BART faced all of these objections as well. It was also over budget. Are you against infrastructure projects in general? Do you think the bay area would be better off without BART, even with the cost overruns?
BART is one of the worst public transit projects in the western world... if you ask "would we have been better off with BART or something else?" the answer is probably something else.
BART has the highest farebox recovery ratio of any public transit system in the United States (excepting the very small, tourist-oriented Vegas monorail). It has among the best farebox recovery of any system in the world, with only a handful of systems (Tokyo, London, Osaka, Singapore, Taipei) higher.
It has seen massive ridership growth over the past decade.
What metrics are you using to claim it is one of the worst transit projects in the world?
Farebox recovery ratio is a shitty way of measuring public transit. Consider: do you rank highway projects by how much revenue they bring in (via tolls, if they exist, or gas taxes to pay for them)? Of course not--hell, most highway projects have negative recovery ratio.
Ridership per mile or transit modeshare is often a better way to rank transit systems. In terms of ridership per mile, BART is the worst of the major systems in the US and Canada. Admittedly, it's somewhat misleading since BART is kind of a mixed commuter rail/inner city subway system, but it is still far less than the other major mixed system (Washington Metro).
Ridership “per mile” is also a dumb way to measure transit systems. BART has a general geographically-mandatory ten track-miles of tube right in the middle of the system that bloats up the denominator.
It's not as bad as you think. It's measuring system length, not track-mile, so the Transbay Tube only comes out to 6 miles including approaches.
Also, it's a chokepoint: there's not a lot of alternatives to crossing the bay, so it should also be driving a much higher numerator as well. And it's not like other systems don't have geographic barriers--consider the crossings of the East River or Boston Harbor.
For the length of BART, taking out the Transbay Tube doesn't reduce track mileage by all that much, and consider that BART is ⅔ the ridership of the Washington Metro by mile. That's not a small gap. Maybe you could say it's slightly better than MARTA, but it's far from Philly or Chicago's performance, let alone NYC or international statistics.
BART is currently running at what could be considered its maximum theoretical capacity given conditions. What I mean is that the built environment provides only unidirectional flow of passengers: toward SF in the morning, way from SF in the evening.
With the addition of tracks to San Jose, this could change. We could start getting more flows of people where neither end is SF. That should boost ridership but of course they are adding a lot of miles.
The cars are dirty and smelly. The upholstery you sit on is gross. Once in a while you will find human feces in the cars. Most BART stations do not even have restrooms, water fountains etc, so I hope you don't have any human needs.
The trains do not run often during the day. If you miss one, have fun waiting 20-40 minutes for the next one. They stop at midnight.
It takes a long time to get to your destination, and the destinations available are not a very large subset of where you actually want to go. Most of the time you will have to chain together another form of public transport on one or both ends, and the transfer time between different forms of transport is often long and pads out the length of a commute tremendously.
The stations and trains are unsafe, and people get attacked on them with some regularity.
On top of all these things, BART is very expensive!
I don't know how you could think BART was good unless you had never used any other comparable transport system.
