BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System

by Michael C. Healy

The history of Bay Area Rapid Transit, as told by "Mr. BART" himself

When BART opened in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972, it became a catalyst for a renaissance in modern rail transit, both nationally and internationally. The concept as sold to Bay Area voters was gargantuan: by adopting aerospace technologies such as microchips for ground transportation, the new computer-operated rail system would bridge counties and curb urban sprawl amid a booming automobile culture. But it all came within a gnat's eyelash of not happening. The question raised by pundits and taxpayers alike was: would this space-age plan actually work, or be the biggest boondoggle in the country's history?

In the first-ever history book about BART, longtime agency spokesman Michael C. Healy gives an insider's account of the rapid transit system's inception, hard-won approval, construction, and operations, "warts and all." Written with a master storyteller's homey wit and sharp attention to detail, Healy recreates the politically fraught venture to bring a new kind of public transit to the West Coast. What emerges is a sense of the individuals who made (and make) BART happen. From tales of staying up until 3:00 a.m. with Bill Stokes and Jack Everson to hear the election results for the rapid transit vote or weathering scandals, strikes, and growing pains, this look behind the scenes of an iconic, seemingly monolithic structure reveals people at their most human-and determined to change the status quo.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Urban Planning, Urbanism, Cities

385 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 7, 2016

Reviews

[William Cline · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m not sure what this book is for.

It’s not a social or urban planning history; if you want to learn about post-war development in the Bay Area or why BART was built the way it was, look elsewhere. It has little technical depth, so it won’t satisfy curiosity about BART’s technical quirks (lightweight trains, non-standard track gauge) or its major engineering accomplishments (e.g., the Transbay Tube).

All this book offers is a basic narrative of BART from mid-century planning through to the present day, with little supporting detail. The author alights on passing controversies (BART board politics, technical problems, labor problems), but never goes beyond superficial explanations, when he attempts explanations at all. It’s like a San Francisco Chronicle article, except three hundred pages long.

In some places, Healy’s sensationalism renders entire passages incomprehensible. As just one example, he describes the ventilation structure at the west end of the Transbay Tube (me: “Oh wow! There’s an underwater structure 400 feet off the Ferry Building? Tell me more!”) by tossing out a mishmash of impressive-sounding figures (X stories tall, Y yards long), but never ties them together into a clear picture of what the thing actually looks like, what it does, or why it’s important.

This book isn’t even useful as a starting point to learn more because, as another reviewer already pointed out, it contains no citations or bibliography.

Okay, so it’s not a good book; just read the official BART history and move on, right? What makes this “dramatic history” truly awful, deserving a rare place on my “disapproval face” shelf? It’s not how it fails in its task, but how badly the author misapprehends that task.

To miss the mark is one thing. To walk the reader over to the mark, hold it up with a “doesn’t this sound interesting?” comment, and then drop it and walk away, is something entirely different. I lost track of the number of times Healy would bring up some tantalizing detail — an abandoned tunnel between Powell Station and Yerba Buena Gardens? Tell me more! — only to drop it and move on. It’s local-TV-news, aw-shucks-isn’t-that-neat sensationalism, with no follow-on effort to inform, educate, or in any way advance the reader’s knowledge. It was so flagrant that I could almost believe it was deliberate; when a “history” book doesn’t even bother to caption photos with dates, that looks like straight-up trolling. Sadly, this book is probably not an elaborate plot to infuriate a handful of Bay Area transit dorks.

I don’t want to kick dirt in the face of someone who at least tried — I want more books on this subject, not fewer — but this was a badly missed opportunity.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. It had been bothering me that, as far as I could tell, no one had written a book on the history of BART---a fact that surprised me, given that I would expect San Francisco to have plenty of railfans---and I was really excited to see that someone finally had.

Sadly, though, it was a disappointment. Healy was BART's head of Media and Public Affairs for thirty-two years, and his writing style shows it. The book feels more like a collection of annecdotes you'd write up for the press than an actual, in-depth history. That alone might be excusable.

