Photo Credit: Pi.1415926535
The Bay Area is one of the richest regions in human history.
We invented half the technology currently destroying the whole world. We have companies worth trillions of dollars. There are people in Atherton with enough money to purchase a small European country (with an oftentimes more efficient public transportation network) because they invented software that makes your company’s meetings 4% more efficient.
And apparently we can’t afford trains built in the 1970s.
BART is facing what transit planners politely call a “fiscal cliff,” which is government language for: we’re broke as fuck.
This is especially insane because BART is basically the circulatory system of the Bay Area. Without it, the Bay, as it currently functions, ceases to exist.
It connects 50 stations across five counties and runs 131 miles through a region whose geography appears to have been designed specifically to make commuting as annoying as possible. We have a giant body of water in the middle, mountains everywhere else and approximately six roads that everyone needs simultaneously.
Without BART, many commuters would presumably return to our other beloved regional transportation system: sitting completely motionless on I-80, 101 or one of the other freeways to waste of lives.
BART’s problem is relatively straightforward. Before COVID, the system depended heavily on fares. Passenger revenue historically covered roughly 60% to 70% of operating costs. Then the pandemic happened, remote work exploded and hundreds of thousands of office workers discovered that commuting 90 minutes to San Francisco to answer emails was perhaps unnecessary.
In 2016, BART averaged about 435,000 weekday riders.
Those were the glory days.
You could squeeze into a train at Montgomery Street with 300 strangers and spend 35 minutes with somebody’s backpack pressed against your kidney.
We didn't know how good we had it.
Now the system’s future is tied partly to November ballot measures that would provide additional transit funding through sales taxes. The regional proposal would impose a 0.5% sales tax across four counties and is projected to generate roughly $1 billion annually for four major transit operators for 14 years. San Francisco voters are separately considering a 1% sales tax.
Whatever voters ultimately decide, the underlying transportation problem doesn’t disappear.
If BART service gets dramatically worse, more people drive. More drivers create more traffic. More traffic makes every Bay Area freeway resemble the parking lot outside Costco five minutes before Thanksgiving.
And the people most affected won’t necessarily be software engineers who can work from home while answering Slack messages from bed.
They’ll be hospital workers, restaurant employees, students, disabled riders and everyone else who actually needs public transportation to function. The people we actually need and those most vulnerable would be affevted.
So maybe in the billionaire capital of the world can find a few dollars to make sure the trains run.
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