Sara Barz

• Office: BART Board, District 8
• Election Date: November 3, 2026
• Candidate: Sara Barz
• Due Date: August 10, 2026
• Printable Version

Thank you for seeking GrowSF's endorsement for the November 3, 2026 election! GrowSF believes in a growing, beautiful, vibrant, healthy, safe, and prosperous city delivered via common sense solutions and effective government. Our work includes running public opinion polls to understand what voters want, advocating for those changes, and ensuring that the SF government represents the people.

The GrowSF endorsement committee will review all completed questionnaires and seek consensus on which candidates best align with our vision for San Francisco.

This questionnaire will be published on growsf.org, and so we hope that you use this opportunity to communicate with voters.

Please complete this questionnaire by August 10, 2026 so we have enough time to adequately review and discuss your answers.

• Your Goals
• Executive Leadership
• The Issues
• Personal
• Thank you

Your Goals

We’d like to get some details about your high-level goals and how you intend to use your elected office to achieve them.

In your own words, what authority does a BART Board Director have — and what constraints limit the Board’s power?

The BART Board’s primary duties are to hire and oversee the General Manager, set operating and capital budgets, approve major contracts and projects, decide areas of strategic focus and key policy questions, and provide oversight and public accountability. It’s important to be honest that the Board does not run the system day to day—and it shouldn’t try to—but it does set direction and shapes its future. These are the same kinds of responsibilities that many corporate and non-profit boards have, but as BART is a public entity the core role of an individual BART Board Director is to act as a steward of the public trust.

With respect to constraints, the BART Board’s primary constraint is fiscal. Fare revenue, BART’s most flexible source of funds, has decreased since the pandemic as a share of overall revenue. Many of BART’s revenues are fixed by federal and state grants and local ballot measures, and a large portion of expenditures are locked in by labor agreements negotiated within parameters set by the Board; neither are something the BART Board can change on its own.

With the fiscal cliff looming, the most important responsibility of the Board is ensuring the future of BART’s ability to operate at all.

What relevant experience, perspective(s), or idea(s) makes you uniquely qualified to be an effective member of the BART Board?

My whole career has been dedicated to improving the rider experience on public transit. I co-founded Seamless Bay Area specifically to push the region’s transit systems to work together as one cohesive system rather than disconnected fiefdoms. I have a master's in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley, worked for MTC on Clipper as well as Clipper START, the low-income fare discount program. I served on the San Francisco County Transportation Authority’s Community Advisory Committee representing District 7, and as a product manager for transit payment at Apple, I have led efforts to make transit easier to access and ride around the world.

I’m also a San Francisco mom raising my kid on the West side. I rely on BART. I know how painful it is when you can’t get to work or school pick-up on time because the train is delayed. I will use my experience to deliver a world-class rider experience and hold BART accountable.

How do you intend to use your experience to improve the operations of the BART Board? Please name 1-3 goals you have for your term.

When it comes to transit, my top priority is to get the basics right: reliable, safe, and clean transit service that keeps people riding the train and out of their cars. This priority is rooted in my professional experience working with public transport agencies around the world. For BART to reduce system outages, this most likely requires more ambitious proactive maintenance and oversight of the modernization projects to ensure that BART replaces old system components as quickly as possible.

I also want BART to build more trust with San Francisco voters. I want to champion more accountability and transparency measures, so there is less room for ambiguity when BART’s budget or policies are scrutinized publicly. Having worked in or with the public sector for many years, I find that some of the best administered agencies are those that can simply report on their work, costs, etc. and make that information accessible in many different ways.

Finally I want to plan for more transit across the Bay Area. We need to reduce our reliance on private automobiles and oil companies and instead build up our public transit system. As the co-author of SPUR’s Seamless Transit report (2015) and a co-founder of Seamless Bay Area, I know that it can be politically difficult to plan and promote new major transit projects, but given how long these projects take to go from idea to reality, we need to always be planning for a future that relies on transit.

Will the power of the office of the BART Board be enough to achieve these goals?

As long as BART has adequate operating funding to provide a baseline level of service then, yes I believe that a Board member working in good faith with the support of other board members, executive staff, and key labor allies can accomplish my top two priorities.

Planning for a future that includes more high quality, rapid transit anchored around the existing BART network will likely require the support and partnership of the cities, transportation agencies and likely Sacramento.

