On Friday, the Bay Area’s largest commuter-rail network suffered an hours-long outage that left its trains stalled on the tracks as commuters across the region waited for a ride that would never come.
It was, as state senators Scott Wiener and Jesse Arreguín said in a statement, a peek “into what life in the Bay Area will be like without robust BART service.” Next year, voters across the region will decide whether they’re ready to see their transit systems go dark for good.
In 2026, a set of unrelated taxes are likely to appear on local ballots across California’s second-largest metropolitan area. Each would fund a different transit network whose leadership says a yes vote is necessary to keep the trains running. Together they add up to a real-time service update for one of the country’s most transit-reliant regions: how much do Bay Area voters believe in their public-transport systems after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted commuting patterns?…