No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.
Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.
The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...
It wasn't until the microcontrollers got powerful enough and Stratasys FDM patents expired that open source Klipper/Marlin firmware from the 3d printer community replaced MachCNC.
Today, that MCU is a Teensy.
The last time I experienced a BART shutdown, the cause was that someone had found a box in one of the stations somewhere, and they (1) assumed it was a bomb; and (2) shut down the entire system. I'm not sure what stopping the trains while you investigate the bomb you've found accomplishes, but I don't think there were efforts to find additional bombs. (The box was not actually a bomb.)
It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.
This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
US is in general very reluctant to invest into profitless projects.
America seems utterly incapable of grasping many second-order effects. For another example, look to the ROI of investing in the (coninuously underfunded) IRS [1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4917017/
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-tax-audits-recover-12-do...
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area.
I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated.
Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically.
This article[0] goes into detail about it.
[0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...
From the article: "Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bart-shut-down-t... (https://archive.ph/LnvJ1)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/09/bart-service-shuts-down-co...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/bart-train-shutdown.ht... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250509152319/https://www.nytim...)
https://abc7news.com/post/systemwide-bart-shutdown-due-train...
The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
[1]: https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/magazine/housing-berkeley...
[3]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/09/17/berkeley-ashby-bart-...
My links are worth clicking:
http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
https://goldenstatswarrior.substack.com/p/the-great-migratio...
I think this is overstated, at least from an operations point of view. My mom has been using BART to commute to work for over a year and I can't recall many incidents like this.
They're still working on this, with four more stations planned beyond Berryessa (Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara), plus an additional infill station on the Berryessa line. I think that would be really cool. Unfortunately it looks like this new extension won't be that competitive with Caltrain as a way to get to San Jose from San Francisco. Maybe at non-express times.
Also, it looks like it won't be complete until 2040!?
Plus: Oakland is actually building homes for people while SF remains laughably behind on building quotas.
Of course most of Silicon Valley is closer to the San Francisco - Santa Cruz line, making the ferry service redundant.
It’s too bad they ripped all this stuff out, and will never rebuild it!
It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.
Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.
I get that they want to charge people who ride the trains for... fun?... and then get off at the same station, but it felt really silly.
“The San Francisco Downtown element of the Bay Area regional rapid transit system consists of a four-track, two-level subway beneath Market Street and a two-track, single-level subway beneath Post Street.”
“At Montgomery Street, the Market Street subway joins the San Francisco approach to the Trans-Bay Tube. The subway extends up Market Street to about Van Ness Avenue where it swings lo the south to become the Peninsula Line in Mission Street. The lower level of the subway provides through regional service by joining the Peninsula and the Trans-Bay Lines. The upper level is built to accommodate local rapid transit trains at a future time and will be utilized initially by the streetcars of the San Francisco Municipal Railway.” (emphasis mine)
And the flow map of estimated 1975 passenger counts makes it clear why they would want to double up on platform capacity along that stretch: https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50-years/1961-...
Imagine if we got this BART: https://i.imgur.com/hon9nEf.jpeg (1956)
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
And about refunds (typically you'd get an automatic refund for a one-off event)
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/touched-in...
I always have high levels of respect for companies with such clarity
Having someone pay just to wave off someone is incredibly customer-hostile. Besides, how many people are even committing fraud like that?
I heard they reopened the bathrooms (they closed them system wide in response to 9/11). If true, I’m guessing that helps a lot.
The goal (by law) should be twofold:
1) increase the number of people with a 90th percentile commute under 15, 30 and 60 minutes. (i.e., improve quality of life and encourage economic growth)
2) sharply reduce the average CO2-equivalent emissions of each commuter.
The current statewide policy (by law) is to reduce commute miles.
In practice, this means intentionally sabotaging commute corridors, which slows economic growth (fewer available workers and fewer reachable jobs) reduces quality of life and increases CO2 emissions (due to repeated idling and hard acceleration).
Point of a single agency is not just to collect taxes. It is to make sure there are better outcomes, so that when you do need more taxes to fund public transit, you don’t get the pushback from the public.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
One area is concentrated and the other is decentralized.
