Major delays system-wide. Rising anger. Endless frustration. That was the all-too-familiar theme of last Wednesday evening's commute on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the sprawling regional rail system here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since mid-morning, BART had been suffering anomalous electrical problems that were burning out thyristors on our train cars, one by one, at the end of one of our lines. By the time the evening finished, 50 damaged cars had to be taken out of service. A busy weekday couldn't have been worse timing for a mess of this magnitude. Providing roughly 430,000 weekday trips on a system that initially served a mere 100,000 people per week, BART simply doesn't have any extra bandwidth to absorb losses.

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@juliakite Rails, tunnels, power cabling and substations, fare gates, fault line creep mitigation... it adds up. — SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016

The communications team, myself included, huddled to talk strategy about dealing with the crisis. Alicia Trost, our department head, went to a BART station near the problem area to do TV interviews. Denisse Gonzalez, our on-call public information officer, began updating our media voicemail lines with information to help frustrated riders. I headed home on standby, ready to go to the operations control center in case the situation deteriorated.

Meanwhile, as the mangled commute progressed, exasperation from people all over the Bay Area began to boil over, particularly directed toward @SFBART, the transit system's Twitter account we manage. And honestly, could you blame them? I got a text from Trost asking anyone available to please break the silence and put an explanation for the crowded commute out online, so I snapped into crisis mode and began replying to as many people as I could.

Somewhere along the way, I replied to a frustrated passenger with what I thought was a fairly standard response, one we had used elsewhere: BART was built to transport far fewer people, much of the system has reached the end of its useful life, and this is the reality we face.

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@shakatron BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality. — SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016

The response went viral, as sites like Gizmodo marveled at a government agency being frank and honest on social media and posted several of my replies to angry riders. Now, I'm hoping this episode sparks a much-needed national conversation about the stark reality of America's deteriorated railways, roads, bridges, airports, sewer systems and electrical grid. This shouldn't be a blame game. This is about facing deficiencies, having a frank conversation about them, and making our government better. There's no purer distillation of democracy's mission than this, but even so, it has proven tremendously difficult to articulate how to fix mass transit in America.

BART now needs more than $1 billion to fix up its electrical system, replacing substations, rectifiers, inverters, and miles upon miles of 1960s-era cabling

Public transportation is an unqualified good for urban environments. BART drives the Bay Area's economy to the whopping tune of over $73 million in productivity by moving people around every single day. We take thousands of cars off the roads and reduce air pollution. Transit is both safer and more cost-effective driving your own vehicle.

Yet for all its usefulness, our system is showing its age with alarming regularity. BART now needs more than $1 billion to fix up its electrical system, replacing substations, rectifiers, inverters, and miles upon miles of deteriorated 1960s-era high-voltage cabling. Our tunnel walls below downtown San Francisco (which are below sea level) are struggling to remain waterproof. Our once-world-renowned automatic train control central computer system is now a Pong-era relic, preventing us from running trains closer together and interfacing poorly with the physical infrastructure it controls.

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@kettering No - sugarcoating problems, especially ones obviously disrupting people's lives, isn't an effective or honest way to communicate. — SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016

Nearly every major public transit system in America faces a similar laundry list of woes—see the litany of problems in New York and Washington D.C. , the latter of which had to shut down its Metro for an entire day last week. But I'm not here to wax nihilistic. Far from doing nothing, the people at BART are working feverishly to fix the system within severe financial constraints and, frankly, an increasingly hostile attitude toward public institutions in America. We've identified funding for most of our new Bombardier-produced rail cars, which are coming next year to replace the original 1972 fleet. We're building a new maintenance complex to repair damaged trains more quickly and are replacing miles of worn rail at a brisk pace. We're not sitting on our hands, and we're certainly not resigned to letting what we have crumble around us.

But efficiency and gumption can't rebuild the rail system that so many Bay Area residents rely on. BART needs billions more to get out of the past and keep the trains running at a reliable service level people expect from public transit, which is why the organization is currently putting the finishing touches on a proposed $3.5 billion bond for the November ballot, so there are opportunities ahead to keep the trains running at a reliable service level people expect from public transit.

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@jalrobinson At the end of the day, we're just trying to illustrate the importance of public transit to the Bay Area - and America. — SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016

Not even 48 hours after my tweets first went viral, a Bay Area paper published an editorial blasting BART for "playing politics" with service disruptions. Well, I hate to break it to you, but public transit has always been about politics, and pretending otherwise is either willful ignorance or cynical maneuvering that seeks to capitalize on people's general loathing of the political process.

Public funding doesn't just appear like freshly fallen snow. Voters have to approve it. In California, approval for new funding is particularly difficult due to Proposition 13, a sweeping 1978 constitutional amendment that requires a 2/3 supermajority vote to pass any kind of revenue-raising measure. Practically speaking, this means that 36 percent of the population can foil the will of the other 64, and tactically speaking, large-scale infrastructure investment measures become nigh-on impossible in non-presidential election years. Plus, public institutions are prohibited by law to advocate for their own bond measures. Go figure.

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@BGRod10 We need to replace 90 miles of rail. — SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016

Playing politics isn't the problem. That's just life as a public institution. The bigger problem is a deep and powerful narrative, slowly growing over the past four decades, that sees government (and thus public transit) as untrustworthy, broken, inefficient, outright evil, or all of the above. Politicians win elections on this message and join a vicious cycle of divestment and dissatisfaction. To be sure, sometimes the government fails the people, and in those instances swift action must be taken to correct it. But on the whole, America's civic institutions are popular, effective, and vital to our way of life. It is strange to think of now, but there used to be a time when having a respected job in government was an honor, not a smear. But now the culture seems bent on tearing itself down, and for what? What have we gained from divestment?

We need public transportation. We need to pay workers well to attract the engineers, technicians, welders, communication specialists that keep our cities alive and growing. We all want to live in a place we can be proud of, and we cannot cut our way to prosperity. BART could make Elon Musk its CEO tomorrow and pay him a salary of zero, but our capital needs would remain. Our infrastructure is barely meeting the needs of today, and no one is planning for the needs of tomorrow, which means more delays, more frustration, and more anger are coming down the tracks. Like I told people on Twitter, this is our reality. Will we act?

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