Smashed windows at Colma BART and Samtrans Station go unfixed for months

COLMA, Calif. (KGO) -- ABC7 News is committed to Building a Better Bay Area -- and one major focus has been transportation.

On Friday, we looked into complaints about the bus shelters at the Colma Transportation Hub, which handles both BART trains and Samtrans buses.

"Why should anyone get out of their cars to sit in a filthy, dirty... Look at this, it's horrible," said Samtrans rider Vivien Zielen.

Having grown up in England and lived in Israel, Vivien knows how public transportation should look -- and it's not these busted bus shelters.

"I first noticed it back in September 2018," she said.

What she noticed last Fall is that many of the bus shelters at the Colma Station had been broken out, and on Friday, she showed us they still haven't been replaced.

"In this particular station, 10 of the 12 shelters have at least one missing window," she said.

Some are missing all of their windows.

Vivien says it's very uncomfortable on those cool Colma evenings, so she contacted BART and Samtrans to find out why the shelters weren't maintained.

"The end of it is that both say the other was responsible," she told us.

So we contacted both agencies to find out who was in charge. Samtrans sent us this written statement:

"While the shelters do have SamTrans branding on them, they are owned and maintained by BART. We have been working closely with BART over the last several months in hopes of rectifying this issue."

A BART spokeswoman told us her agency indeed owns the property, but it's not clear who has the job of maintaining them. If the shelters haven't been repaired by September, that means they will have been in disrepair for one full year.