[chipsy]

There's a sort of "feedback loop inversion" effect in play where transit caters to extremes of poverty and wealth and not the middle. For example, Palo Alto's Caltrain stops are not high-end real estate because transit runs through it - they're high-end because they have become a major destination for tech workers over the course of a few decades. On the other hand, West Oakland BART is within easy reach of many major destinations but it's been heavily resistant to gentrification: major firms do not have a presence there, and it's historically a working-class community, not a wealthy suburb. BART's deployment there is effectively transit as a "handout" policy, a way to make sure low-income workers get to their low-income jobs.

But places that are a bit outlying and don't have a big job market, like much of Marin, sit in a nebulous zone in between: they aren't really "in demand" right now, and that gives the community leverage to stomp out anything that would change that.

[omegaworks]

>BART's deployment there is effectively transit as a "handout" policy

Is that really how it's framed?

[chipsy]

It's coded. You see "handout" named as such more often when it's low-quality, inefficient service. With a system like BART, the whole thing was motivated by pressure to relieve middle-class downtown commuters specifically, and everyone else by chance(hence a design without redundancy that requires a midnight service shutdown). Geometry forces it to pass through many types of communities, but during construction, the slightly richer, whiter communities had more room to shape their relationship to the system:

Prime examples of how public pressures escalated the cost of the system are the Berkeley subway and the Ashby Station. After originally approving a combination aerial and subway line through Berkeley, that city later came to oppose the plan in favor of a subway-only line, which was much more expensive. The new plan necessitated redesign of the Ashby Station from an aerial to a subway facility. Extensive controversy and hearings ensued for the next 2 1/2 years, finally to be resolved by Berkeley residents voting to tax themselves additionally to finance the changes they wanted. Next, a Berkeley City Councilman filed a successful suit to redesign the Ashby Station, yet a second time, asserting the use of skylights in the original plans was not a true subway design. [0]

And indeed, the "nicer" stops on BART tend to be underground, while the "inexpensive" ones are mostly aerial alignments adjacent to freeways. (See the history around "freeway revolts" and you get a similar picture of class/race division.)

[0] http://www.bart.gov/about/history/history2

[mrbabbage]

I highly recommend that you check out the book Mass transit and the politics of technology: a study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a different, if similarly unflattering, take on the forces that shaped BART's eventual geometry.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/mass-transit-and-the-politics...