Bay Area Rapid Transit District

The Bay Area Rapid Transit District, or BART, is a special-purpose district body that governs the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the California counties of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco. The system itself also serves northern San Mateo County and is being extended to Santa Clara County; however, these counties have bought into the system and have neither a voting stake nor any representatives in the district proper.[1]

A map of California, with the Bay Area Rapid Transit District highlighted in blue, non-member counties served by BART in yellow, and the former (unserved) member county, Marin, in red.
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History

The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (occasionally abbreviated in early years to BARTD) was created in 1957[2] to provide a transit alternative between suburbs in the East Bay and job centers in San Francisco's Financial District as well as (to a lesser extent) those in Downtown Oakland and Downtown Berkeley.

Of the six Bay Area counties initially envisioned as participants—San Francisco, Marin, Contra Costa, Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara—only Santa Clara County refused to join when the district was first set up; it originally included both San Mateo and Marin Counties. San Mateo opted out in 1962, preferring to utilize funds to build its freeway and expressway system. Marin left a month after San Mateo, fearing that it would be unable to absorb its share of operating costs with San Mateo's withdrawal. Marin was also concerned by ongoing debate about the feasibility of running trains across a lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Structure

BART is split into nine districts, each of which elects one board member. One board member acts as president. Board members appoint five officers: General Manager, Controller-Treasurer, Independent Police Auditor, General Counsel, and District Secretary.

BART Board of Directors

Current board members, by district, include:

District
No.		 Board Member County(s) Stations
1 Debora Allen Contra Costa Concord, Lafayette, Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre, Walnut Creek
2 Mark Foley Contra Costa North Concord/Martinez, Pittsburg/Bay Point
3 Rebecca Saltzman Alameda / Contra Costa Bay Fair, Downtown Berkeley, El Cerrito del Norte (partial), El Cerrito Plaza (partial), North Berkeley, Orinda, Rockridge, San Leandro
4 Robert Raburn Alameda Coliseum/Oakland Airport, Fruitvale, Lake Merritt, 12th Street/Oakland City Center, 19th Street/Oakland, MacArthur (partial)
5 John McPartland Alameda Castro Valley, Dublin/Pleasanton, Hayward, West Dublin/Pleasanton
6 Liz Ames Alameda Fremont, South Hayward, Union City
7 Lateefah Simon (President)[3] Alameda / Contra Costa / San Francisco Ashby, El Cerrito del Norte (partial), El Cerrito Plaza (partial), MacArthur (partial), Montgomery (partial), Richmond, West Oakland, Embarcadero (partial)
8 Janice Li San Francisco Balboa Park (partial), Embarcadero (partial), Montgomery (partial)
9 Bevan Dufty San Francisco 16th Street Mission, 24th Street Mission, Glen Park, Civic Center, Powell Street, Balboa Park (partial)

Former BART Directors
  • Carole Ward Allen, (1998-2010)[4]
  • Lynette Sweet, (2003-2012)
  • Dan Richards, (1992-2004)
  • James Fang, (1990-2014)
  • Margaret Pryor, (1980-1998)
  • Willie B. Kennedy
  • Bob Franklin, (2004-2012)
  • Gail Murray, (2004-2016)
  • Dan C. Helix[5]
  • Zakhary Mallett, (2012-2016)
  • Tom Radulovich, (1996-2016)
  • Joel Keller, (1994-2018)
  • Thomas Blalock, (1994-2018)
  • Nick Josefowitz, (2014-2018)
gollark: In a market, if people don't want kale that much, the kale company will probably not have much money and will not be able to buy all the available fertilizer.
gollark: You can just hand out what some random people think is absolutely *needed* first, then stick the rest of everything up for public use, but that won't work either! Someone has to decide on the "needed", so you get into a planned-economy sort of situation, and otherwise... what happens when, say, the community kale farm decides they want all the remaining fertilizer, even when people don't want *that* much kale?
gollark: Planned economies, or effectively-planned-by-lots-of-voting economies, will have to implement this themselves by having everyone somehow decide where all the hundred million things need to go - and that's not even factoring in the different ways to make each thing, or the issues of logistics.
gollark: Market systems can make this work pretty well - you can sell things and use them to buy other things, and ultimately it's driven by what consumers are interested in buying.
gollark: Consider: in our modern economy, there are probably around (order of magnitude) a hundred million different sorts of thing people or organizations might need.

References
  2. "San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District". CalTransit.org. California Transit Association. Retrieved 30 May 2016.
  3. Simon, Lateefah. "Lateefah Simon". BART. BART. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  4. "See a BART station, see a village". 28 September 2005. Retrieved 8 July 2017.
  5. Hoffmeister, Laura (29 November 2016). "ViewPoints by Laura Hoffmeister: Welcome, thanks for city council service". East Bay Times. Retrieved 6 December 2016.
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