Low ridership feeds on itself since low ridership leads to even less ridership and the accompanied decrease in the budget to run it.
We have the added shitshow of being a metro system spanning three different states. No one wants to pay, no one feels responsible; it's a mess.
I used to go to conferences in downtown SF a lot and I would wind up riding the BART from SFO, I would always meet Europeans doing the same thing but all the other Americans I met would take the SuperShuttle or an Uber. I thought the BART was great.
I ride the bus from rural Tompkins County to Cornell, the one problem is that you have to plan your schedule around just a few trips, but it drops me off right by the cafe on the way to work, if I drove I’d have to spend another 15-20 min finding a parking space and walking to my office and might need to move my car mid day or pay for parking.
The bus has been in bad shape lately, we used to get a full size bus (often electric) now often it is a mini-bus, sometimes a mini-bus where 1/3 of the seats have been replaced by a wheelchair elevator that gets used once a month. A few years back there was a utopian proposal to not charge fares, it seems to have become a reality because some vendor screwed up and now 90% of the fare boxes are busted. I think the service is great but it surprises me how few people use it because it stops at some very transit friendly development.
BIG MISTAKE! On the second day I took a car, and it took 1/3 the time, and 1/10 the cost EVEN with searching and paying for parking.
Public transit should be free.
You have to do something like tag all driver licenses/IDs in the "area" with "free ride".