cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/71474217

Unlike transit systems in other world-class cities that receive significant government funding, Bart has generated 60%-70% of its operating revenue through passenger fares, making it uniquely self-sustaining – and uniquely exposed to the low ridership during the pandemic and the Bay Area’s nation-leading shift to remote and hybrid work.

Witness the Bay Area consume itself with manufactured crisises that are products of the blindspots in the Bay Area mentality believing it is unquestionably the future. Witness what a future of Gavin Newsom types controlling things leads to.

Are you really going to keep the title as one of the great tech centers of the world without even a functioning mass transit system?

I share this in “collapse of the old society” because I think this crisis captures the collapse going on in US culture so perfectly, the idea that the Bay Area cannot afford to invest in mass transit is an absurd contortion of the reality that the Bay Area must invest in mass transit to grow and sustain itself.

In a sick collapsing society the choice for survival has become “rationalized” as the impossible choice that must be passed over in favor of austerity and ideologically driven decay and collapse.