(Editor's note: This is the first of two parts of my interview with Robert Raburn. The second, dealing with more specific BART projects, will run Tuesday.)

Less than four months into office, newly elected Robert Raburn is settled into his role as District 4 BART Director.

Last fall, Raburn won responsibility for:

• Coliseum/Oakland Airport – the site of the Oakland Airport Connector.
• Fruitvale: Site of a BART officer fatally shooting a passenger.
• Lake Merritt: An area undergoing an extensive redesign.
• Twelfth and 19th streets: Shared with District 7, two of the East Bay’s most urban stations.

Raburn ran as a proud progressive on the promise that "we can do better." In contrast to the incumbent, Carole Ward Allen, champion of the Oakland Airport Connector, Raburn focused on the core BART system and improving its connectivity to nearby communities.

He earned the label “transit wonk" while earning his Ph.D. in transportation and urban geography from University of California, Berkeley, and during 10 years as a professor of urban planning. He earned endorsements for “Measure B Citizen Watchdog Committee and leading the dismantling of the “World’s Shortest Freeway. When he discusses bike and pedestrian access, he brings 18 years of experience as the director of the "East Bay Bicycle Coalition."

As BART's 2012 budget looms, I spoke with Raburn to see how his priorities are meshing with agency's existing culture of opinions.

Q: BART recently signed a master vending agreement. How does BART plan to integrate retail into its stations?

A: BART will end up with what will probably resemble airport kiosks in many of our stations. In making my public comments, I wanted to assure that 1) vendors represent local products as well as employees, and 2) that we focus on bringing things to districts that are not already available and that we’re not competing with nearby vendors, that we’re bringing something new.

For example, the Coliseum station is a food desert. I’d love to see them bring in a farmers market. My goal is to activate spaces and make people feel comfortable, bring things and activities to the BART stations and turn them into community.

Q: Will these retail areas be inside the paid part of the station?

A: They would be. Farmers markets … maybe not.

Q: Is it too early to know what rent will be for a small business owner?

A: We don’t know that yet. We just approved the agreement in January, but want to make sure that we do more than just the top 10 proposals. Stations without the most foot traffic could be ignored. We want to bring things where we’re not currently providing goods and services.

Q: If people can start buying food and drinks in the BART stations, would BART change its eating and drinking rules on the trains?

A: We would have to make some changes, on bathrooms, too. I asked staff how this would play out. Of course, people that are employees would need restroom facilities and if we’re serving things to eat and drink, we need to consider providing restroom facilities to customers.

I’m trying to use every angle I can to reopen bathrooms. I’m getting a lot of pushback on this. I’m told there are serious 9/11 concerns, and I feel that our police department, if they’re accepting funds from the federal government to augment their police service and provide fully TSA-type security, they should also be reminding the federal government that we need to establish or reestablish our restroom facilities in a way that’s accessible and secure for our passengers. You can’t deny someone with a full bladder their bodily functions.

Q: People often call BART a suburban commuter service. What makes it suburban? Given that you represent a relatively urban district, what should BART do to become more urban?

A: The suburban element is one: multi-story parking garages. We would not be able to meet our suburban customer’s needs without giving them a place to park their cars.

Number two is the longer distance between stations. The farthest distance BART travels between stations is 10 miles between Castro Valley and the new Dublin/Pleasanton station. That is an extraordinary trip. It fits more in the category of the heavy rail commuter line travel that you’d expect on the Capitol Corridor, not on BART.

The distinction here is when BART tries to juggle these long commuter trips while providing frequent, reliable service in the urban core areas. In the core areas, passengers want urban service because they’re walking into a station at any time, standing around, and now weekend and late night service is 20 minutes, only 3 trains an hour.

You only have to stand around for 20 minutes a few times before you find another mean of transportation, or it’s just going to be difficult if you don’t have an option, whether it be a bike or a car or other transit. You’re just not providing good service to the customer. I don’t think any of us have 20 minutes to waste every day of our lives.

Q: BART only recently began running three trains an hour on evenings and weekends. What will it take to go back to four trains an hour?

A: We’re at capacity. At peak hours, 90 percent of our equipment is deployed. You need more equipment, more maintenance. Our overtime cost to maintain the equipment was spiking. It’s only been in the last few years that our maintenance department has adopted the policy of strategic maintenance to keep cars on the road and pull them off every x number of miles and check them out. In the past, we would run things to failure. So we’re transitioning from ‘run to fail’ to a more strategic maintenance policy.

I’ve been told that within a year, we might have enough of the cars refurbished that we might consider going back to a 15-minute headway. I fully intend to make a push that we improve our service, but in the long run, we need a new fleet of cars. Our current cars average 30 years old. Some date back to 1972. We have the oldest subway fleet in the nation.

Q: What happens if gas prices continue to go up?

A: That’s a chilling idea, but it’s also one of BART’s assumptions for the future.

After the Giants won the World Series, BART set a new ridership record of 522,200 people in a single day. We expect to have 500,000 people on a daily basis within the next 20 years. But I could see with spiking gas prices like what we experienced in 2008 as ridership shot up, we could experience that again, and we would not necessarily have the equipment to apply to meet all those passengers.

Q: After 18 years leading the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, how are you making the transition to transit? Does it feel like a transition?

A: For years and years, I‘ve been working to get bikes on transit. I’ll take some credit for the Safe Routes to Transit, and that’s now become ingrained in the Bay Area, the state, and now even the Federal government. The livability program in the new Transportation reauthorization is basically our Safe Routes to Transit: providing for safe access to transit on foot, bike and a safe place for your bike.

We as people have a gut level for safety and personal security. We have to ensure that it’s safe to use transit, to wait at a bus stop or wait at a BART station. It’s absolutely critical. We need to build a culture of transit civility. For example, passengers in the East Bay, when they get off the bus, say “thank you.” I didn’t hear that in DC. It’s very endearing.

We have a culture with our interpersonal relationships, seeing people we know, developing friendships and I can relate a short anecdote about trips that I took with my father when he was alive. He was 84 when he passed, and a couple days before he passed he was on the No. 62 with me. It was our outing. And he absolutely loved leaving a retirement home where he was surrounded by other people his age and hopping on this bus and seeing 10-year-old Chinese kids and he would smile at them and he would smile back. It added something to his life. And we need those interpersonal relationships and transit provides that. I’m not belittling that we have public safety issues in Oakland, but my goal is to work to make transit appealing.

OL writer Ruth Miller is a policy fellow with Walk Oakland Bike Oakland.