Worse, it has no notes or bibliography: Healy doesn't give readers any clues about the sources of the facts he reports. Are they from BART archives he has access to? Old newspaper articles? His personal memory? The fact that the acknowledgements page mostly lists people who he says told him "anecdotes" is certainly not encouraging. In any case, the lack of bibliographic notes means that even if he does have reliable sources for his information, there is no way for a reader to track them down to verify them and learn more.

Furthermore, the book does not seem to have been well-edited. I caught a couple of obvious factual errors (he refers to BART's gauge as narrower than standard gauge, rather than wider than it, for example), but I have no idea how many other typos or factual errors may have slipped through that I didn't catch. The publisher, Heyday, describes themselves as "an independent, non-profit publisher", and I'm guessing that their budget is fairly limited and didn't include any sort of technical editing.

I did manage to finish the book, which is why it got two stars rather than one, and it was at least a source of topics I might want to look into elsewhere. However, it certainly wasn't something I felt I could consider a reliable source on the history of BART.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm an admitted transit nerd so I was immediately drawn to this book to learn more about the first modern transit system to be built in the US since SEPTA in 1907. And, being a new resident of the Bay Area, I've got a lot to learn about historic icons and institutions - especially those that are part of our everyday life. While the financials covered in the book concerning the funding of the system could be a bit dry, the rest was chocked full of fascinating facts and figures. Despite being close to 45 years old, BART is still growing (a new station just opened last year and two more are on the way) and the board continues to take steps to modernize the aging system. I'm excited about the future of BART and the new trains coming later this year!

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

BART is a whiggish history of transit system of the same name by BART's longtime director of public relations. As such it reads more like a glossy pamphlet than any kind of critical review. The basic problem of any transit system is that the best time to build it is well-before the region strangles itself in construction, traffic, and NIMBY interest groups. But suburban and rural voters don't see the benefit of a massively expensive and socially transformative infrastructure project that won't pay off for decades, so the systems mostly don't get built.


Maximalist BART from twitter user Jackson Mills

From its origins in the 1960s, BART was the first new transit system in nearly 50 years, and the basics were laid without the Federal funding that supported the DC Metro and Atlanta's MARTA. The system was hugely ambitious, with space-age automation and a key tunnel under the bay, while also being much less than it could have been. Planned expansion to Marin and San Mateo was off the table, costs kept ballooning, and the automated control system and high tech cars took years to shake-down all the bugs. Every expansion since then has been a complicated mess of local, state, and Federal deals to get the money in order before the costs to build another mile triple.

As a regular BART user, it handles my commute pretty well, and much more efficiently than the other options, car, bus, walking, mule train, etc. would. Yet, whenever I ask it to do anything other than take me from the outer part of San Francisco to downtown at 9 or 5, I find myself waiting on a platform for a half-hour.

Well, at least I brought a book.

[Nils · Rating 2 out of 5]

An insider’s account of the development of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, by the longtime spokesperson for BART. Explains, albeit often in a somewhat bashful way, mysteries like why the BART system didn’t go to Marin or San Mateo counties (short answer: racist suburban real estate developers like David Bohannon, who didn’t want competition from the malls they were developing). Also provides an extremely detailed account of the political campaigns to get both the original system and it’s later extensions approved. NIMBYism and partisan politics in Washington have their part, and the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act even makes a surprise cameo as a knight in shining armor.

Unfortunately the book has three major flaws. First. filled with hackneyed writing of the sort you’d expect from a career PR flak, like, “It seems that controversy over major public works projects such as BART and California’s ambitious high-speed rail is endemic to the human condition. For every proponent of progress, most assuredly a line of opponents who worship at the altar of the status quo will be waiting in the wings.” Second, it doesn’t seem to be rooted in any actual archival research — there are no footnotes and Healy appears to have more or less written the book from memory. Third, because of the latter, the book is constantly coming right up to the edge of something interesting and then not fulfilling the reader’s curiosity: the opponents of BART were also promoters of racial covenants in the suburbs? Tell me more! The electrical control systems and transbay tube were unprecedented feats of engineering? Show me exactly how! In the end, this is neither a social nor a political history of BART...

[Anusha Datar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a general overview of the history of the BART. Healy was once the PR/media manager for BART, and it shows. He shares lots of personal anecdotes and interesting one-off vignettes about the development and management of the train. It's clear that Healy has a lot of insight into what makes its history so nuanced and special.

