We don’t know why the Transbay Transit Center broke yet, but it’s discouraging for those of us who care about the future of transportation and are so proud of this beautiful new station. The Bay Area has an enormous transportation deficit from decades of underinvestment, stretching back to the opening of BART in 1974. Simply put, we need to be capable of building new transportation infrastructure and having it work. We are proposing a possible solution.

This isn’t about the cracks. There are bigger questions to face: If we think public agencies cannot deliver successful projects, we need to change those public agencies so they do. Throwing up our hands in despair is not the answer.

Was it a manufacturing defect? A bad engineering calculation? An underlying flaw in the structure of the contracts, or something else altogether? We need a full and thorough investigation, so we can both fix the station and bring it back online, as proposed by Mayors London Breed and Libby Schaaf.

In fact, we need to learn from the entire experience of delivering the station — what went well and what went wrong. Learning has to be a part of the process of building.

Mistakes, failures and setbacks are part of life. This is especially true for megaprojects — projects costing billions of dollars, with challenging designs and complex construction methods. While as long as there are humans, there will never be a flawless construction project. What’s important, however, is that we continue a commitment to build the infrastructure that supports the Bay Area quality of life and the economy that provides for it.

We believe that one of the problems that underlie the Bay Area’s repeated failures of project delivery is the fact that so many public agencies mobilize to deliver a single project. San Francisco Muni is building its first subway in 40 years. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission rebuilt a span of the Bay Bridge one time. Caltrain is electrifying its system once. And in the case at hand, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority was set up to deliver just one piece of infrastructure. These are all great projects. But the many, many lessons that each of these agencies learns the hard way through its experience are not getting translated into improved performance in project delivery next time because there is no next time.

The Bay Area simply must continue to build innovative and effective transportation infrastructure. For example, we need a much more robust regional rail network matched with BART, Metro, bus, ferries and bike lanes to make the Bay Area functional to a first-world standard. The extension of Caltrain into the Transbay Transit Center is even more essential now than ever before.

We believe the magnitude of new transportation infrastructure our region desperately requires a new regional project delivery body that can manage transportation infrastructure across the region.

We have a proliferation of transportation agencies leading major projects all around the bay. Whether or not we merge some of our many transportation agencies, we can create a stronger project delivery entity.

A regional organization of this kind would be capable of attracting global design, engineering and project delivery talent from other parts of the world such as Western Europe and Asia — the United States cannot become a global infrastructure backwater. It would be capable of learning from its mistakes so it can improve over time. This body would foresee and avoid megaproject challenges and innovate new ways to deliver projects, together with the private sector as public agencies have only periodic major project needs.

Let’s learn from the mistakes, let’s make whatever changes are necessary, and let’s move forward. The continued prosperity and livability of the Bay Area demands it.

Gabriel Metcalf is the CEO and Ratna Amin is the transportation policy director of SPUR, a member-supported nonprofit organization that promotes good planning and good government in the Bay Area.