In yet another case of a public transit entity making ends meet by selling itself to corporate interests, BART is dealing with its budget shortfalls this year by letting several big brands wrap entire trains with advertising. As the Chronicle's Matier & Ross report, the first four ad-wrapped trains rolled out Tuesday, so some of you may have spotted one  they're covered in ads for the 2018 Ford Mustang, which M&R muse is "a bit of an irony, considering that BART’s main goal is to get people out of their cars and onto mass transit."

A total of 25 trains are set to become rolling billboards this year, with more ads on the way from United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and Kaiser Permanente. BART is expecting to reap a windfall of $2.2 million from the ads.

BART General Manager Grace Crunican boasted to BART's board last week that "Additional campaigns are already sold for this fall and more are pending," and BART spokesperson Jim Allison tells the Chron that this is "a creative way for us to increase revenue without going to our customers."

This news arrives just a couple weeks after we learned that the Transbay Transit Center  which will become a hub for all local bus travel starting next year and (maybe) train travel eventually  had to sell naming rights to become the Salesforce Transit Center, also to cover some budget shortfalls.

The news also comes just two days after we learned that BART was handing out contractually obligated bonuses to almost all of its employees, bonuses that are tied to ridership increases, even though ridership has been trending down. (BART justified the bonuses, which totaled $1.8 million, because while overall ridership is down 3 percent, average weekday ridership is actually 1 percent above long-range projections.)

The issue of these bonuses has come up every year the past few years as BART has repeatedly been in the red, yet has had to hand out millions of dollars in bonuses  the figure was $3.3 million back in 2015, but ridership was trending upward at that point.

And apparently there was blowback this year among BART's board, with BART director Debora Allen, whose district is central Contra Costa County, telling the Chronicle that she is "not happy with [the] decision" to extend the bonuses this year to middle managers at BART, which actually is not required under the contract deal struck by operators and other service workers, but which has traditionally been done in the past.

In any event, expect to see one of those beleaguered, soon-to-be-mothballed BART trains rolling into a station near you encouraging you to go buy a car.

Previously: BART Now Says The First 'Fleet of the Future' Cars Will Be Taking Passengers In September