This isn't a hypothetical. It happened. Again.

As one local transit rider recounted, "My friend politely asked him to put it away and he told her to go fuck herself. She went to go get the conductor and that's when I started recording." That a passenger felt the need to pull out their phone — not for TikTok clout, but as a basic self-preservation instinct — tells you everything about the state of public transit in the Bay Area.

Let's be clear about what's happening here: taxpayers fund a transit system that they are increasingly afraid to use. BART ridership is still well below pre-pandemic levels, and stories like this are a big reason why. Every rider lost to safety concerns is a rider who gets in a car instead, adding to congestion and undermining the environmental arguments transit agencies love to make when asking for more money.

The frustrating part is that this isn't an unsolvable problem. It's a choices problem. Cities and transit agencies have chosen a permissive enforcement posture that effectively prioritizes the comfort of people smoking meth on trains over the safety of fare-paying commuters. That's not compassion — it's abdication.

You can care about addiction and homelessness while also insisting that public transit be safe and functional. These aren't competing values. But when conductors are either unable or unwilling to act, when police response is nonexistent, and when political leaders shrug and call it a "complex issue," the message to regular riders is unmistakable: you're on your own.

A transit system that can't guarantee basic safety isn't a transit system. It's a publicly funded liability. And riders — the ones actually keeping the system alive with their fares and tax dollars — deserve a whole lot better than "good luck out there."