, cracking down on fare evasion and working on ways to get homeless people out of stations and into supportive services.

The initiatives are aimed at problems that appear to be growing. BART police in 2017 received 11,826 calls for welfare checks, mostly complaints about homeless people, compared with 9,878 a year earlier. The calls came amid concerns across the Bay Area about homelessness and lack of housing.

Last year, 534 people complained about what BART calls “quality of life” issues, most involving homeless people. Of the complaints, 404 were about “transients,” 99 reporting “unclean individuals” and 31 referenced people with “mental health issues,” said Angela Borchardt, a BART project analyst who’s been working on homeless issues. In an online survey of BART riders’ concerns last fall, cleanliness and homelessness were among the most frequently mentioned.

Director Debora Allen, of Clayton, said she not only hears complaints from constituents but routinely spots them on social media.

“Riders cannot speak more loudly to us than they are now about what they want from BART,” she said.

Cleaner stations were one of the bigger promises made to directors — and riders. Instead of simply adding more cleaning crews, BART said it is following the advice of an international organization with members that clean hotels, shopping centers and stadiums, and modernizing its procedures, which hadn’t changed much since the system opened in 1972.

In most cases, workers will be assigned to a single station rather than being moved between two or three. Standardized cleaning plans will be established, officials said, with regular inspections and customer satisfaction surveys conducted. Workers will emphasize cleaning up stations frequented by homeless people, working to “address platform level filth and odors,” said Tamar Allen, chief maintenance and engineering officer.

At Civic Center Station, when a train pulls in, Allen said, the smell of urine “was very pungent and very strong because people were urinating on the tracks and off the platforms.”

Crews are focusing on cleaning the tracks and walls behind them after trains stop running at night. Deep cleaning efforts will continue in BART’s downtown San Francisco stations but, in most, overnight shifts will be eliminated and all cleaning done during operating hours.

The union representing cleanup crews has concerns about that plan making it tougher to clean stations, said John Arantes, president of the BART chapter of Service Employees International Union 1021.

But agency Director Bevan Dufty, of San Francisco, likes the idea of more BART workers in stations.

“There will be more of a presence,” he said, “and I think that makes people feel more safe.”

In perhaps the most unusual attempt to clean up, BART will place attendants in platform and street elevators at Civic Center and Powell stations at all times in an effort to stop people from urinating and defecating in them, a persistent problem in downtown San Francisco. The six-month experiment will begin this spring.

BART also plans to step up efforts to prevent homeless people from sleeping in stations and on trains. Officials said the agency will continue to field its own homeless outreach team, and may add another crew to work with people sleeping, camping out or loitering in the Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell and Civic Center stations.

Over the past year, the team made contact with 258 people, referred 128 for services, helped people make 266 contacts for assistance, and had 89 refuse services, BART said. Those who refuse services can be evicted from the stations or arrested if they’re sleeping, blocking entrances, littering or committing other offenses — and they will be, said agency General Manager Grace Crunican.

“This is not a place to sleep,” she said. “This is not your home. If they’re not willing to go, we will move them out.”

BART said it plans to take its San Francisco strategy of offering services to the homeless to the other counties in the system. The problem has spread across the system, said Dufty, especially to end-of-the-line stations.

Directors said this week they were encouraged by the efforts to clean up BART.

“I think it’s a real cultural shift,” said Nick Josefowitz, a director from San Francisco. “People are going to notice the difference.”

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