Seems like a much better plan than synchronizing and expanding the train networks so they cover more neighborhoods in all parts of the bay (except Marin, of course…)
Absolutely not.
Discounts are fine. Free riding isn’t.
People don’t value free things, and it’s hard to plan things without pricing demand.
Why not? Could you not make a pretty strong argument that avoided negative externalities (CO2 and air pollution from car engines and tires) make public transport worthwhile by itself, and just fund transport by taxing those (gas/cars)?
Saves you all the infrastructure for billing/access control and some enforcement, too.
2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
If you live in a region of the world that doesn’t have these issues, great, do what you want. We’re talking about the Bay Area specifically, and the thing keeping BART ridership down is that people don’t want to ride BART because it sucks. The actual service is mostly fine. The issue lies in the people.
I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay. In the years prior to the new fare gates being installed, I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.
Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
The only mode of transportation that is truly free is walking. BART is already the economical choice compared to the $8 bridge tolls plus gas, but cutting off an existing revenue source hoping to increase service is either going to degrade service frequency, service quality, or both.
> Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
This is out-of-scope, but I have literally zero issues with making driving more expensive, however this also isn't the counter that you think it is. Both Bay Area roads and Bay Area public transit agencies are subsidized, in addition to having associated fees that add to the cost of each of them.
> Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
Once again, out-of-scope, but I have literally zero issue with and would even advocate for upzoning around BART. I still would not make BART free after doing so.
These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
Something you may have missed in this discussion is that BART has hardened its most frequently-used gates and is still in the process of hardening all of them with new fare gates and other infrastructure. This has noticeably decreased the frequency in which people are casually engaging in theft of service. In all of Downtown San Francisco with the new fare gates installed, you can't just step over them anymore, nor is circumventing them a subtle and quick matter.
> I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
It doesn't require magic to look at someone and assess their clothes, the items they're carrying and general hygiene and clock that with the time of day, or even figure out what their occupation is: mostly office workers and others who work in downtown San Francisco. Most of BART's passengers are commuters with jobs after all, they're not just riding it for fun which is what you would expect from a commuter rail system. Paying for transportation whether that is the bridge toll or the BART ticket is each person's responsibility, and notably there are tax incentives for public transportation within the Bay Area already, and as I noted up thread, plenty of discounts.
Sure. And you can do that with taxes, rather than charging at point-of-use.
I mean, we (very wisely) subsidize the absolute hell out of road construction and maintenance, and noone bats an eye. Folks get weirdly up in arms when the method of transportation being subsidized doesn't require a (typically) many-thousand-dollar up-front investment to use.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. As I addressed way above this comment chain:
> 1) it’s a funding source for transit agencies which are already facing shortfalls and at the mercy of voters for any tax increases or bonds.
Having a funding source tied to use is also pretty nice if you want to financially justify further BART expansions in e.g. the directions of Tracy/Stockton, Santa Cruz, Vallejo or an in-fill Diablo Valley run from Martinez to Pleasanton and provide more comprehensive coverage. It’s also nice to keep it segregated from having to compete within the legislature and on the ballot with highways.
> I mean, we (very wisely) subsidize the absolute hell out of road construction and maintenance, and noone bats an eye. Folks get weirdly up in arms when the method of transportation being subsidized doesn't require a (typically) many-thousand-dollar up-front investment to use.
We also subsidize the hell out of BART and public transportation. There isn’t a single mode of transportation within and between cities that isn’t heavily subsidized by the government. Maybe a smattering of fully private roads somewhere.
Those subsidies are also not mutually exclusive with direct fees for service and direct fees and taxes (e.g. vehicle registration and fuel taxes), nor do they justify removing fee-for-service from BART.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you shouldn't.
> We also subsidize the hell out of BART...
For ages, BART crowed about how it got like 80->95% of its operating expenses from rider fares. If what you're saying is true, then one or more of the following must be true:
1) The BART directors were lying to the public
2) This change in funding mix happened when BART ridership fell off a cliff as folks fled the SF Bay Area
3) Rider fares have never actually been expected to cover system expansions to any significant degree
If #3 is true, then it seems to me that talking about fares in conjunction with future system expansions is totally pointless and a waste of time.
