CA: BART is dying. But will the Bay Area pay higher taxes to save it?

Like many Bay Area workers, Sabrina Hardy is back in the office part time — and noticing a stark change in her commute. These days she can reliably find a seat on BART.

"There are definitely fewer riders," Hardy said, exiting the El Cerrito del Norte Station as dusk fell on a recent weekday. Although rush hour had set in, only a few people trickled through the turnstiles. Hardy and others marveled at how open and airy the trains have become — particularly on Mondays and Fridays, when people no longer have to jostle one another in the aisles or circle the station lots to find parking.

This new normal would have seemed unimaginable before the pandemic, when commuters logged 400,000 BART trips on an average weekday. Passengers routinely stood shoulder to shoulder in train cars thick with body heat; parking got so competitive that riders began selling permits on a gray market.

As major employers including Apple, Google and JPMorgan settle on three days a week in the office, according to a recent report from Business Insider, BART has come to mirror the pattern. Trains fill up on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with crowds thinning out on Fridays and Mondays, when workers tend to stay home. If those sparsely filled Monday and Friday trains are more comfortable, they're also eerie — as though to signal the beginning of a long, slow crash.

"A three-day workweek would not work to fund our operating budget," BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said, citing a critical problem with the system's funding model.

Traditionally, BART relied on fares to fund two-thirds of its operations. With post-pandemic ridership stabilizing at fewer than 200,000 people on the most bustling weekdays — Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, when office workers generally come in — the agency projects a funding gap of between $300 million to $400 million a year after federal and state emergency funds run out. No amount of concerts or Warriors games at Chase Center can make up for that vanishing ridership, Trost said. The loss of the A's — and trips to the Coliseum — count as yet another blow.

BART and its consultants have begun conjuring images of a dark future with an eviscerated rail system: hourlong waits for trains, miles of unused track, thousands more cars choking the freeways. Now BART officials are invoking that imagery to make a difficult pitch.

At this point, transit agencies are not pinning their hopes on a full return to the office, Trost and others say. Instead, they are trying to drum up support for a 2026 ballot measure that would likely impose taxes to fund public transit, BART being among the most urgent beneficiaries. It's unclear whether Bay Area voters are willing to pay to keep it alive.

And the 2026 campaign is already facing trouble. When staff from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission presented options for the measure — including sales, parcel or payroll taxes — to a committee of Bay Area leaders last month, committee members found flaws with every idea. Several said their constituents are burdened with too many taxes already.

"The one common thread that runs through all of this — nobody likes anything," committee chair Jim Spering said at the beginning of the meeting, providing a grim forecast for the three-hour discussion that would follow.

Commissioner Nate Miley, a supervisor in Alameda County, encapsulated the discontent in comments he made at the meeting and in a subsequent interview. Voters have little appetite for new taxes, he said. Miley pointed out, moreover, that a 2026 transit measure might compete with a proposed parcel tax for housing, another dire need.

If transportation officials can't craft a revenue measure and present it to the state Legislature by January, BART could suffer devastating consequences. A study the agency published in November 2022 listed the types of "extremely deep" service cuts riders would see if the agency were to lose $233 million annually — a shortfall that's less severe than what BART is bracing for now.

In that scenario, BART would slash two of its five lines, run trains every hour, shut down at 9 p.m. on weekdays and not run on weekends. Nine stations would close. Yellow line service, which terminates in Antioch, would instead end at the Pittsburg/Bay Point Station.

"BART going into a death spiral is a very real possibility if we don't find the resources to keep it running," Nick Josefowitz, vice chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and a former BART board director, said in an interview.

A Bay Area without BART — or with an ailing BART — would be "a greatly diminished place," Josefowitz added. Deprived of an essential commuting option, some people would have to quit their jobs and businesses might leave.

Whether these warnings will persuade people to commute to the office more often, or to pay higher taxes to fund transit, is an open question. Hardy, who rides BART four days a week to Oakland Children's Hospital, where she schedules surgeries, said she values her one day of working from home. She also cares for an elderly parent, so having the flexibility to work remotely is important, she said.

Still, she struggled to think how she would get to work if BART were to stop running.

"The bus would take forever," she said. "Uber would be expensive."

Others simply could not envision a future without BART. Elias Acosta, a restaurant worker from Richmond, said his life would "completely change" if the trains shut down. He commutes on BART every day. Others flinched at the prospect of losing a vital form of transit.

"I don't like driving," said Mimi Medalle, who was waiting for a train at Powell Street Station last Wednesday. She works in real estate and has resisted going hybrid. Medalle takes BART to work five days a week.

Bevan Dufty, a BART board director representing San Francisco, tried to stay optimistic.

"I am hopeful," he said. "We've got a groove going, we've got a couple hundred thousand riders a day — OK, it's not enough."

He paused a beat.

"Well," he said, "miracles can happen. BART is just too big to fail."

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