How much does BART cost per year (or per decade) vs the Bay Bridge?
A huge advantage of roads vs public transit is you don't need staff. (Maintenence is needed on both, but even then I suspect roads are cheaper to maintain.)
Wikipedia says BART costs about $0.6 bil/year. Which is 10 times as expensive as the bridge. I need figures on yearly maintenance cost for the bridge to make this accurate though.
But so far it's not looking good for BART.
That way everyone can use BART :)
Not to mention in addition to direct costs, you need to look at externalities.
They were comparing number of people crossing the bridge to the total number of people using the entire BART system.
If anything what you say just makes BART look even worse, since a 2 mi stretch of bridge carries a half as many people as a hundred mile long BART system.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/bay-bridge...
The BART has to pay for everything out of fares and sundry. The highway authority just has to build and maintain the road not the vehicles.
And costs like the drivers and station workers is just split over the 1-per-car drivers across an equivalent road. I don't know anyone who enjoys that commute, likely arriving more stressed rather than less, and you can't read or prep for your real work in any way when driving.
It's a common fallacy to ignore relatively small per-person costs, even if the total adds up to a massive amount due to the numbers of people.
So those 1000 people spent that time either way, makes little different if they are passengers or drivers. However driving gets you there faster, so the costs are lower.