> Having a funding source tied to use is also pretty nice if you want to financially justify further BART expansions...
And yet we frequently build new roadways without any significant usage-based funding.
> Those subsidies are also not mutually exclusive with direct fees for service and direct fees and taxes...
Duh.
> ...nor do they justify removing fee-for-service from BART.
Nope, not in isolation. Of course not.
> As I addressed way above this comment chain:...
As you also said way above this comment chain:
> [I support suppressing] ridership by people who can['t] afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
On this, we disagree. I'm going to be kind and assume that the important part of your expressed concern is crime. The criminals are on trains with well-known stops; they're simply not going to force their way off of the train between stops. Like many other municipal railways BART has its own police force. Deploy the BART cops and get the bad guys at the next stop.
You might argue that this will be expensive, or that it will be ineffective. I'd argue that criminals have been able to jump over the faregates for nearly fifty years, so this thing we're discussing isn't a new problem.
BART has had a long history. If you want to see for yourself, here's their most recent budget, page 25 is what you want:https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/FY25%20%26%...
As far as I remember, capital expansions have never relied on rider fares per se.
> And yet we frequently build new roadways without any significant usage-based funding.
And arguably we shouldn't be, or that we should be doing less of this. To be clear here, you are not going to find anywhere in this discussion in my own words that I am a friend of the institution of the automobile, the many highways built to support them, or suburbs.
> On this, we disagree. I'm going to be kind and assume that the important part of your expressed concern is crime.
The most important part is crime, but all the pieces matter. If you want to attract new ridership, that means improving service, improving QoL on BART (keeping both low level and overt crime at bay), and ultimately expanding BART's service area both making it more comprehensive in the areas it does serve and expanding it outwards to serve additional communities adjacent to its core service area attracting new paid riders who would otherwise probably drive. People who can take BART or MUNI but don't tend not to because to them, it is not a pleasant place for them to be and they will choose to drive or take a Lyft or make other choices. I'm sorry to say, but getting someone to drive you around no matter how many other people are riding with you is a small luxury[1] that people are not entitled to, nor should they be.
> Like many other municipal railways BART has its own police force. Deploy the BART cops and get the bad guys at the next stop.
> You might argue that this will be expensive, or that it will be ineffective.
I don't know why you think I would be making that argument. Part of having laws is the cost of enforcing them. If anything, I'd make the laws somewhat harsher and have a more active police presence throughout the BART system. One of the weak points now in the additional hardening that BART has been doing is that at some point, there's just no one minding the emergency exits and toll gates around downtown San Francisco. Take a page out of Japan's book, stop relying so much on patrol cars and install some kouban (and also better CCTVs) within the station infrastructure, enabling them to say, virtually fill in for when no one is visibly minding the booths. In terms of labor costs, I couldn't tell you if it would cost more because to be honest, I have no clue what BART Police are doing now when they're not actually on the trains and platforms.
> I'd argue that criminals have been able to jump over the faregates for nearly fifty years, so this thing we're discussing isn't a new problem.
Yeah, and we're discussing it because for the first time in BART's history, they're doing shit to actually address it in a productive fashion, rather than throwing up their hands and saying "free BART for everyone!". I think I like their new way at least directionally a bit better.
> Duh.
Bruh, that's how I felt when you explained we can "pay for things with taxes", or informing me that BART police exist, or that fare evasion isn't new. So, you actually want to go down this path? I know I don't want to. Let's be nice to each other.
[1] I know it doesn't feel like any kind of luxury, but it's true!
And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.
We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
I've repeated this a couple of times already responding here, so clearly there's a bunch of people chiming in that just haven't on BART recently or haven't taken it into downtown San Francisco or Oakland. BART is currently in the process of hardening the paid areas against casual theft of service. IIRC most of their fare infrastructure has already been upgraded with the new gates that you can't just step over, nor even easily hop or climb over. There are still weak links, but it has had a noticeable impact. Beyond that, you should note that taking BART is the economic option, so if someone is law abiding and needs to get to work, then unless they live right by their job or have no commute at all, they're probably taking BART and paying for it.
