Let's be clear about what's actually happening. BART is running at roughly 50% of its pre-pandemic ridership. The Oakland A's are gone. Oracle Arena concerts are a memory. Return-to-office mandates have stalled. As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly: "No A's games, no concerts at Oracle, and 50% returned full time to work. Massive downturn in utility for BART."

So ridership is cratered and revenue is down. That part is real. What's also real — and what BART leadership would rather you not focus on — is that the agency overhired during the pandemic, bloating its workforce to historic levels while fewer and fewer people actually rode the trains. Now, instead of right-sizing like every tech company and school district in the region has been forced to do, BART's solution is to ask taxpayers for more money.

As one local noted: "BART wants to increase taxes so that they can maintain the largest number of active employees they've ever had even though they're running at something like 50% of their peak ridership."

This is the government accountability problem in a nutshell. A public agency refuses to make hard choices, then frames a tax increase as an existential rescue mission. The petition reportedly circulating on trains to "save BART" is apparently being met with shrugs — one rider observed that "almost everyone ignored the petition" and most people don't even realize this is supposedly an issue.

Maybe that's because people intuitively understand what BART brass won't admit: the system isn't going to disappear. Trains will still run. Tunnels don't evaporate. What might happen is that BART has to operate within its means — a concept that apparently qualifies as a crisis in Bay Area governance.

We're not anti-transit. A functional BART is good for the region. But "functional" shouldn't mean "immune from fiscal discipline." If ridership is half what it was, staffing and spending should reflect that reality before anyone comes knocking on taxpayers' doors.

BART doesn't need saving. It needs a budget.