USA: On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria)

[John Ashworth]

On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria)

By ZUSHA ELINSON
NYT
Published: March 5, 2011

Carrie Nee prefers to stand during her half-hour commute on BART from San Leandro to downtown San Francisco. Although the trains’ blue fabric seats are plush and comfortable, Ms. Nee refuses to sit on them.

“I would love to sit down, but it just grosses me out. They’re disgusting,” said Ms. Nee, a 26-year-old records clerk.

Riders on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system have long complained about germs in the hard-to-clean cloth seats. As Bob Franklin, the BART board president, acknowledged, “People don’t know what’s in there.”

Now they do.

The Bay Citizen commissioned Darleen Franklin, a supervisor at San Francisco State University’s biology lab, to analyze the bacterial content of a random BART seat. The results may make you want to stand during your trip.

Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Ms. Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.

High concentrations of at least nine bacteria strains and several types of mold were found on the seat. Even after Ms. Franklin cleaned the cushion with an alcohol wipe, potentially harmful bacteria were found growing in the fabric.

Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, played down the threat of infection from harmful bacteria on a BART seat. “I suspect it’s not a very big problem,” Dr. Swartzberg said. “That said, if there’s another way to do it, where you can clean it better, then you should do it.”

He said the cloth seats most likely allowed bacteria to flourish because they were more difficult to clean and disinfect.

James Allison, a BART spokesman, wrote in an e-mail that the findings were “not surprising,” considering that 330,000 commuters rode the trains daily. Last year, the BART police received 1,051 complaints of smoking, eating and drinking; 245 complaints of urinating or defecating; and 56 reports of spitting.

Mr. Allison encouraged riders to wash their hands and use hand sanitizers available at BART stations.

Hygiene has emerged as a key issue as BART officials determine what kind of seats to install for a new fleet of cars in 2017. In January, system employees were invited to test a variety of seat models at a Hayward warehouse. One employee, Melissa Jordan, filed a report on BART’s Web site about the trade-offs in selecting the new seats.

“Can I live with some type of seat that’s less cushiony — maybe padded vinyl instead of fabric — if it’s easier to keep clean?” Ms. Jordan wrote.

Ms. Franklin’s analysis also revealed that Muni, which uses acrylic plastic seats, appears to be more sanitary.

She tested a seat on the No. 28 bus, a route frequented by college students traveling from San Francisco State to Daly City. Two benign bacteria colonies were found. Unlike the BART seat analysis, Ms. Franklin’s test of the Muni seat after cleaning it with an alcohol wipe detected no bacteria.

Ms. Franklin tested the BART seat at the back of a Dublin/Pleasanton-bound train in the midafternoon. A swab taken from the seat cushion and headrest produced a veritable forest of mold and colorful bacteria.

In two separate tests, Ms. Franklin identified characteristics of the MRSA bacteria growing in the seat. The first test confirmed the presence of staphylococcus aureus, the skin-borne bacteria. A second confirmed that the bacteria, like MRSA, was resistant to the antibiotics methicillin and penicillin. But a third test intended to isolate the MRSA bacteria was negative.

MRSA is known as the “superbug” because it is resistant to antibiotics. It infects people through open wounds, attacking the immune system; 19,000 deaths each year are related to MRSA infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There’s a probability that it is MRSA, but more tests would need to be done,” Ms. Franklin said. “Somebody probably was wearing shorts and had an infection, and there you go. It is concerning.”

Ms. Franklin identified two other bacteria strains that she said resulted from fecal contamination of the BART seat. Those strains were also resistant to antibiotics. The other bacteria did not appear to be harmful and are found throughout the environment, Ms. Franklin said.

The soft seat is a BART trademark, going back to Sept. 11, 1972, the day the first train rolled down the track. The seat covers are made of 90 percent wool and 10 percent nylon and are filled with foam padding, which was made fire-resistant after a fire in the Transbay Tube in 1979.

A BART brochure proclaimed that the new trains were designed to “lure the commuter out of the comfort of his automobile.” The trains were “almost as wide as a Boeing 707, and every bit as comfortable,” according to the brochure, which was printed in the shape of a BART car.

“BART was an all-new system, and they wanted everything to be different,” said Mike Healey, who was a BART spokesman at the time. “They wanted cushioned seats and rugs on the floors. Comfort was certainly a key selling point for the system.”

The marketing campaign worked. Ridership has grown. And the once-quiet suburban commuter train is now a heavily trafficked line.

“Things have changed,” said Mr. Franklin, the BART board president. “Now you’re no longer guaranteed a parking space. You’re no longer guaranteed a seat. There are 350,000 people traveling every day, as opposed to 50,000.”

BART cleaners go through trains every night and tackle the dirtiest seat cushions. Hard surfaces are wiped down with an industrial disinfectant.

Between 300 and 500 seat covers are removed each week and sent to a third-party vendor to be dry-cleaned and disinfected, Mr. Allison said. But that is a fraction of the 40,000 seats on BART’s 669 cars.

Dry-cleaning costs BART $595,000 a year. When necessary, BART replaces the cloth seats for an entire car — generally about 60 seats — at a cost of about $12,500. The system intends to continue rotating in new cloth seats as it continues to try out seats for the new cars.

Mr. Allison said that a major concern in designing the new cars was cleaner, more comfortable seating. BART plans to let the public test different types of seats in demonstration cars and then comment on their suitability.

Mr. Allison said that the choices for new seat models included hard plastic and padded vinyl.

Ms. Nee, the BART rider, said she would prefer hard plastic, especially after hearing the results of the bacteria analysis.

“I would seriously sacrifice my comfort for a more sanitary surrounding,” she said. “Granted, you’re going to be comfortable with the seats they have now, but I think your health is much more important than having your butt hurt for half an hour.”