What is an "out there" change that you would make to state/local government policy, if you could? For the purpose of this question, you are not constrained to the BART Board.

The biggest problem facing transit in the United States is the unsustainable lack of operating funds. A world with abundant local and regional transit requires a sustainable financial operating model, and it almost certainly requires financial help at scale from the state and federal government. In my work with transit agencies around the world, most agencies that operate high-levels of transit service receive more guaranteed operating funding from their state governments than we do in the US. For example, the province of Ontario spent $82 per capita (adjusted for USD) in 2025-2026 in operating subsidies as opposed to the $57 per capita that California spent in 2025-2026 (h/t Claude for those back of the envelope calculations).

However, the State of California does have money for transportation. In the 2025/2026 state budget, the state spent $15 billion* on state highways and $2.5 billion on transit operating and capital combined. That disparity reveals the extent to which transit service is not a priority of the state of California, but it could be.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would divert as much revenue from Caltrans as feasible to fund both transit operating and capital funds so long as we held the state’s transit agencies accountable for that spending. We would need the recipient agencies to demonstrate that they could grow to deliver more high quality service that got people out of their cars and to operate that service efficiently. Given BART’s operating model, I’m sure the agency would rise to the occasion.

I have other “out there” big picture policy ideas to pursue, but the basics need to be in place for success.

*Curious about the comparison to Ontario? In the same budget year Ontario spent $3.3 billion (USD) on provincial highways or $204 (USD) per capita as opposed to the $384 per capita here in California. To place that highway spending number in perspective, the province of Ontario is larger in terms of land mass than Texas and California combined.

Link to Claude’s reasoning on the comparison of California to Ontario: https://claude.ai/share/f2e8805c-f339-4391-b34c-d8d93612468e

Executive Leadership

Is the data that BART publishes sufficient for riders, taxpayers, and lawmakers to evaluate performance? If not, what is missing?

BART makes a significant amount of data available, especially its quarterly performance reports and detailed ridership data. But the agency could go further to make more performance reports available in structured formats, not just PDF files, to facilitate comparisons and trend analysis. BART could also publish more data on its capital projects and construction contracts to build public confidence and ensure transparency around how capital dollars are spent.

Because every report and data feed has a cost and ongoing maintenance burden, I would look to BART’s independent Inspector General for guidance on what data would provide the most value and provide sunlight around key risks.

Labor costs and work rules significantly affect service delivery. How will you approach labor negotiations and workforce management to balance fiscal responsibility, service quality, and employee morale?

Labor is the largest line item in BART’s budget, and BART can’t operate without the people who keep the system running every day. Those workers deserve to be compensated fairly.

To prepare for contract negotiations, I’d want to look closely at the performance and cost data and do my best to understand the impact of key work rules. BART executive staff and union leadership have chosen to rollover contracts for the past decade, and it may be time to review the impacts of those decisions especially in light of findings from BART’s Inspector General, such as gaps with managing and tracking overtime costs.

As with the fiscal cliff in general, BART can’t simply cut its way to financial sustainability. Treating negotiations as a zero-sum game is toxic to morale and creates even larger turnover problems in the long-term. I’d rather focus on reforming work rules that aren’t serving the agency and in parallel prioritizing capital funds on improvements that reduce operating costs. BART negotiated tens of millions of dollars in savings by sweating these details before and can continue to make real progress without reopening the wounds that led to strikes and didn’t even move the budget much in the end.

Describe a difficult governance decision you’ve made involving tradeoffs between cost, quality, and public expectations. How does that experience prepare you to serve on the BART Board?

When I served on the San Francisco County Transportation Authority Community Advisory Committee, I had the responsibility and privilege to review the funding requests and plans from staff before those items went to the SFCTA Commission (Board of Supervisors) for approval. For those agenda items there was always a tension between expediency and scrutiny, and I would hold or block funding requests or draft plans selectively if it seems that the project description fell significantly short of my standards:

• Clear problem definition
• Clearly articulated project benefits, e.g. project users, new ridership, operational savings, etc
• Clearly articulated project costs, both in time and money
• Evidence-based practices or best practices employed to shape the project
• A basic understanding of other options considered
• An assessment of whether a pilot or prototype is feasible
• Plans for evaluation

During my time on the CAC, one proposal, a funding request to lengthen an off-ramp from 280 that leads to Geneva Avenue, fell short of those thresholds. Staff was not able to speak to most of the bullets above, but portrayed the project as a “safety improvement” to address a dangerous off-ramp that leads to a High Injury Network corridor. What to do?

