The problem here is that BART is not a metro service - MUNI is supposed to be, but doesn't do a particularly good job of it, so BART has been co-opted over the

The problem here is that BART is not a metro service - MUNI is supposed to be, but doesn't do a particularly good job of it, so BART has been co-opted over the years by residents in some neighborhoods to pick up the pieces. San Francisco first needs to figure out what BART is - if its future is as a rapid transit municipal system (that's tied together with other municipalities), or if it should be strictly a commuter and inter-city transport system. The current operating model is not a bad one assuming what you want is a regional commuter rail system, it fails utterly at being municipal transport. I'd suggest that the "failures" of BART are really the extension of the massive, completely unmitigated clusterfuck that is MUNI. Looking at the recent history of MUNI is like watching a really bad slapstick act - it'd be funny if it weren't so damned sad. MUNI is broken, its system of governance is broken, and the propensity for California/Bay Area to engage in hyper-democracy is keeping it broken (ballot measure ALL the things!) San Francisco holds 800K people in 47 square miles of land - the argument that this is insufficient density for a proper rapid transit and municipal transport system is IMO complete bunk.