For years, Lateefah Simon was an ordinary transit rider — the unflinching single mom who dropped her daughter off at 7 a.m. each weekday, then scrambled to catch a BART train. Now, she helps set an agenda for the regional rail system.

“ With all these decisions BART is making, the board needs a legally blind, black, single mother,” said Simon, whose acute nearsightedness prevents her from driving. She was elected president of BART’s Board of Directors in December, signaling a political shift for the transit agency.

Throughout its history, BART offered respite from the problems outside. This year it’s confronting them head on. A more progressive board is pressing for low-income fare discounts, civilian ambassadors to supplement the police force, housing on station parking lots and parking prices that dissuade people from taking their cars. They’re considering far-reaching ideas, like making transit free for everyone — something that 42-year-old Simon hopes to see in her lifetime.

“In 1994, I jumped the fare gates every day to get to my internship at Youth Radio,” Simon said matter-of-factly, sitting on the couch at her home in North Richmond. “And yes,” she added, “I got a couple citations.”

Though she believes everyone should pay his fare, Simon empathizes with BART’s neediest riders — teens whose parents have no money to buy them a Clipper card, transients who sleep on the seats, people rummaging in their bags for change to get home. Simon spent much of her life struggling to get by. She grew up in public housing in San Francisco and had her first child at 19 after graduating from George Washington High School.

She would go on to lead several influential nonprofits, earn a public policy degree at Mills College, win a MacArthur Foundation grant and become a dynamic public servant whose personal story and credentials seemed unusual for BART. Endorsing her opponent, Zakhary Mallett, in 2016, The Chronicle’s editorial board wrote that Simon “has a future in politics, but this position is the wrong fit for a candidate too deferential to labor’s interests.”

Some observers saw Simon’s election as a changing of the guard. The original managers of BART weren’t that concerned with social issues — they were more interested in expanding track to the far reaches of the East Bay and into Silicon Valley. For a long time, the board was dominated by “good government types” who pushed for extensions to the system, tried to make parking plentiful and cheap and kept BART’s labor unions in check, said former Director Tom Radulovich, who served from 1997 to 2016 and often felt like the lone progressive warrior on the board.

“That was ‘old BART,’” Radulovich said. “The manifest destiny was always, ‘keep building into the suburbs,’ and that was just strongly ingrained into the culture,” Radulovich added.

But the whole institution flipped upside down after a BART police officer fatally shot 22-year-old Oscar Grant on the platform of Fruitvale Station in 2009. In the years that followed, a new wave of leaders took over the transit agency, many of them animated by social and environmental justice issues.

“BART reflects the culture of the Bay Area, and social justice, equity, the state of good repair — that’s what resonates now,” said General Manager Bob Powers. “And Lateefah gets that. She’s a champion of that.”

The board grapples with many competing demands. Officials are under pressure to stop violent crime and fare evasion, but they also want to keep the transit system open, welcoming and affordable. BART directors try to promote cycling or other sustainable ways of getting to stations, while serving a population that relies on automobiles.

Several directors are wary of the new, more social-justice-driven ethos. Some argue that police and sturdier fare gates should be BART’s top priority. The board spent nearly two years sparring over whether to put civilian ambassadors on trains. The directors finally approved a program this month but agreed to have the ambassadors vetted and supervised by BART’s Police Department. Simon and her liberal colleagues also have a tense relationship with the influential Police Officers Association, which Simon said she hopes to repair this year.

Above all, BART struggles to build trust with the 400,000 people who ride each day.

As commutes become longer and more arduous, the rail system has taken an outsize role in people’s lives. Board members constantly field emails and tweets from riders who want to feel like the transit agency’s leadership is listening. Because Simon is the sole black director, she’s often first to hear from people who feel their civil rights have been violated on the BART system. Now she’s also a sympathetic ear for people pushed to the distant corners of the region in search of affordable housing.

At the time of her election, Simon rented a Victorian in West Oakland. She loved living in the urban core, where she walked her younger daughter, Lelah, to preschool every morning, smiling as the other parents rushed in with their coffee thermoses, everyone in a hurry to catch a bus or a train. Simon had just roared back to life after a period of intense grief when her husband, Kevin Weston, died from a rare form of leukemia two years earlier. In summer 2016, she became executive director of the Akonadi Foundation in downtown Oakland and dreamed of buying a house nearby — in a neighborhood rich with transit. But everything was too expensive.

“My mom ran (for the BART board) on transportation justice — putting affordable housing within walking distance of BART,” Simon’s older daughter, Aminah Ortiz-Simon, recalled. “These issues of gentrification and high housing costs, for her they’re not just theory. That’s her life.”

Simon bought a house in 2018 in a small residential community tucked into a hillside in North Richmond. Surrounded by an industrial flatland and adjacent to a railroad crossing, the homes are large but affordable. Simon’s house has a bedroom upstairs for 23-year-old Aminah, who lives in San Pablo but visits often, and a smaller room for 8-year-old Lelah with pink walls and a dollhouse. Their neighbors, a mix of UPS drivers, restaurant owners and airport baggage claim employees, are mostly working-class families.

It’s a major adjustment for Simon, a lifelong city dweller who grew up in the Fillmore neighborhood and spent part of her childhood in the Banneker Homes, a low-income apartment complex on Fulton Street. Her new neighborhood lacks a grocery store, so she has to order food from Instacart. Getting around by mass transit is difficult. At first, Simon tried to take Lelah to school in El Sobrante by bus, but the journey took several hours — they left the house at 7 a.m., and Simon didn’t arrive to work until 10:30 a.m.

Now they hail a Lyft at 7:20 every morning, stopping first to drop Lelah off at Bethel Christian Academy, then heading to Richmond BART, where Simon boards the train. In the evenings, Lelah’s grandmother picks her up so Simon can work late. She catches another Lyft from the BART station to get home. Costs for these rides hover at about $30 a day.

“I recognize the privilege I have, to get these rides,” Simon said Thursday morning as her Lyft van skimmed down Appian Way in El Sobrante, past auto body shops, churches and shingled homes with cars parked in their front yards. “These people,” she said, pointing to the houses alongside the road, “they have no options to get to BART.”

Her van pulled into Richmond Station at about 8:30 a.m., and Simon dashed into the concourse, pulling up the hood of her jacket. She stopped to chat with the station agent, then hurried up the escalator to catch the Warm Springs train. As it lurched away from the platform, Simon grabbed one of the ceiling straps and caught her breath — just an ordinary transit rider trying to get to work.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan