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From reading TFA: it was a cheap way to improve lateral stability of the lightweight cars in high wind conditions. And the gauge used was common in some other countries like India.

Don't know what NIH syndrome has to do with it, doesn't sound like interoperating with other rail systems was in the spec.

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The people who developed the BART were Rohr Inc., which up until that point was an aerospace company. In that sense, they basically ignored most of the previous lessons learned by the industry.

They also entered busmaking at this time and produced the Flxible 870, a notorious lemon of a bus.

From TFA: “The pamphlet does not specify why only the wide gauge of five-feet-six inches was tested and not others.”

Standard gauge was ubiquitous in the US at the time, and this engineering firm didn’t even evaluate it in their report, despite the fact that the original BART plans called for standard gauge. Stability of standard gauge has since been proven to be a complete non-issue.

If you read more about the history of BART, everything about it was NIH. They thought they were going to design some new space-age standard and usher in a new era of public transportation.

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