Here's a radical concept for Bay Area transit: actually enforcing the rules.

BART has been quietly making progress on vandalism prevention, and the results suggest something that should be obvious to anyone who's ever managed, well, anything — when you make it harder to break things and hold people accountable when they do, fewer things get broken.

The specifics aren't rocket science. Better surveillance, faster repairs, and — crucially — a willingness to actually pursue consequences for people who trash public infrastructure. It turns out that when a smashed window stays smashed for six weeks, it sends a very clear signal about how much the system cares. Fix it in 48 hours, and the calculus changes.

This is basically the broken windows theory that San Francisco's political class loves to mock in theory but quietly relies on in practice. And it works. Not because it's punitive for the sake of being punitive, but because functional public spaces create a feedback loop. People treat well-maintained things better than they treat neglected things. Shocking, we know.

The broader lesson here is one this city keeps refusing to learn. As one SF resident put it bluntly: "It's because we are beholden to unserious but loud people." That about sums up the dynamic. Every time someone proposes a straightforward accountability measure — whether it's for transit vandalism, retail theft, or traffic enforcement — the loudest voices in the room treat it like an assault on civil liberties rather than basic governance.

Meanwhile, the people who actually ride BART every day, the commuters and students and workers who depend on a system that doesn't smell like a urinal and doesn't have windows held together with duct tape, are left wondering why "maintain public infrastructure" is somehow a controversial position.

The fix isn't expensive. It isn't complicated. It just requires the political will to say that public transit belongs to the public, and destroying it has consequences. San Francisco has demonstrated it can do this when it wants to. The question, as always, is whether it wants to.