In my view, while the goal of improving the safety of this part of San Francisco is very important, not being able to articulate the benefit or rationale for the proposed project meant that the team needed more rigor in its conceptual approach. With the support of other members of the CAC, I recommended staff revisit the proposed project and bring back more options for review.

Project effectiveness requires analytical rigor; that rigor can happen quite quickly when the project team is aligned to a conceptual methodology grounded in problem solving and measuring success. My job as an appointed representative of the public trust is to ensure that I think the case for the project is defensible and worth the public investment. I would apply this same lens to my work as a BART Board Director.

The Issues

Next, we will cover the issues that voters tell us they care about. We hope to gain a better understanding of your policy positions, and we hope that you use this opportunity to communicate with voters.

BART faces a structural operating deficit and long-term ridership uncertainty. BART and other Bay Area transit agencies are expected to rely heavily on a regional transit funding measure on the November 2026 ballot to avoid major service cuts. Do you believe this ballot measure, if passed, will be sufficient on its own to put BART on a long-term fiscally sustainable path? Why or why not?

No, the Connect Bay Area funding measure is a lifeboat, not a high speed ferry (that’s a fun metaphor for all you readers down in the depths of these answers with me). For starters, the measure is set to expire in 2041, which will give the region time to chart a new financial course, but not an indefinite, fiscally sustainable route through troubled waters.

Second, a key part of the Connect Bay Area measure is the Financial Efficiency Review Independent Oversight Committee, which has both documented savings and efficiencies already achieved and laid out a roadmap toward long-term financial stability. The measure comes with real teeth: ongoing funding is conditioned on meeting financial accountability commitments.

In other words, Connect Bay is both a medium-term funding guarantee, but also an accountability process to encourage BART to grow both ridership and non-farebox revenues, invest in transit-oriented development, and find feasible funding sources.

In short, it is absolutely essential that we pass Connect Bay Area to address the immediate fiscal cliff and prevent station closures, devastating service cuts upwards of 70%, or even the closure of the system altogether. That’s why I’ve worked hard to help gather signatures to put it on the ballot and continue to fight for every vote I can. But the work to get to fiscal sustainability continues after the measure passes in November

If the measure passes: what additional reforms or actions should BART take to ensure financial stability and accountability? Please identify 1-3 cost reforms, revenue or funding reforms, service reforms you would recommend.

My goal would be to oversee implementation of the Financial Efficiency Review Independent Oversight Committee recommendations (a component of the measure) to keep BART on a stable financial footing and ensure we maximize the transit service we get for our taxpayer dollars. Implementation of the Seamless Transit Principles can help attract new riders, and revenue, by improving efficiency and fare equity for multi-agency trips. I would also seek to expand BART’s efforts to seek new revenue sources from its existing assets, including transit oriented-development on parking lots and other agency property.

If the measure does not pass: what specific steps would you support — including service changes, cost reforms, governance changes, or alternative revenue sources — to prevent fiscal collapse and maintain core service? Please identify 1-3 cost reforms, revenue or funding reforms, service reforms you would recommend.

Should the Connect Bay Area measure fail, BART will face agonizing decisions that could not be solved with any amount of reform. BART cannot only cut its way out of this crisis: the data is clear that cuts meaningful enough to address the deficit would quickly reduce fare revenues more than they can reduce expenses.

As Director, I would continue to uphold the Alternative Service Plan approved by the Board in February 2026 and fight to ensure that District 8 stations remain open and are as well served within that plan as financially feasible. At the same time, I would emphasize equitable access and prioritize the needs of those with the fewest transit options, providing as much safety-net service as possible while seeking regional solutions to the crisis.

BART is essential to downtown San Francisco’s recovery and to daily life for SF and Bay Area riders. What specific improvements to service frequency, reliability, or station conditions should SF riders expect by the end of your first term? How will you hold BART management accountable for delivering those improvements?

There is no recovery in San Francisco without transit. BART and Muni are the lifeblood of our downtown and ensuring stable transit funding is essential to the city’s ongoing recovery and vibrancy. As BART Director, my first priority would be to ensure BART survives the fiscal cliff and continues to fill this critical need.

To attract and retain riders, BART must get the basics right. Riders deserve reliable service, safe and clean stations, and working elevators, escalators, and fare gates. Continuing to track and report these metrics shows riders when they’re getting what they’re promised and when the agency is falling short.