> We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
We use a mix of both fees and tax subsidies for both BART and public roads. If you have to cross a bridge and you're taking public transportation, you're paying at a minimum $8 plus gas which includes gas taxes which non-drivers are not paying for directly. Your other option is the Ferry which is like $9 or something like that.
>The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.
> BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin.
How about fix the country public transport first instead of spending 2 Trillion on BS AI?
That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.
Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.
I don't have data but in Moscow where I'm from the typical well to do thing was moving to a "cottage village", something between a suburb and a gated community, despite good transit and horrendous traffic. In the 90ies it was stereotyped as a nouveu riche thing but in 2010s I even knew a senior dev who did it as it became more affordable. When I was visiting Tokyo iirc most local devs I was working with lived in the city but their manager lived in an outlying less dense area, since presumably he could afford it). I get a sense that people are likely to move to have more space and privacy, unless it's locally difficult or expensive.
You've mixed a subjective measure "rich country" with an objective one "rich people." I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
Everything has it's place, in an ideal area if I was wanting to go a short-medium distance I'd go on a bike, if I wanted a drink or to carry more than practical on my bike or to go a medium length I'd take public transport, and if I wanted to take a lot of stuff, or go in a time sensitive manner, or not want to worry about the last bus, or go somewhere rural I'd take the car.
I don't think good public transport can replace cars in all situations, but it is an extremely good option to have for situations that suit it (which for most people is likely most, but probably not all, of the time).
Rich countries that have good public transit? Sure, that's easy.
Denmark Singapore Japan Germany Switzerland France UK ...
Here are some middle income countries that have good public transit also:
China Spain Portugal Italy Taiwan
I think the real reason your average rich person would take transit is because in some places, at some times of day, it's significantly faster than driving. But I do believe there's some -- probably fairly small -- subset of rich people who ride public transit simply because they prefer to.
Also, planes are a form of public transport and rich people take them all the time.
This part of your earlier comment confuses me:
> I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.
What "limitations" are you talking about here?
Er, 6 figures is a hundred-thousand-aire, not a millionaire. Perhaps you meant 7-8?
Note that this includes environmental arguments - saying that 8bil people cannot all live like people in Houston may be true but it's basically saying we cannot afford to have nice things.
But the thing is US, and especially major cities, currently can afford them!
Why would "rich people take public transit"? Except for extremely dense areas, driving is faster especially accounting for overhead; goes exactly where one needs, any time; and is way more comfortable. Only those who prefer extremely dense areas and also cannot live close to work/amenities (kind of the point of density) would want it.
That's worth a screenshot.
Any idea whether the political and technical will is there, to post-mortem this, and make the system more robust and resilient?
Should it not be "they were able to just simply reconnect them"?
Surprise to see no exact problem been given in the article and comments section. Curious to see is it a legit computer networking problem, and if yes what they actually were? Could they install a proper fail over connection to prevent the outage in the first place?
The last time I had a long car commute, it was 45-60 minutes driving, or 2+ hours via various transit options, so driving was unfortunately the only reasonable choice. But 20 minutes extra to avoid driving? I'd do that in a heartbeat.
(Hell, I do that often enough just inside SF, taking a bus or train instead of an Uber/Lyft or driving myself... sadly it's not uncommon for a 15-minute car ride to be the equivalent of a 40 minute transit ride.)
Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.
It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
I remember when the clipper cards rolled out. If I saw more than a few people holding one, I’d just go to the other gate.
These days, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with my physical Clipper card. I do recall lots of issues when they first rolled out the ability to put a Clipper card on your phone, but I haven't run into a problem with that in at least a couple years.
I forgot to get a Tokyo metro pass along with my train ticket from Narita to Tokyo, so I ended up wandering around Nippori station looking for an ATM that would take my Visa debit card so I could get some cash in order to top up my Pasmo card[0] and take a local train to Shinjuku. I'd also forgotten how most random ATMs don't take foreign debit cards; after it dawned on me, I left the station, found a 7-11, and used the ATM there.
