The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system provides the crucial transit backbone for one of the most economically dynamic metropolitan regions in the world. But as Michael C. Healy writes in his book BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (Heyday Books, 2016), it almost never came to be. In fact, just as I documented about the Los Angeles Metro Rail history in my 2014 book Railtown, BART’s future came down to one swing vote in 1962 on a county board of supervisors (in Los Angeles, it was one switched vote in 1980 on that county’s transit board).

That swing vote, from the farmland of eastern Contra Costa County, was never supposed to matter. Back in the early 1960s, BART was going to be a six-county project, funded by a multi-county bond measure. But rural Santa Clara County (in today’s Silicon Valley) dropped out due to local anti-tax sentiment and a sense among elected officials that they wouldn’t get their money’s worth from a San Francisco- and Oakland-based system.

Next, neighboring San Mateo County dropped out, due to concern they would lose local sales tax revenue from in-county shoppers who would instead take BART for better retail north in San Francisco. And residents there were also generally satisfied with their existing Caltrain connection to the City.

The loss of those two counties meant that Marin County across the Golden Gate to the north of San Francisco would have to drop out, because without the South Bay counties, the tax base to fund the construction would be too small to cover the expense of getting a train across the bay to Marin.

So it was down to three counties to go forward with a viable, but scaled-down bond issue to fund the system: San Francisco, Alameda (home of Oakland and Berkeley), and the largely suburban and rural Contra Costa.

But Contra Costa County supervisors were divided. The train’s backers had two votes on the five-member board locked down, but two supervisors already opposed. That left Supervisor Joe Silva as the swing vote from the eastern farmtown of Brentwood. Silva was undecided. But last-minute lobbying by then-San Francisco mayor George Christopher and Oakland mayor John Houlihan, culminating in a 5am breakfast meeting at a Martinez coffee shop, sealed the deal. Silva was a yes.

That ensuing 1962 bond measure was pivotal to launching BART. The legislature had recently dropped the voter-approval threshold to 60%, and the measure barely squeaked by. In fact, Silva’s Contra Costa County voters did not meet that threshold, but the numbers were averaged with Alameda and San Francisco counties to achieve 61% approval.

Healy tells these and other stories about the system in an engaging, first-hand way. For not only is he a scholar of the system, he was also the head of public relations at BART for many years. As a plus, that means he was close to the system’s key leaders and part of some big decisions, which he can relay in the story with authority. It also means the book focuses a disproportionate amount on scandals big and small, as well as marketing efforts, as that was Healy’s bailiwick in his job at BART.

But on the downside, Healy’s close role and vested interest in the system means he often casts an uncritical eye toward the flaws. For example, he never addresses the failures of ridership compared to initial projections, except to put a positive spin on them. And he never engages with debates about more cost-effective alternatives to heavy rail that might have served more residents more quickly and cheaply. He also fails to acknowledge how some of the system’s recent extensions to low-density suburbs have cannibalized the quality and condition of the core system and led to the deterioration we see on it today.

Still, the book is useful for fans of BART, providing some interesting tidbits:

• While talk of building a rail system to cross the bay had gone on for much of the early twentieth century, the system started in earnest with planning in the 1950s, following an Army-Navy study that indicated that a bay crossing for rail made most sense.
• San Francisco Supervisor Marvin Lewis was a crucial early booster, getting Bay Area Council business leaders to lobby Sacramento legislators to authorize a commission and bond capability for the 1962 ballot.
• Once the system was under construction, it could take advantage of freeway rights-of-way that were also under construction, to provide cheap and ready-made (though not friendly to rail-oriented neighborhoods) rights-of-way.
• The system was meant to pioneer new ‘space age’ automated train technology, per the vision of early general manager Billy Richard (B.R.) Stokes. But as costs kept rising, voters needed to keep approving new funding measures to get the system completed, while the automated technology faced multiple technical challenges.
• When the City of Berkeley objected to loud, unsightly elevated rail tracks through its jurisdiction, the BART board forced them to pay the cost of undergrounding it, which is why the system goes underground at the Oakland border and then surfaces again in Albany and Richmond. Today, most cities have the legal and political leverage to force BART (and other similar transit districts) to pay for those kind of improvements.
• A Downtown Oakland retailer close to the mayor forced the train tunnel to go around his parcel under the city, in order to avoid surface disruption at his store. But he promptly went out of business before the system opened, so now BART riders are subjected to a slow squeaky turn under Oakland for the rest of their lives for nothing.
• The Bay tube was built by construction crews carefully sinking pre-fabricated concrete tunnel blocks onto a gravel bed laid directly on the bay mud floor and then welded together to seal them from the water.

Overall, I would recommend the book for anyone interested in BART and the history of rail systems more generally. Although while it’s chock full of anecdotes, the narrative does tend to jump around without much focused organization, making it sometimes hard to read in long batches.

The lessons of BART’s history should be familiar to anyone who’s followed rail transit deployment more generally in the U.S.: the costs, performance and construction timelines are always worse than advertised, but residents often like and rely upon what gets built. And to build something at the scale of BART took a lot of vision and frequent financial support from voters. Simply put, it’s hard to imagine the Bay Area today without BART.