San Jose station and 24x7 service. Not having either of these makes BART nearly worthless to me. If they had these things, I would use BART probably a few times

San Jose station and 24x7 service. Not having either of these makes BART nearly worthless to me. If they had these things, I would use BART probably a few times a week to go to SF from SJ. Right now, I drive instead (1x on average every other week) to night clubs / bars / dinner in SF / Berkeley. I can park at Millbrae and take BART into the city, but doing so is only useful if I'm going to be back before ~midnight. Caltrain is not an option because the service isn't 24x7, it's terribly slow, the train doesn't come often enough, and the station isn't close to where I live. The last 2 are just personal annoyances, but I think the first 2 are enough to make it a much-less-desirable option vs driving for people who would otherwise take it. That the cars are ridiculously over-built because they technically share tracks with freight trains (from what I've read, this is also what makes them so horribly loud and inefficient [which also makes the system much more expensive to run]) and do lots of PR damage by having very loud horns (my speculation: is that also related to the shares-tracks-with-freight-trains thing?) are just rotten cherries on top. Public transit isn't easy, but it's also not impossible. I know that even the Bay Area doesn't have the population density of places with their public transit