Basically this
>>1263123From the start, just broadly everyone involved fucked up thinking that 50 years from now everyone would only want to go to SF and nowhere else, consider that from BART's inception (1972) to 2002 3+ new commuter rail networks were spawned to get commuters to San Jose. Granted SF has the bay crossing by SJ does not, but consider that on BART's 50th birthday in 2022 they will still not have any SJ service despite it being a relatively easy run. But on the other hand, BART never expanded in SF besides their current core, even more recently BART couldn't justify a second subway against SF's current Central Subway project for Muni.
On a more practical level, every individual component that comprises BART is deficient because they tried to subvert every established railroad standard to see if it would work. End result was BART using a computerized train control system that was horribly out of date and not upgraded until 2013, fare "gates" that don't gate anybody from illegally entering, a unique 1000 vDC power supply and the infamous choice of broad gauge over standard (one of only two examples of it's kind in all of North America) which meant no car replacements until the existing ones were literally falling apart.
Most of this has to do with shit planning inside Oakland and SF. The former is culpable for not caring about transit at all until about ~2000, which is why they more or less abandoned their largest train station while rebuilding 880 and building 980. SF is culpable for being run by retards that make shit decisions since 2000, in particular the SFO BART extension (where the Samtrans' embezzlement case happened), the new Eastern (car) Span and the new Transbay Terminal all of which did not need to happen or could have been done using much more cost effective means (rebuilding Muni's 38 line to SFO instead of BART, fixing the existing bridge and running Muni over it like the Key System did, and not fucking with the old TT) but wasn't.
