BART is a whiggish history of transit system of the same name by BART's longtime director of public relations. As such it reads more like a glossy pamphlet than any kind of critical review. The basic problem of any transit system is that the best time to build it is well-before the region strangles itself in construction, traffic, and NIMBY interest groups. But suburban and rural voters don't see the benefit of a massively expensive and socially transformative infrastructure project that won't pay off for decades, so the systems mostly don't get built.


Maximalist BART from twitter user Jackson Mills

From its origins in the 1960s, BART was the first new transit system in nearly 50 years, and the basics were laid without the Federal funding that supported the DC Metro and Atlanta's MARTA. The system was hugely ambitious, with space-age automation and a key tunnel under the bay, while also being much less than it could have been. Planned expansion to Marin and San Mateo was off the table, costs kept ballooning, and the automated control system and high tech cars took years to shake-down all the bugs. Every expansion since then has been a complicated mess of local, state, and Federal deals to get the money in order before the costs to build another mile triple.

As a regular BART user, it handles my commute pretty well, and much more efficiently than the other options, car, bus, walking, mule train, etc. would. Yet, whenever I ask it to do anything other than take me from the outer part of San Francisco to downtown at 9 or 5, I find myself waiting on a platform for a half-hour.

Well, at least I brought a book.