Both Beege and I have been writing about this problem for a few years. In my case, I think my first post about problems with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train system was back in 2018. But post-pandemic the problem really went into overdrive.
Prior to the pandemic about 70% of the funding for the transit system came from tickets. That was actually higher than in most large cities in the US but it meant that when ridership collapsed during the pandemic, the money to operate all the equipment just vanished overnight. And unfortunately for San Francisco, ridership has never returned to anything close to pre-pandemic levels. Too many people simply stopped going into the office and worked from home instead. And that put the transit system in a serious financial problem.
For the first couple of years the city was able to rely on federal emergency funding…