At the same time, Healy only references the depth of those stories (whether they be about engineering achievements or police violence or NIMBYism) and never dives into them. Worse, he does not provide a bibliography or further references one could seek out to learn more or to suggest that this is a meaningful work of archival history and not just a retelling of moments from his career. He's dismissive wherever things get complicated (bathrooms in stations/other equity concerns, accessibility, police violence, natural disasters, etc.) and self-congratulatory when things are simple (celebrity visits, events, contract negotiations).

I really wanted to like this book - I love to take and celebrate the BART and I was so excited to learn more about the development of this (relatively) modern train system in the US. However, I can't recommend this outright. I think I would suggest a fellow transit enthusiast check it out, but I'd warn them that the book is pretty repetitive/in the weeds without a lot of reward for trudging through it.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history. Most telling part for me was when the author and several other staff drove from the Oakland HQ to Concord for a meeting. They did not have to put this detail (driving) in the book, but decided to anyway. Such a great system - that even those that work for it (in public relations no less) do think it necessary to use it (or bury the fact that they don't)

[Jacob Finkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many interesting stories and history that I’d never heard about. And the author has a knack for ending chapters with cliff hangers!

[Joshua Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Healy has done a service to the San Francisco Bay Area by writing this book. Having myself lived in San Francisco, Daly City, Berkeley, and Dublin at different times over the past quarter century, BART has been a constant in my life a Bay Area citizen.

This book is at once inspiring and informative, framing the rise of BART as part of the political and social movements of the latter half of the 20th century. There are so many little treasures, from behind-the-scenes recollections of shocking events to legendary and critical agreements made behind closed doors and shrouded by intrigue. This book is a primary source written by a man who saw it all -- or at least had to keep abreast of it all.

All in all... who knew the history of BART was so dramatic!

[Zack]

What you'd expect from a spokesperson writing a book with a light handed editor...kind of conservative, meandering with lots of tangents, miles wide and inches deep. That being said the position Healy was in made it so there's a lot here you're just not going to find elsewhere. If you're interested in BART you'll want to read this book, and you'll probably wish it was better. It's not boring; I'll give it that.

[Abhishek Kona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool but repetitive book. Bart is a lot of hard work.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 2 out of 5]

It would be great to have a history of BART that told of its trials and tribulations, that showed how it grew, evolved, rose, and fell with the Bay Area.

This isn't necessarily that book.

It's actually pretty decent for its first half or so, which nicely lays out how BART came to be. But, the further the author gets into the actual operation of BART, and thus his time with the agency, the deeper he gets into the weeds. The latter half of this book is full of vignettes that don't necessarily connect up with each other and which don't tell a very cohesive story of the agency. Things are constantly out-of-order, poorly explained and poorly resolved. I think one of the problems is that the author isn't really a writer, at least not of works this length. So, though his prose is fine, his plotting is not.

The author also has serious problems with bias. It's clear that he's on the side of BART and of certain people within BART. He thus shrugs off any number of problems. My least favorite, way to the end of the book after I'd already become disenamored, was a one-sentence write off of bathrooms at BART stations as an "albatross", with no discussion of how the racially discriminatory closure of bathrooms at inner city stations is one of the agency's most embarrassing elements in the 21st century. (Also not covered, major issues like: the disabled-unfriendly elevator situation at BART stations; the homeless problems, which are particularly bad in the SF stations, and which cause many of the mechanical breakdowns; and the problems caused by a vital transit service that goes dark every night.)

There are certainly interesting tidbits in this book. I managed to push all the way through to the end. But, the further I got, the more of a push it was.

[Nikky Southerland · Rating 3 out of 5]

When looking for histories of transit agencies, the most frequently found kind of work is that which goes into a deep technical dive without surrounding context. In this case, the history of BART as presented in this book is a series of political fights and battles that brought BART into inception and was extremely parse on the more interesting engineering and technical details.

While the author certainly does a good job of presenting the political sausage making that was required to bring BART to life, he frequently dangles tantalizing tidbits without going into further detail. Whereas the Transbay tube, the resulting fire, the train control networks, and wide gauge track all deserve consideration, they're briefly touched before quickly going into the next topic.

