Bay Area transit has responded to a historic collapse in ridership by protecting the status quo: employees, contractors, and capital megaprojects. Costs have climbed while service and ridership have not. Here is what the public record shows.
BART's operating costs rose from $673 million in FY19, the last full pre-pandemic year, to about $1,007 million budgeted for FY26, a 50 percent increase. Its operating subsidy rose from $191 million to $682 million over the same period, a 257 percent increase, even though service was reduced.
Caltrain tells the same story. Operating costs rose from $140 million in FY19 to $246 million budgeted for FY26, up 75 percent, while its subsidy climbed from $37 million to $188 million, an increase of more than 400 percent.
In inflation-adjusted terms, total Bay Area transit spending over 2020 to 2024 ran at 224 percent of its 1980 level. The cost of producing one mile of transit service ran at 240 percent of 1980. But the cost of carrying one rider one trip, the thing riders actually consume, averaged 507 percent of its 1980 level over those five years, after literally going off the chart to 888 percent in 2021. Current-dollar total spending grew more than tenfold, from $607 million in 1980 to $6,591 million in 2024.
From 1980 to 2019, regional ridership held near 500 million unlinked passenger trips a year even as the population grew 51 percent. Trips per person actually fell about 40 percent before the pandemic. Ridership then dropped roughly 75 percent during COVID and has recovered only to about 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile road traffic has returned to pre-COVID levels, and Bay Area congestion, as measured by the Texas Transportation Institute Travel Time Index, has more than doubled in the San Francisco-Oakland area and quadrupled in San Jose since 1982.
Plan Bay Area's population and ridership projections have been consistently and dramatically too high. MTC repeatedly assumes strong ridership growth that never arrives, then uses those projections to justify more spending and more transit-oriented development. Its only correction has been to reset the starting point to the latest actual figure while keeping the optimistic slope. The agency has been especially slow to acknowledge how permanently remote work has reduced commute travel.
The region's marquee capital projects have a poor record on cost, schedule, and scope. Across projects including the BART San Jose extension, the SFMTA Central Subway, the BART SFO and Warm Springs extensions, the Oakland Airport Connector, and SMART, actual costs and timelines routinely blew past the original projections while delivering less than promised. About 30 percent of SMART's ridership is fare-free. This is the same group of decision-makers now asking for 14 years of guaranteed funding.
Link21, the proposed second transbay rail tube between Oakland and San Francisco, shows how the system spends for decades before it builds anything. By the program's own accounting, more than $124 million had been spent on consultants for studies, outreach, and environmental work by the end of 2024, and not one foot of tunnel exists to show for it.
The full project, including the tunnel, new stations, and connecting tracks. Early estimates on projects like this routinely prove far too low.
Expended on professional-service contracts through December 2024, by Link21's own quarterly report, and that total leaves out BART's internal labor. None of it builds anything.
Roughly two decades of contracts, consultant fees, and staff positions before a single train could run.
The concept has only shrunk, from a four-track crossing serving BART and regional rail down to a single service, because the original was not cost effective.
Where the $124 million went
| What the money paid for | Lead contractor | Spent through 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Strategic advising & program management | HNTB (two contracts) | $83.2M |
| Planning & engineering | ARUP–WSP | $18.3M |
| Engagement & outreach | HDR Engineering | $11.8M |
| Travel-demand & land-use modeling | Cambridge Systematics | $7.4M |
| Environmental review | ICF Jones & Stokes | $3.5M |
| Total expended | ~$124.2M |
BART and the Capitol Corridor launched Link21 in 2021 with a plan to spend roughly $1 billion just to plan the program, none of it slated for construction. The justification rests on figures that do not survive scrutiny. Link21's own marketing claimed the 21-county "megaregion" would swell to 16 million people by 2050; the state's Department of Finance projects only about 14.9 million. The existing transbay tube is nowhere near full now that BART ridership sits far below pre-pandemic levels, and the agency is already spending hundreds of millions to upgrade the signaling on the tube it already has so it can run trains every two minutes.
This is how the transit-industrial complex operates. A $29 billion project with a 2040 target date generates contracts, consultant fees, and staff positions for two decades before anyone has to prove it was needed. The same circle of agencies behind the over-budget BART San Jose extension and the $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center, which had to close weeks after it opened because of a structural defect, now wants fourteen years of guaranteed sales tax. Every dollar spent narrating a tunnel that may never be built is a dollar not spent moving the riders who are on the system today.
Even if the tax passes, it does not solve transit's finances. The top eight agencies already received about $5.1 billion in subsidies in 2024. Plan Bay Area 2050+ seeks roughly $500 billion in transit funding over 25 years, and MTC understated that need by more than $300 billion by using outdated 2019 costs. Fully funding the proposed program would mean an annual drain on the order of $38 billion, about $6,000 per Bay Area resident per year. The benefit does not come close to justifying the cost.
Sources: agency FY19 and FY26 budgets; National Transit Database; Texas Transportation Institute Urban Mobility Report; Plan Bay Area 2050+; and the SHIFT Bay Area analysis, The Transit Bail-Out Sales Tax: Fixes Before Funding (2026).