If your BART commute is taking longer and feels more crowded this week, it’s because the system is short 43 cars systemwide.

That’s roughly four 10-car trains, each capable of holding up to 1,000 commuters.

The problem has largely been at the Concord maintenance yard, which has just 201 cars working — 40 short of what’s needed to mount full service between Pittsburg and San Francisco International Airport during commute hours.

“The shortage is pretty extraordinary,” said BART spokesman Jim Allison.

The Concord yard is the busiest in the BART system, servicing about 40 percent of the agency’s fleet of 600-plus cars — but its efforts to keep the trains on track have been hamstrung for weeks by a combination of problems.

For starters, maintenance workers are dealing with the lingering effects of those voltage spikes near the North Concord Station that have shorted out electrical components on dozens of cars this year.

Then there’s the weather.

Allison said the exceptionally wet winter made for slippery tracks that caused many of the trains’ steel wheels to slide on the rails and flatten out. “It’s created a lot of wheel maintenance to catch up,” Allison said.

BART is trying to speed up repairs by moving cars to its other shops, but Allison said shortages will probably continue until part of a new Hayward maintenance complex is up and running this fall.

Nuns prevail: The Dominican nuns of San Rafael have bested their high-powered lawyer neighbor’s attempt to prevent them from opening their convent to a pair of homeless women and their children.

By a 6-0 vote, the San Rafael City Council voted down the latest appeal by well-known personal injury lawyer Chris Dolan, whose $6.5 million mansion sits on 2 acres next to Our Lady of Lourdes convent on Locust Avenue. Dolan had raised concerns about how the plan to house the two families would affect the neighborhood.

Vice Mayor Maribeth Bushey said that as a single mother, she took Dolan’s opposition personally. She called his attempt to stop the project “utterly without merit” and said housing two families transitioning to permanent housing was “a valuable goal for our community.”

Under the terms of the convent’s conditional-use permit, the homeless families will be limited to a two-year stay.

Convent spokeswoman Kate Martin said the nuns are seeking bids on the $30,000 to $50,000 remodeling job needed to convert an empty wing of their convent into a pair of apartments. “If all goes well,” she said, “we might be ready to welcome our families in September.”

Dolan initially hinted to us that he’d sue if the city didn’t see things his way, but now he’s downplaying the possibility. He said he simply wanted to ensure that the city isn’t setting a precedent that would allow the convent to expand.

Still, there are signs of tensions in the neighborhood. On the Nextdoor social media website, Dolan said his front gate had been defaced.

“It’s sad that people can’t have a respectful disagreement,” he wrote.

Dolan also attached a testimonial from a former receptionist at his San Francisco law firm who took exception to the public portrayal of him “as a greedy, nasty, uncaring lawyer.”

“I was a single woman with a low income and zero family support,” wrote Hannah Herman, describing how Dolan helped her after she learned she was pregnant a year after starting work at his office. “Chris provided me with health insurance ... (and) opened his own home to me. He gave me a place to live, food to eat, and always treated me with respect.”

Adachi stays put: The San Francisco Hall of Justice has been buzzing with rumors that Public Defender Jeff Adachi is headed to Los Angeles.

Not so, he says.

“I was recruited in the search for their new public defender and even did some interviews with the (Los Angeles County) Board of Supervisors,” Adachi said Tuesday.

It’s an attractive job, Adachi said, coming with a whole new set of challenges — not to mention a $350,000 annual salary, about $108,000 more than he makes now.

On the other side of the scale, however, would have been a loss of independence that has allowed Adachi to speak his mind on a variety of issues in San Francisco — where the only bosses to please are the voters.

Unlike San Francisco, which has the only elected public defender in the state, the Los Angeles County public defender serves at the will of county supervisors — some of whom might not take kindly to a crusading public defender.

So he’s taken himself out of contention.

“It was clear that I would not have the freedom that I have here,” Adachi said.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or email matierandross@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @matierandross