A computer upgrade shut down BART

Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.

It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.

Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....

Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.

So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.

Good ol' Prop 12, guaranteeing that everything will be underfunded one way or another.

Hilarious that from 2020 and to this day ridership has collapsed but BART operating expenses went up despite that and all the efficiencies they talk about in your link. Kind of tells you everything you need to know about where the money is actually going...

Just to compare with another expensive city - BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget.

It's pretty hard to keep from drowning in despair when one realizes that almost everywhere else in the USA except maybe NYC, the situation is worse.

That is mostly a zoning issue, have you seen the density around Tube stations? Compare that to the density around half of the BART stations which are big parking lots surrounded by single family houses. Of course it's cheaper to run a transit system in a city with twice the population density and population in the metro area.

Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data/

BART is one of the most cost efficient systems in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1d27dvo/us_cost_pe.... It's so efficient that pre-pandemic it got the majority of its funding through fares, not taxes.

By the way it costs exorbitant amounts to build highways too and you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you.

So quite frankly you don't know what you're talking about.

> Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.

Didn't bigTech start buses going directly to their campus as a perk?

Except, as always bureaucratic pay raises.

Yeah this is basically the private market filling in for our lack of transit down south. Most every other major city doesn't have this, you just take the metro to work like a normal person.

BART service area population is comparable to Greater London

> Costs are an America issue, not a BART issue: https://transitcosts.com/new-data

If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km

> you don't see people criticizing all of our highways around the area do you

uhm what?

didn't realize cage free pigs lead to such dramatic second order effects =)

What metro :/

BART is not a typical metro system in that it serves a lot of suburbs that have very little population density, and was mainly built as a commuter service to get people to downtown SF. So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has without massive upzoning and more infill stations. Comparing it to the Tube which mostly serves the city of London is not an apples to apples comparison. Look at the costs of building new rail infrastructure in London and it's comparable to here.

> If by "America" you mean NYC/SFBA then sure. You can see in your own link there's massive spread across the locales with some being cheaper than UK per km

What you're talking about in that link is the extension to San Jose, not day to day BART operations. That one does deserve criticism as they've made poor decisions like not doing cut/cover because NIMBYs in San Jose don't want any disruption to streets. So instead we are tunneling to the Earth first. Elsewhere in the world municipalities understand that it's worth temporary disruptions to roads to bring down costs, but of course America is unique and we have to learn these lessons ourselves.

  So it was never going to have the kind of ridership the Tube has
  without massive upzoning and more infill stations.

Yet BART insists on expanding its footprint instead of building infill stations.

must have meant Prop 13

> when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting

Everyone wants more services and lower taxes, but they vote for the lower taxes and get made when there are no services. Those things often don't go together. It's okay to either accept fewer services with less tax burden, or higher taxes with more services (the side I generally lean towards, within reason).

Hey, the Boston T runs some of the time!

Jokes aside, I'd like to see a stack ranking of US public transit. I'd assume NYC and DC are top dogs, but I'm curious about other cities.

I'm not sure why we've drifted talking about new lines/stations. Both Tube and BART hardly built anything in the last 10 years. I was only remarking on operating costs for what was already built by pandemic and the fact that ridership seems completely untangled from it.

It seems to me that BART management did what most of other government bureaucracies did around here during covid - threw their feet on the desk and took an extended 2+ year sabbatical

> have you seen the density around Tube stations?

As a former tube-commuter and occasional BART-user, I'd wager that possibly a majority of the commuting trips in zone 1 are taking people from a mainline train station to somewhere, and then back in the evening. That option barely even exists in the Bay Area - indeed every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.

The failure of Proposition 5 doesn't indicate that California voters are opposed to transit. That was a very broad proposition which lowered the voting threshold for local governments to issue bonds for a wide variety of projects, not just transit. Local governments are already facing debt problems and making it easier to take on more debt would set them up for serious future fiscal problems.

True, but it ignores the point of who various services are for. Wealthy professionals in the suburbs tend to vote against mass transit they don't plan on using.

IMO, if LA can maintain its rate of progress from the last 10 years going forward, they will have a better system than SF before long.

It even has direct service from two metro lines to the airport.

  every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and
  rent a car instead.

