Yesterday I had an hour between meetings to have coffee with my mother in Rockridge. I thought it would be a good opportunity to twitter the latest BART protest, and hopefully to pick up a few more readers of my microblog thanks to intrepid, live reporting of what promised to be a large and potentially riotous demonstration in the heart of Oakland’s supposedly “power elite” neighborhood. Unfortunately for me and for the protesters, it was a complete bust. The media outnumbered the handful of protesters, and BART and the neighborhood took no chances securing the transit station. I enjoyed no discernible uptake in my twitter popularity, and the protesters looked pathetic and marginalized. But lost in their divisive and extremist rhetoric is the fact that the protesters are basically right: BART is a deeply flawed and unjust organization.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system opened in the early 1970s with a promise of uniting the central Bay Area with a high-speed rail system. The system’s construction wreaked havoc on Oakland and San Francisco’s downtowns, precipitating the fall of the DTO as an upscale shopping destination by tearing up Broadway for years, and driving the final nail into the coffin of West Oakland’s once-vibrant 7th St. As the system expanded throughout the 80s and 90s, far-flung suburbs received high-intensity transit service far out of proportion to their size and density, and the residents of central cities found themselves subsidizing suburban transportation at an ever-increasing rate. Despite failing to meet ridership projections, a uniquely costly construction type, and decades-long problems with escalators and elevators, BART remains the most politically popular transit service, receiving a share of regional transportation dollars far out of proportion to its ridership. Today, BART’s legacy is an ever-expanding regional development footprint and fantastically wasteful expansion plans that starve the much more efficient and larger bus agencies of needed operating funds. This is not just an issue of priorities, it is an issue of social and environmental justice.

BART’s per-rider public subsidy (at an average of $6.14) is more than twice that of AC Transit ($2.78), neatly intersecting (PDF) with the fact that its ridership is twice as white as AC Transit’s (43% to 21%). Its subsidized parking lots in the suburbs encourage driving and transfer additional funds to the suburbs at the expense of the inner cities. Most galling, fares from the outer suburbs don’t come close to covering the operating costs of those train lines, while intra-city fares in Oakland are actually more than the operating cost of a trip from, say, Fruitvale to the DTO. This means that every trip within Oakland is subsidizing a trip from the outer suburbs. Both the structure and the operation of BART is subsidizing suburbanites at the expense of the central cities, and its low-cost parking has been shown to encourage more driving.

This is not just a legacy of the 1950s BART plan, it is a result of continuing policy choices by the elected BART Board. The same Board that for decades refused to create a civilian oversight board for its large police force has chosen to create an unjust fare structure and repeatedly break promises made to voters. Those broken promises include a shockingly wasteful Airport Connector that bears no resemblance to the project approved by Alameda County voters, and the VTA’s 2008 tax measure that took all of a month after it was approved for the transit agency to announce that it would jettison all of the local-serving projects in the tax and redirect the funds to the duplicative San Jose expansion (which won’t even go to downtown San Jose, as promised to Alameda County voters when they approved the Warm Springs extension).

The BART Board flies below the radar of public and media interest. The last contested BART election, for the North Oakland-Berkeley seat, saw a transit advocate unseated by Bob Franklin, a union leader upset by Roy Nakadegawa’s efforts to run the system more equitably. The wasteful nature of BART is part of its political power: the construction companies and unions are strongly supportive of the enormous costs of expansion, which go directly into their pockets, while low-cost bus systems aren’t lucrative to big political donors. AC Transit is relentlessly criticized for buying nice buses and for attempting a widely successful Bus Rapid Transit project, yet nary a peep is raised by the media when BART embarks on trains to nowhere, at the cost of over half a billion dollars a mile.

