Newcomers to the Bay Area are often surprised to learn that, well before Richard Nixon cut the ribbon on our space-age BART network, we had a web of light rail that linked the East Bay to downtown San Francisco. A trip on the Key System from University Avenue in Berkeley to 2nd and Mission in San Francisco took around 25 minutes — comparable to a trip today on BART. Service throughout Oakland and surrounding cities had superior coverage to today’s BART network, directly connecting neighborhoods to San Francisco that now lack a reliable connection to our region’s economic core.

Key System Rail Map — Commuter lines appear as thick black lines connecting the East Bay to San Francisco, with local trolleys offering coverage throughout the East Bay.

At the time, the top deck of the Bay Bridge carried two directions of private car traffic, while the lower deck was restricted to buses, trucks, and electric rail. Unlike BART, the privately-owned system used a conventional rail gauge, which meant it could share its tracks with the Sacramento Northern Railway. This enabled direct passenger service from Downtown San Francisco to Sacramento and destinations as far afield as Chico, in addition to freight transport.

In the postwar era, the nation’s nascent love affair with the automobile rang the death bell of Los Angeles’s expansive Red Car system. It also spelled doom for the streetcars in Brooklyn, Chicago, and countless other American cities. Auto companies purchased faltering private rail networks and “modernized” them by converting them to bus service. Our region was no exception. Even in San Francisco proper, a city defined in no small part by its historic transport system, any streetcar line that did not make use of a special right-of-way was replaced by rubber-tired buses. The five lines that remained (The J, K, L, M, and N) all make use at some stage of a trolley right-of-way incompatible with bus service, and so were retained as a product of necessity.

At the time this was seen as the steady march of progress. Streetcars were perceived as antiquated and inferior to bus lines, which were more adaptable and easy to roll out. In 1958, the Key System suspended rail service in favor of a bus system and the tracks were removed from the bridge. Two years later, the floundering bus system was purchased by Alameda County and made public, taking on the name Alameda County Transit (or AC Transit for short.)

It didn’t take long before the lack of trans-bay rail service raised cries for an alternative to bridge traffic. After another twelve years and almost 10 billion (2016) dollars, BART made its first trip under the Bay.

Had Alameda County simply purchased the Key System a few years earlier, we may have been able to preserve, upgrade, and modernize a rail network that was already present instead of starting from scratch, for a fraction of the cost.

Key System Transbay Rail Car

Today, we’re faced with a familiar dilemma. Voters will be asked to approve a $3.5 billion bond measure to ensure the continued vitality of our BART system. These improvements, primarily replacing extremely outdated and worn physical infrastructure, will ensure that the system remains reliable. They will allow BART to transport hundreds of thousands of new commuters through meaningful capacity increases. New train control technology will allow trains to run closer together, increasing headways and passenger throughput. Modernized computers will significantly reduce the likelihood of major delays due to software failure. Replacements for physical infrastructure will increase the useful life of the rails, some of which have not been replaced even once in the 44 years the system has been operating. Without these improvements, we are faced with an inevitable decline, and potentially even total failure, of the system that serves as the backbone of Bay Area transportation.

Housing and transportation are inherently intertwined. Our housing crisis exists because there are not enough places to live within commuting distance of good jobs. If we allow the backbone of our transit system to fall apart, we’ll make that problem even worse. BART carries hundreds of thousands of people across the Bay every day. We’ve seen what happens when it fails — the result is mayhem. If its failure were made permanent, the result would be an effective contraction of housing supply for San Francisco. Housing prices would skyrocket faster than they already have.

If not for the Key System and similar railways, the East Bay would not have become a viable home for San Francisco commuters in the first place. Letting it rot away was an insanely expensive mistake. In no small part because of BART, Oakland, Berkeley, and the greater East Bay have provided overflow for San Francisco’s constrained housing market. Their extra supply has facilitated tremendous job growth throughout the region, but only because of the transit that connects far flung jobs with the East Bay’s supply of housing.