Buuntu

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.