BART really made a mess of transit to SFO, unfortunately. BART ridership never met projections so they played around quite a lot with service between Millbrae and SFO in effort to save money. For a while there was a Millbrae-SFO shuttle. For a while one line provided service during the day and one provided evening and weekend service. Even today only one of the two transbay lines that runs down the peninsula offers service to Millbrae and SFO.

Once you actually get to Millbrae you then get to deal with BART's whole NIH problem manifesting as a refusal (up until recently) to offer timed connections with Caltrain. And, of course, up until 2021 actually getting between the BART and Caltrain platforms involved a ton of walking.

> BART serves 1/20th of London's Tube rides while operating on 1/5th of the Tube's budget

I would think increased ridership means increased efficiency.

> ...every time I look at how to use Caltrain from SFO I give up and rent a car instead.

Why? Last I checked, it's

   * Depart SFO via BART
   * Get off BART at the first stop, Millbrae
   * Exit BART and enter Caltrain

Is there some complication I'm missing (other than the fact that neither BART nor Caltrain are 24/7 services)?

You would not expect a ridership reduction to have any significant reduction in operating expenses. Full trains costs roughly the same as an empty trains.

I wouldn't consider myself anti-transit - before Covid I took BART every work day and currently walk to my office. And have never regularly commuted by car in the Bay Area. But in SF, we seem to keep throwing money at transit orgs through ballot measures, and getting little tangible results in return. I voted for funding increases for Muni for years, with supposed reliability / service enhancements that never seemed to materialize. It's disappointing that rather than hearing that voters are more hesitant to fund this now vs previously, the reaction would be to try to lower thresholds to get things passed.

Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.

While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?

Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)

Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.

The infill stations don't make much sense because they're also low density housing. The fundamental problem with mass transit in CA is the insane insistence to remain low density despite the overwhelming demand for housing. It's the sin that leads to all of the problems the state faces.

Whoops, yes, that was the one. Caught it too late for an edit.

Do you have a sense of how much you're paying in taxes that is being mismanaged by BART? I think it's far less than you realize.

Depending on the year and day of the week it also involved a transfer at San Bruno.

Fortunately they've since reverted back to always running to Millbrae from the airport.

No, treating BART as a low-density transit system while granting them right of ways in some of the most dense areas of the country doesn't make much sense. 30th & Mission and 98th & San Leandro would've absolutely made sense while neither Millbrae nor SFO should've ever been built.

The numbers are here [1]. BART generates about $300M in revenue and gets $500M in "financial assistance," of which $320M is sales tax revenue.

[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/FY26%20Adop...

I meant like as an individual do you have a sense? $320M in sales tax is not really very much. Because people are often upset we spend too much on transit but also upset that our transit isn't as good as, say, the Tube. Can't really have it both ways.

BART taxes are not even in the top 100 list of expenses I worry about personally.

Intreased ridership almost always means better service. Run more service on the lines you have, and run / build more routes so you have a useful network.

There is a half cent sales tax in BART counties, 75% of which goes to BART.

The BART is better than the DC metro in my experience. The DC Metro is great for commuters into metro center, but it shuts down too early, and is totally impractical for moving around the outside of the city/suburbs. The BART looks visibly in worse shape, but you can quite easily live car-free in SF

I don’t have a specific link but I’d be surprised if the CityNerd channel on YouTube didn’t have a (recent) video on it. Just as a disclaimer: Even if you don’t agree with his politics, he does take care to explain his data set sources and methodology, so it’s likely a useful source for this sort of thing.

NYC is definitely the top dog. There was a recent ranking for metro areas ranked by walkability, bike-ability, public transit, and some other urban score, but divided by average rent price for a 1BR apartment. NYC still came out #1 despite the rather large denominator.

It looks like BART usage is way down from pre-pandemic levels, around half of what it used to be, and to top it off the BART system has added over 300 additional employees since 2019. It may be a tough sell to convince taxpayers to fork over more money to them.

If ridership is down, I'd expect them to run fewer trains.

The problem of course then is that you create a whole in the bucket. Fewer trains -> BART becomes less convenient -> people choose other options -> lower ridership -> fewer trains -> less convenient ....

The complication is not physically how to do it, but that the timing is not arranged to line up well, resulting in excessive waits.