It's generally worth a read if you're looking for more information about how a transit system can be constructed in the 20th century, but don't come looking for how the trains actually run.

[Ned · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating history but didn't answer my question: why does BART use broad gauge???

[Kate Blair · Rating 1 out of 5]

The lack of citations is extremely frustrating. There's a reason this is called the "Dramatic History", it gives Healy an excuse for many of the inaccuracies found throughout the book.

I so badly wanted to enjoy this book. It pains me greatly to give it one star. I love public transportation and I have always been a fan of BART. My love for SF, the Bay Area, and all the freedom BART has provided for me blinded me for the majority of the book, but eventually it became too great to ignore. There is no unifying theme or message throughout this book, and yet the news and official BART website tout this book as being one of a kind and a beautiful insight into the history of our local public transit. I wish this was the case.

For those interested in a more thought provoking, insightful view into the history and problematic nature of BART conception check out "Urban Elites and Mass Transportation: The Dialectics of Power" by J. Allen Whitt. It is at times a bit of a slog to read, but what PhD dissertation turned book isn't? It may be a bit dated for the modern reader, but I found it insightful to the behind the scenes machinations that come with urban machine politics. Also! He cites his sources! Shocking!

[James Fee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, I really did. It wasn't that it was poorly written, it just has very little detail into the technology of BART. There is lots of discussion on how it was set up and how they picked "futuristic technology" but other than talking about how none of it worked correctly (automated train control, etc), there was nothing.

Now the book is an easy read, the author was the BART agency spokesman so he was there for much of the late 70s, 80s and 90s. But his perspective wasn't technical and in the end that was OK. If you're looking for a good history of the politics of BART, this book will work for you. But otherwise you'll be looking for more detail that just isn't there.

[G-Soxx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by BART's retired PIO, this is a must-read for public transit as well as Bay Area history buffs. Healy gives readers the background on BART and all of its hiccups as well as its milestones. I had to ding it for not having any citations - I get this is more of a story as told by Healy, but it's unacceptable to not cite sources, including where the photos used are from. But do give it a read if you're at all interested in BART, and what it has meant to Bay Area politics, transit, and communities.

[Joe M · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has the history, but could do with more drama. The author was the spokesman for BART and while that clearly gave him unrivaled access, several of the anecdotes read like lightly-edited press releases.

The book is also very uneven. Some of the most dramatic moments in BART history - the 1979 Transbay tube fire, for example - are given little more than a page of description, while we get pages upon pages of detail about contract negotiations.

[Samuel Lam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book as I am a Bay Area native and I love BART. I enjoyed reading the history of the system and even though it could have had a better flow, the chock full of information was delightful to read. If you don't have a fondness for BART, this might not be for you. But for me as someone who rode the trains as a youth, I loved every bit of it.

[Mike Doyle]

Great transit history, rich backstories, wonderfully brings to life the toxic way politics of the moment impacts wise planning and land use, worth reading. But. Also overlong, has a weak through line, and both combine to make it a slog to finish. I have picked it up and put it down for three years without ever making it to the last page.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fine overview of the history of BART, but once it had reached the point of BARTs opening, the book felt much less historical and more like a collection of fun facts, short stories, and tidbits the author felt like including. The author also had a habit of ending paragraphs abruptly, which led to a somewhat jarring read.

[Angela Huang · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was quite a dramatic history - my favorite drama was the Disabled rights activists’ slogan “BART, give us the shaft” when advocating for elevator access in stations. Also the transbay tube is super cool

[Ken-ichi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just one damn thing after another. Maybe I'll revisit at some point.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and I learned quite a lot, but a bit dry at times.

[Nathan Wilder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a boring read.

[Jen Thakar]

A few interesting anecdotes, but overall it's neither in-depth enough nor well-written enough to ever really hook me, despite my strong existing interest in the subject

[Dustin · Rating 2 out of 5]

An insider's view. Not without interest, but not a critical overview in any way whatsoever. Does explain why it took so long for BART to get to SFO. (Short version: Contra Costa paid in from the beginning, while San Mateo opted out, so Contra Costa got its lines provisioned first.)