So how does this relate to Oscar Grant? The protesters are eager to connect Oscar Grant’s death with wider social justice causes, yet they focus exclusively on the BART police. BART’s unjust operating structure, the subject of a racial-discrimination lawsuit, has been utterly ignored, and the protesters appear to fail to understand that the elected BART Board is fully responsible for a lack of civilian oversight for the BART police, as well as the despicable response to the incident in the first place. This gives BART Directors, like the aforementioned Bob Franklin, cover to claim they “take the protesters’ demands seriously” while in fact doing nothing to address the substance of those criticisms. Unless and until the protesters connect the dots of BART’s deeply unjust operations and the culpability of its elected officials (who are accountable to the voters), lame attempts to shut down urban stations will do nothing to improve transportation equity or social justice.

Transit advocates had reason to cheer on Election Day. California voters endorsed high-speed rail, Berkeley voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure intended to halt Bus Rapid Transit, and East Bay voters ignored the noise about Van Hools and approved a transit tax to make up for state budget cuts. But as the euphoria fades, it’s increasingly clear that Oakland could be really screwed by post-election transportation decisions made by local bodies.

As I wrote before the election, the particular SF-to-LA route chosen by the High-Speed Rail Authority bypasses the largest part of the Bay Area, the East Bay, which also precludes service to Sacramento and Modesto without a costly extension. Many of my friends argued that this isn’t really a big deal for Oakland (though of course we would benefit from hosting the HSR hub), because downtown SF is just as convenient for us as the Coliseum. However, that’s not true for most East Bay residents.

Be that as it may, immediately after the bond passed, HSR Authority boardmember and former SF Supervisor Quentin Kopp said that the costs of the service may not be covered by the bond (surprise), and that service may not go to downtown SF but instead to the Fourth and Townsend Caltrain station. Aside from drawing attention to the fact that locating a regional system in San Francisco is unnecessarily expensive, this stop is far less convenient for everyone in the Bay Area outside the Caltrain corridor. East Bay trippers will now have to take BART to DTSF, then transfer to light-rail. Aside from adding a mode change, which is off-putting, the Fourth St light-rail line does not have anything close to the capacity to host the number of passengers carried by HSR. The prospect of overcrowded light-rail trains and a long schlep to a sketchy part of SF makes High-Speed Rail less appealing against the constant flights out of the Oakland Airport, a conveniently BART-available destination, especially with the forthcoming rail link.

Except the kibosh is on the OAK light-rail line. Currently BART operates a bus service between the Coliseum BART station and the airport. The bus operates in mixed-flow lanes and is often held up by traffic. The bus is extraordinarily popular, even turning a profit, and creating a rail connection between BART and the airport has been on the drawing board since at least 2001. However, the airport connector project has secured only $295m in regional transit funds, and with a significant private-sector partnership precluded by the credit crunch, BART is giving up. Meanwhile, SF continues to receive enormous regional subsidies for its airport connector, part of a $1.6b BART extension that has vastly underperformed ridership expectations and so continues to receive outsized subsidies.

Of course, with the now-probable passage of Santa Clara County’s Measure B, Oakland and the region will be on the hook for billions of dollars for a BART expansion justified by ridership projections so fantastic as to constitute lying. Combined with Governor Schwarzenegger’s push to build capital improvements while further cutting operating funds from unglamorous but cost-effective transit services like the bus, the East Bay is in for a very tough transit future.

One outlet for trapped transit users is market-based public transportation. Strangely, Oakland lacks jitneys and limousines, leaving us dependant on a taxi duopoly. With the paucity of taxi service inspiring a public outcry, city staff has reformed the taxi ordinance and will propose issuing new permits. Unfortunately, rather than issuing the 200 permits needed to make up for 30 years of a service freeze, city staff is only going to ask for 11 new permits. A San Francisco operator has said at public hearings that they would start a new service in Oakland if they can get at least 20 permits. City policy will instead maintain the duopoly, leaving Oaklanders bereft of service. At the state level, in regional transportation priorities, and even at the level of local transportation regulation, Oakland is totally screwed. As usual.