So far no evidence has been shown for these "broad" benefits.
It has seen massive ridership growth over the past decade.
What metrics are you using to claim it is one of the worst transit projects in the world?
Ridership per mile or transit modeshare is often a better way to rank transit systems. In terms of ridership per mile, BART is the worst of the major systems in the US and Canada. Admittedly, it's somewhat misleading since BART is kind of a mixed commuter rail/inner city subway system, but it is still far less than the other major mixed system (Washington Metro).
Also, it's a chokepoint: there's not a lot of alternatives to crossing the bay, so it should also be driving a much higher numerator as well. And it's not like other systems don't have geographic barriers--consider the crossings of the East River or Boston Harbor.
For the length of BART, taking out the Transbay Tube doesn't reduce track mileage by all that much, and consider that BART is ⅔ the ridership of the Washington Metro by mile. That's not a small gap. Maybe you could say it's slightly better than MARTA, but it's far from Philly or Chicago's performance, let alone NYC or international statistics.
With the addition of tracks to San Jose, this could change. We could start getting more flows of people where neither end is SF. That should boost ridership but of course they are adding a lot of miles.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/03/25/has-barts-cutting-edg...
The nonstandard track width may have had good intentions but I think was a mistake.
BART has the highest farebox recovery ratio of any public transit system in the US
[0] http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/55CF12C9-9D4E-4762-A27A...
I suspect it's a lot worse now. Turnstile-jumping is rampant, and fare evasion has been decriminalized altogether for minors.
The trains do not run often during the day. If you miss one, have fun waiting 20-40 minutes for the next one. They stop at midnight.
It takes a long time to get to your destination, and the destinations available are not a very large subset of where you actually want to go. Most of the time you will have to chain together another form of public transport on one or both ends, and the transfer time between different forms of transport is often long and pads out the length of a commute tremendously.
The stations and trains are unsafe, and people get attacked on them with some regularity.
On top of all these things, BART is very expensive!
I don't know how you could think BART was good unless you had never used any other comparable transport system.
Broader reach and faster travel times within those urban areas would go much farther to improve the quality of life of Californians than this high speed train project in the middle of nowhere.
I would really like California to have a high speed travel network from north to south at some point in the future - but I just don't think it's the right priority at this time - as air travel is good enough for now - and most people have to commute within their urban area every day. How often do you need to commute between SF and Los Angeles?
- Trains are generally more comfortable
- Trains allow you to use your cell phone
- Trains can take you from city center to city center
- Trains don't have the same security requirements
- Trains are safer
- Trains are cheaper to operate (and so should actually be cheaper in the long run)
Planes are better over very long distances. But trains are better for regional travel.
However, where a train does make sense, is connecting other points along the route.
Air travel tends to be either hub-and-spoke between busy hubs and tiny spokes, or point-to-point between two busy points; rail travel, however, is always along a route that allows intermediate points to be served at similar levels-of-service as major destinations.
Whereas a Sacramento-Bakersfield journey would typically require at least one hop to SF or LA by air, train (and roads, for that matter) allow that journey to be taken without intervening hops, and serviced at a marginal cost, because the two lie along a route that a train would travel anyway. That ability to connect ancillary cities is where rail travel really shines, in ways that air travel can't currently mimic.