I would say even the minimal change of funding 2x as frequent trains on BART would do wonders for making it more useful. Unfortunately residents in the bay area have way too much say in what does and doesn't get built, so new stops and new lines are difficult, to say the least.
If you convince enough people to invest in self-driving car companies, eventually self-driving cars happen. Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still.
> Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still.
Yes, and that's what you get when you underfund something for decades. Technical and maintenance debt piles up, and it costs increasingly greater amounts of money just to hold the status quo. I don't know for a fact that this $3.5B couldn't be managed in a better way than planned, to not only maintain what we've got, but also improve, but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, either.
I'm not saying it's wise, given how BART is currently managed, to throw (say) $10B at them, but, managed properly, perhaps it'd be enough to not only get them out of the hole, but also make actual real improvements? The trick is, of course, giving them that money in a way where we'd actually see good results, and I agree that, without other things changing, we probably wouldn't get much for that money. At least not enough to be worth it.
In the end it's the way the bay area is structured politically that's the problem. BART can't build new lines because the citizens along the way are all of the NIMBY mindset, and our governing structure gives them too much power, and politicians are too cowardly to override them. The Fremont->Diridon expansion plan has been on public maps since before I moved here in 2004; and we just finally got the Warm Springs expansion earlier this year. And who knows about San Jose. The delay isn't because BART sucks at building or managing construction projects, it's because the people and municipalities along the track path are selfish.
For comparison, Elon Musk built a space program, orbited the Earth and docked a rocket with the ISS for 1/10 of that amount.
I agree, it's not lack of money that's holding public transit back.
Certainly building a reusable rocket in a mostly greenfield environment isn't quite apples-to-apples with maintaining a decades-old transit system that is politically difficult to maintain and expand, but it does illustrate the point that amazing things can be done on a small budget.
Privatizing public services is often fraught with peril, but the bay area transit systems have proven that they're incapable of meeting needs with current management. Not sure what we can do here, unfortunately.