We recommend voting for Sara Barz for BART Board, District 8.

We endorsed Barz for the Democratic County Central Committee in March 2024, and this is the job her career has been pointed at the whole time. She co-founded Seamless Bay Area to push the region's agencies to work as one system rather than two dozen fiefdoms, and co-authored SPUR's 2015 report making that case. She worked on Clipper and the Clipper START low-income fare discount at MTC, and has spent the years since at Apple putting transit cards into Apple Wallet across North America and Europe. All of it is what riders use on every trip: how you pay and how you get through the gate.

That matters more than usual right now. If the regional transit measure fails in November, BART's own board materials lay out a 63% cut in train hours, a 30% fare increase, a 9 p.m. shutdown, and ten station closures starting in January 2027.

She is specific about what she would do with the seat. She supports the new fare gates and still wants them fixed, because the lines they create at rush hour are their own problem. She would expand the transit ambassador program as the cheapest way to put more staff where riders can see them. She wants BART's outreach contracts tied to results, pointing to the $350,000 contract an audit found had gotten one person into treatment over two years. And she wants BART to stop treating ground leases as its whole development strategy and win state authority to capture more of the value its stations create.

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.

Sara BarzCo-founder, Seamless Bay Area

BART's next board will spend its term on budgets, contracts, and whether riders come back. Barz has spent her career on exactly that.