This was not something I enjoyed having to do, while carrying my bags, after a 10-hour flight, plus 2 hours waiting in line at immigration, followed by another hour-long train ride to the city.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that many many more businesses in Japan take credit cards nowadays though.
[0] I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Pasmo cards are still good up to 10 years after the last time you use them. I feel like something similar in the US would expire after no more than a year or two.
This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.
If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.
My personal observations are really that California are just truly fucking terrible at this sort of thing. Ironic considering they are such a huge economy and so wealthy. In northern California PCH (pacific coast highway) has been closed for over 15 months due to a rockslide. In southern california, a huge segment of ACH (angeles crest highway, one of my favorite places on earth) has been closed since 2023! You cannot drive from one end of the range to the other at this time.
China would have fixed these issues in weeks. For all the cash and people they have, Cali really manages to drop the ball on these things constantly. Don't even get me started on high speed rail that was built out in the middle of buttfuck farmland from Madera to Shafter. Like a stairway to nowhere.
The Purple line has evolved into a financial disaster. It will be the most expensive train line ever constructed, $10 billion for a 16 mile segment.
BART ridership is 40% of what it was in 2019. There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.
There is a way, but (with how much they used to crow that (unlike those other big, fat, LOSER mass-transit companies in the area) 80->95% of their budget came from rider fares) the BART management pretty clearly really hates to do it: Make up the shortfall with government money.
South Bay is doing everything it can to make sure no new houses are serviced by existing train route. They even tore out the line that ran through most of the residential areas decades ago.
That line serviced Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos, the San Lorenzo Valley and Santa Cruz. It ran all the way to SF, so it must have serviced many other cities on the peninsula.
What is the purpose of public transit? Do you believe that public transit is designed so that poor people can commute to jobs?
Wrong. Public transit is designed so that people can go shopping. Buses and trains move people around to shopping centers and stores and malls.
It is only by accident that poor people can commute to some jobs with public transit. There are far, far more jobs that are more-or-less unreachable by bus or train, and poor people end up walking, cycling, or moving closer to those jobs.
When I was a young child, Grandma didn't drive, and so our weekends were consumed by walking around the neighborhood, shopping and eating in restaurants. We'd hang out at the 7-Eleven playing Centipede, Missile Command, and Asteroids. We'd pick up some sodas and Cracked magazine and go home.
Then later in life, we started going to malls. None of the malls were walking-distance from Grandma's house, so we rode the bus. And I fell in love with public transit; we'd ride the bus to any one of 3-4 malls nearby, walk around to our heart's content, and ride the bus back home carrying our spoils for the day. It was always a treat to do this.
What I definitely noticed was that a lot of poor people rode the bus. What I didn't realize is that mostly, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wasn't a matter of commuting to their jobs, but just hanging out for the day.
Here in Phoenix, most bus stations are in shopping malls, or they become de facto shopping centers, and the light rail corridor is basically a commerce incubator by the way stores and shopping centers are popping up now that the track is permanently laid down.
On the weekends it may be common to see working-class Hispanic moms take their children to church on the free buses, but the free buses are intended to get tourists and residents into the shopping areas and/or connect them to the full-fare routes so that they can really do some hardcore "shop 'til you drop" activity.
In fact, the public transit sectors that are designed for commuting are the Express buses, which have a higher base fare and serve 9-5 white-collar office workers. It's transparently upper-crust. None of those Express routes can possibly help poor people get to poor-people jobs. Express buses get people into the city center so they don't need cars there: attorneys, civil servants, accountants, clerks. That's the Express system only. The rest of transit: shopping, shopping and more shopping.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/no-bart-trains-runnin...
BART doesn't automatically mean anything unless you are familiar with the region.
I lived 7 years in the US and still took a while (even after opening the linked article -- given the website was a local media outlet, there were no immediate clues in the article which country/state/city it is referring to)
I guess today those same people feel a level of validation on what they insisted.
The majority of times it's SSL.
But yes, public transit in the states is rather pathetic.
