The promise of federal money never fails to move San Francisco Bay Area politicians to action. With the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill likely to pass, the mayors of Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco penned an open letter arguing that the Bay Area is in dire need of money to improve its infrastructure. The region does face a unique set of transportation challenges, but its most pressing infrastructure problems stem from the breakdown of law and order. The city’s inability to address madness and criminality on public transit and on the streets inhibits access to already existing amenities.
The Bay Area’s geography required city planners to develop a unique network of transportation routes. Set on a narrow peninsula, San Francisco is connected to its suburbs by a handful of bridges and Bay Area Regional Transit, or BART, which runs trains through an underwater tube. Current BART ridership is down nearly 90 percent from 2019—a decline owing only in part to work-from-home arrangements instated after Covid closures. The network has deteriorated for nearly a decade, with ridership stagnating through the late 2010s, despite local population growth. The system has long verged on unraveling.
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