My friend lent me his copy of BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, and just finished reading it this weekend.
The book was an entertaining and educational read. It had a lot of play-by-plays of insider moments, like a negotiation at a diner to get the right county votes. I learned a lot from stories like that about the Bay Area politics that shaped the BART.
I started the book with an expectation of a kind of textbook-style, dispassionate, third-person, linear storytelling. However, the author worked for BART in media and marketing for 30 years before retiring and eventually writing this. He even titled it the dramatic history. So, a textbook this is not, and that’s probably on me for making assumptions about this book.
It feels like, if one of my parents had worked for the BART and I had heard the stories my entire childhood kind of piecemeal, and then I’d written up a series of essays and stapled them together in a book, it would end up like this. Which is fine if you’re looking for an anthology, but in this case, I was not.
Two of my biggest frustrations with the book: the non-linearity of its timeline, and some of the repetetiveness. For example, we learn about the double murder of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978 early in Chapter 18, but then a few pages later in the same chapter, Mayor Moscone is alive and well for the ribbon cutting at the Embarcadero station in 1976. And it’s probably at least 5 times throughout the book that the author mentions that BART was the first new transit project in the US in decades, so it served as a live lab test for all sorts of stuff (automated signalling, GPS tracking of trains, etc).
A smaller frustration was how the narrator angle kind of flip-flops. A lot of the book is third-person, but every so often, we get a little first person “I was there to do this”, and mostly around celebrity visits. I feel like the book written entirely third-person would have been just fine.
One thing I really appreciate about the book was that it helps provide context for a lot of parts of BART I take for granted, like the SFO airpot connector. I knew that BART didn’t originally go to SFO, but I didn’t realize that it wasn’t until 2003 that the connection happened. My first BART trip was in 2008 (I think) and I moved to San Francisco in 2011, so it’s wild to me to realize that it was all within the first 10 years of that connection existing. And the Oakland airport connector is only as recent as 2014!
The book also does a good job at connecting BART with the history of the Bay Area. I had no idea about San Francisco’s “Emperor” Norton who, in the 1800s, declared that there should be a tunnel connecting San Francisco and Oakland, and that the current Transbay tube route is very close to his original proposal. It’s a really neat “time is a flat circle” kind of moment.
Another part of the BART I had taken for granted was that the Berkeley stations are underground, instead of aboveground like a lot of the other suburb lines. The “how the sausage gets made” parts of the book covers how the original plan the Berkeley residents voted on in the 60s planned for aboveground stations, and then by the time they actually started construction in the 70s, Berkeley sued to halt construction because they wanted underground stations. Underground costs more, and there was a disagreement in price estimation, and who would pay for it. I’m glad it all worked out, but the book points out that by preventing any work from getting done during that period of time, which had rapid inflation, the overall cost went up.
Underestimating costs is really common in construction projects, and the book does a good job at mentioning different price bids over time, but it never really clicked for me. I would have loved to see a chart or two with a “the estimate was $1M in 1960, $10M in 1970, and by the time it was built it was actually $500M” or whatever.
I went into the book with a strong idea of what I thought BART’s biggest mistakes were and expected them all to be covered:
- Uncommon track gauge
- Not going to Marin
- Using flat wheels intead of conic wheels
- Lack of 24-hour service and a third line
The uncommon track gauge got a passing mention, but I think that really undersells it. Having an uncommon track gauge (BART is the only operating railroad in the US with its gauge) means that everything is custom and bespoke and more expensive and more challenging.
The book does mention the reason for the wide track (which is also posted on the BART blog), to allow lighter trains to be more stable in high wind situations. Since originally BART was planned to go on a lower part of the Golden Gate Bridge, which can have very high winds.
And the book does cover the history of why BART doesn’t go to Marin: it’s because San Mateo pulled out of the BART district (because they already had Caltrain). But I really feel like the dots don’t get connected! Like why are we stuck in the worst of both worlds with a basically bespoke track gauge, and the one place of the track it was critical for, we don’t even go! Extrapolating outside of the book, maybe it’s a sign that one day we can muster the political willpower to extend BART across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin, but the book makes no such forward-looking statements. The fact that we are still expanding BART today to San Jose is a sign that change is possible!
At no point in the book does cover the BART’s choice to use flat wheels. There are all sorts of cool explainers about why it’s better for trains to have conic wheelsets (briefly: stability and balance), and it’s not a new discovery! Many trains have had conic wheels since the 18th century! I recall reading outside of the book that BART engineers thought they could go faster with flat wheels, but we ended up with extremely loud noise, especially in the Transbay Tube. BART’s fixed this in recent years, but I think that it’s at least worth a mention!
The book also doesn’t cover what I think is truly a tragedy of the BART: its lack of 24-hour service. New York City’s subway is so special because it runs 24x7. One of the ways they do this is that they have lots of extra tracks to run trains on, which allows for 24x7 maintenance. Yes, it would have increased costs a lot, but running a third line through key parts of the BART like the Transbay Tube would allow for maintenance without having to close the system down. Having extra lines would also allow running express trains that can bypass stations!
The book also covered the creation of the BART police. Briefly, I think the book is too sympathetic to the cops. I appreciate that the book mentions two high-profile incidents where BART police killed people (including the 2008 murder at Fruitvale Station, the subject of Ryan Coogler’s film). The book defers to the judicial system’s decisions instead of re-examing that hey, maybe creating another armed police force is probably not a good idea. The book points out that the BART police stopped a pickpocket ring early on in their creation, but that’s not solving any problems at its root. The book mentions the BART budget a lot of times, but never what the cost of the BART police is! Or imagines a world without them. A book that’s written in the style of corporate PR probably wouldn’t cover that, but at least I can hope.
If you’re a transit enthusiast, or at all interested in the BART or Bay Area history, I’d give the book a read! I think that it fits into the same narrative thread as Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride, a guerilla documentary about the BART that even interviews Michael Healy. They’re celebrations of the BART, which is overall good! But I wish that we acknowledged the room for improvement in the BART in the future and even advocated for a path there.