San Francisco’s heavily traveled Powell Street BART Station is getting a $30 million-plus face-lift. And as usual with big BART projects, the five-year job is already running behind schedule — about 18 months behind.

Station improvements include new ceilings, platform tiles and fare gates, plus relocated ticket machines. There’s even a new bit of artwork planned for the Hallidie Plaza lobby that will make the station’s ceiling look like a dome open to the sky.

Outside, metal and glass canopies that lock at night will arch over the station’s Market Street entrances.

The plan even calls for the reopening, on a pilot basis, of long-closed public restrooms — this time a unisex version — that have been shuttered since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s all part of a plan to make the system’s third-busiest station — and BART’s gateway to shopping in San Francisco — safer and more attractive to the 27,783 passengers who pass through it on an average day.

But as BART Director Bevan Dufty tells us, “Things often move slowly, and there are usually reasons.

“We might rename it Murphy’s Station, because it seems that everything that could go wrong with these projects has gone wrong,” Dufty said.

The plan hit its first bump shortly after BART’s news release went out in March 2016 announcing the restoration of the station to its “showcase status,” after having “endured 43 years of daily use.”

The release gave the planned starting date for the first portion of work — a yearlong job installing new ceiling light panels and removing what remained of the fire-protective asbestos on the station’s support columns — as June 2016.

No such luck.

It turned out there were errors in the $7.3 million bid, and BART was forced to rewrite it, pushing back the start date to the end of 2016.

The winning bidder, however, had never worked for BART before and struggled to comply with the transit agency’s requirements, which included scheduling around other crews working on the rail system’s tracks and the Muni stop that shares the station.

“It was a little bit disjointed,” BART spokesman Jim Allison said.

Then BART decided to bring in a separate subcontractor to upgrade the sprinkler system, which meant getting a sign-off from the San Francisco Fire Department.

“Naturally, they wanted some changes,” Allison said, so more time was lost as BART redesigned the sprinkler system to meet the city’s fire codes.

Now BART is thinking about upgrading the public address system, putting a halt to installing some of the ceiling panels while officials decide if the wiring first needs to be replaced.

“Something new is going to cost us more time,” says project manager Mike Wong. “That’s how it goes.”

Wong said the designs for the rest of the station modernization are still being worked out, and there is no definite timeline for completing them.

That includes the ceiling art of fabricated, illuminated polycarbonate panels. Passengers will be able to look up and see what looks like a dome opening to a view of the sky framed by surrounding buildings.

And while all this is going on, BART is preparing to tackle one of the station’s most pressing problems — the constantly broken escalators. Bids are expected to go out late this summer on a $164 million contract to either replace or rebuild 41 escalators between Embarcadero and Civic Center stations, including every one at Powell Street.

When BART board President Robert Raburn passed through Powell Street recently, he saw wires hanging from ceiling light fixtures, so he assumed the long-awaited work was finally getting under way — and it has.

But he said he is “warily aware” of the difficulty of getting BART projects started — and not just at Powell Street.

“At the MacArthur Station, which is in my district, a developer was supposed to put in new bike racks and do a plaza renewal,” Raburn said. “That was four years ago!”

Strike two: For the second time in four years, Oakland’s Port Commission is expected to enter into exclusive negotiations this week with the Oakland A’s for a possible ballpark at Howard Terminal.

The first exclusive negotiating deal in March 2014 ended within months, after the team’s then-managing partner, Lew Wolff, backed by Major League Baseball, concluded the waterfront site wasn’t viable.

The new discussions come amid signs the A’s are feeling increasingly hopeful that they can make a ballpark work on the 50-acre property north of Jack London Square — despite a slew of transportation, environmental and regulatory hurdles that deterred them in the past.

The first step will be a “feasibility analysis” to address both the challenges and what it would take to get the needed approvals from State Lands Commission, Bay Conservation and Development Commission and other regulatory agencies that have jurisdiction over the port.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has likened the talks to an “exclusive dating” agreement where both sides agree only to talk with each other.

And Schaaf said she “loves — just loves” the A’s idea of an overhead tram to shuttle fans between downtown Oakland and the site.

It’s no marriage yet, but it’s a start.

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