Perspective: Budget reduction long overdue for BART

Cutting BART's budget per Newsom's Jan announcement may have been an unwelcome surprise to some legislators, but the CA Focus's Thomas Elias points out that it's high time we focus public funds on more efficacious services. With BART's ridership 45% below pre-Covid numbers, expansion into DTSJ is neither logical nor fair to taxpayers.

From the moment Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in January that his next budget plan would include a $2 billion cut in funding for building mass transit, there was bleating from many of California’s leading liberal legislators....

Figures from the American Public Transit Assn. demonstrate that neither the extensive Bay Area Rapid Transit system nor Southern California’s Metro Rail have come close to recovering the ridership they lost during the coronavirus pandemic, when two things happened:

One saw many white collar workers begin staying home to work. The other was that thousands of commuters daily chose to use private cars rather than public transit in order to avoid possible exposure to the many, ever mutating variants of Covid.

By the fall of last year, BART was carrying just 55 percent of its pre-pandemic passenger load, while Metro Rail was at 71 percent of prior ridership. Partly, that’s because San Francisco saw a greater shift than Southern California toward remote work. The change also saw that city lose about 6 percent of its population, many workers moving to less expensive areas once they no longer needed to live close to their jobsites.

The specific numbers, available most recently from last July, August and September, saw both systems carrying tens of thousands more persons in those months of 2022 than a year earlier. But still not nearly enough to make either system break even financially.

This article originally appeared in the California Focus. Read the whole thing here.

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