Night and weekend events are an important part of San Francisco’s recovery and transit must support both attendees of these events and the workers who make them possible. BART’s transition to consistent all-day schedules has helped here, but late night service is still minimal, deterring people from coming to the city for fear they’ll be stranded.

Tourism is another key piece of the city’s recovery, and BART is often the first stop for visitors at SFO and OAK. Today, the process of understanding where to go, how to pay, which trains go where, and how to connect to other transit systems can be disjointed and confusing. I will look to ensure that visitors get a great rider experience that sets them up for success.

Are you supportive of the new fare gates which are designed to stop people from entering the system without paying?

Yes. BART’s new fare gates have demonstrated a major improvement, saving the system millions while reducing the need for special cleanups by 961 hours in six months. This is a smart example of using capital dollars to deliver efficiencies and reduce ongoing operating costs. However, the job isn’t yet finished. See next question.

What could be done to make the new fare gates faster?

But these gains have come at the expense of the rider experience: the fare gates are leading to long lines at rush hour and after major events, causing crowding and delays. In addition, both the BART Accessibility Task Force and BART Bicycle Advisory Task Force have raised real concerns about how the new gates perform for people with disabilities and bike riders.

Making it simple to pay for transit has been a major focus of my professional career, and the new fare gates don’t yet live up to the standard BART needs to achieve. I would need to talk to the experts on staff at BART behind the new fare gate program to learn more about the details, but anecdotally, much of the delay appears to relate to the Clipper Card readers. BART and MTC need to work together to ensure Cubic is held accountable for the many deficiencies in the Clipper 2.0 rollout and that there is a plan to make the new gates at least as fast as the old ones.

BART has made great strides over the past two years to reduce open drug use and disorder on trains and in stations. What specific actions will you take to continue this trend? Please identify one enforcement action, one operational change, and one inter-agency partnership you would push for — and how you will measure whether conditions have improved or worsened.

BART has indeed made significant progress. Crime has shown double digit decreases systemwide and customer satisfaction is measured at nearly 90% and has consistently continued to increase. I’ll do all I can to keep it going.

Riders need to know that there are eyes and help throughout the system. That means a consistent visible presence of BART PD and transit ambassadors riding trains and walking stations, deployed to the places where the need is greatest. While fiscal constraints are severe, I would look to expanding the transit ambassador program as the most cost-efficient way to get more safety personnel working in the system quickly.

Operationally, I’d ensure that BART’s outreach efforts are attached to tangible outcomes. BART was right to put a stop to the $350,000 contract that only got one person into shelter, and future agreements need to be tied to performance metrics so that the agency pays for results. The Board should look cohesively at the entire landscape of public safety and social services personnel and contractors working in the system and ensure that its size and composition is matched to needs.

I would push to better coordinate the many social service teams and agencies covering BART stations in San Francisco. One station may be served by SFPD, BART Police, BART Transit Ambassadors, BART Crisis Intervention Specialists, Station Agents, District Works restroom and elevator attendants, Downtown SF Partnership ambassadors, and DPH Street Teams. That’s more than enough people to keep stations clean and safe, but only if they work together. All staff working in and around stations need to be equipped to work as a team to enhance public safety and provide compassionate services to those in need.

BART is still dangerously loud between Glen Park and West Oakland, subjecting riders to sound levels not safe without hearing protection. Why have none of the "fixes" for the extreme noise worked? Describe what causes the noise, what has been tried to fix it, and what needs to be done to fix it once and for all.

BART’s noise in the Transbay Tube and sections of the San Francisco tunnel is extreme. My Apple Watch reminds me every time I ride BART that exposure to sound levels over 90 dB SPL for over 30 minutes can cause temporary hearing loss.

Extremely loud noise, like extremely poor air quality, is a public health problem that I would like to take seriously as a BART Board Director. As I understand it, excessive noise is a complex, decades-long problem. While I am not an acoustic engineer, my understanding is that the noise is the result of the interaction of many elements: the solid axle design baked into the system since inception, the choice of wheel profile, wear on the wheels and tracks, the seals of train doors and windows, the acoustic properties of the Tube, and the speed of the trains.

