BART's impending fiscal cliff makes SJ extensions even more ridiculous

VTA and the City of San Jose are pouring billions into misguided SJ add-ons for a transit system that is on the edge of going under. As SFGATE reports, BART is nowhere near recovering its pre-pandemic ridership and is actively exploring cutting services and lines, making the bad idea of adding new stops in transit-unfriendly Santa Clara County increasingly absurd.

That lack of in-person workers, particularly in San Francisco, has punched a massive hole in BART's annual revenue and the agency could soon cut service and close stations in the coming years as a result.

Riders generated roughly $500 million per year pre-pandemic via fare revenue, but with weekday ridership regularly sitting between 30 and 40 percent of pre-pandemic expectations and no sign of a return to the ridership levels of the previous decade, BART is now aiming to close an annual budget gap of some $300 million.

"We built our budget around peak worker riders, and when they went away, it sort of broke our back, it broke the budget," BART Board member Mark Foley said Thursday during a presentation by the agency's budget and operations officials.

BART's financial planning is further complicated by roughly two-thirds of its expenses being fixed or semi-fixed, such as upkeep of BART facilities, maintenance and maintaining the BART police force.

As such, BART officials have been adamant that there is not a level of service cuts that would erase the agency's projected deficits without gutting service to the point that BART would go into a "death spiral," as planning officials said at the board's Dec. 2 meeting.

Without additional revenue from fares, new taxes or some other source, BART is on track to run out of pandemic-era emergency relief funding by mid-2025.

At that point, BART officials estimate that the agency would have to eliminate service on the Richmond-Millbrae and San Jose-Daly City lines, close roughly nine stations, reduce service to weekdays only and limit trains to arriving once every hour just to break even.

This article originally appeared in SFGATE. Read the whole thing here.

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Image by Erica Fischer