Over the years, much has been done to address the problem: the new Fleet of the Future cars have improved soundproofing; custom-made noise dampers have been installed at key locations; the agency switched from flat to tapered wheel profiles; and rails have been reground to match the tapered wheels. The wheel shop at the Hayward Yard is filled with specialized equipment needed to maintain train wheels in good condition.

While BART has achieved noise reductions through some parts of the system, there hasn’t been much progress at addressing the loudest spots. As The Chronicle noted earlier this year, “our loudest readings on BART were about as high as 15 years ago, and in the same places: inside the Transbay Tube and other tunnels.”

It is not the BART Board’s job to micromanage engineering decisions to reduce noise, but it is the Board’s job to hold the agency accountable for providing a quality rider experience. Just as I plan to hold BART accountable for reliability, cleanliness, and other basic promises to riders, noise needs to be measured and evaluated regularly. Short of major capital projects, reductions in noise in the short term are best achieved through consistent, ongoing maintenance practices to keep wheels, tracks, dampeners, and other equipment in top shape. As the Board sets budgetary priorities, I will dig into the details to ensure that this maintenance is budgeted as a routine practice, not just one-time fixes.

BART has authority over its station-area land, including zoning power expanded by AB 2923 in 2018, to enable high-density housing and commercial development. It has used this authority at fifteen stations, but the pace has lagged its own targets and the deals aren't structured to maximize revenue. Given BART's budget shortfall, why hasn't station-area development become a more aggressive revenue source?

Because of the long lead times in development, it can take years for policy changes to translate to progress on the ground. BART’s transit-oriented development program has made real strides in recent years, with more homes in the pipeline today than the total number that have been built since the 90s. But BART’s goal is to build 20,000 residential units and 4.5 million square feet of commercial space before 2040, and it needs a more aggressive approach to get there.

There are important policy questions about the trade-offs between maximizing the amount of affordable housing and generating revenue for the BART system. BART needs to do its part to address the shortage of affordable homes, but it also doesn’t benefit low-income workers to build transit-oriented housing next to a transit system that can’t afford to run transit. AB 2923 sunsets in 2029, so BART must work with its partners in the state legislature on successor legislation that accounts for the change in California’s housing landscape since 2018 and sets a foundation for a more expansive TOD program.

Longer-term, we need to look at state-level solutions that give BART the legal authority to recoup more of the value its stations provide through proven tools like tax increment financing and other value capture mechanisms. BART should not rely only on long-term ground leases as its development strategy.

Personal

Tell us a bit about yourself!

What is your professional background?

I’ve been a Product Manager at Apple for seven years, focusing on transit payments and ticketing. In my role, I have the privilege of working with transport agencies worldwide. In 2024, Mass Transit magazine named me a 40 under 40 Transit Professional.

Read more about me on my website sarabarz.com

How long have you lived in San Francisco? What brought you here and what keeps you here?

I have lived in San Francisco since 2011 with one year living abroad in Paris. I love San Francisco because it’s such a weird, beautiful, creative city filled with people who just want to make it special.

What do you love most about San Francisco?

As a city, the people from here and who make their lives here tend to invest in their community. We probably have more neighborhood associations, political clubs, and community based-organizations per capita than anywhere else in the country. I love that so many people who live in this city really want to give back in a meaningful way.

What do you dislike the most about San Francisco?

It’s really hard for us to embrace change even if we stand to benefit from that change. And the fear mongering can be apoplectic with little reason or fact-checking by authorities.

Tell us about your current involvement in the community (e.g., volunteer groups, neighborhood associations, civic and professional organizations, etc.)

I am on the board of my neighborhood association, the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, and I co-founded Friends of Slow Hearst, the group of neighbors who steward our slow street and advocate for traffic safety improvements in Sunnyside.

I’m the President and co-founder of the Westside Family Democrats club, which champions the needs of families on the West side of San Francisco.

Previously I served as the District 7 representative to the San Francisco County Transportation Authority Community Advisory Committee from 2022-2026.

Why do you want to run for public office?

I love transit, and I want to offer my professional expertise and experience to making sure BART provides the best transit rider experience it can for San Francisco and the Bay Area. I want more folks with professional transportation experience to hold positions of elected leadership because transportation investments — both operating and capital — can have profound consequences in our daily lives and long-term plans. We need people with real expertise to participate in elected bodies to help steer those decisions. I’m just being the change I want to see in the world.

Thank you

Thank you for giving us your time and answering our questionnaire. We look forward to reading your answers and considering your candidacy!