Marin Says No To BART

Marin County was one of the five founding counties of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, and in May 1962 it withdrew, which is why no train has ever crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. The plan was to hang a second deck for trains beneath the roadway. BART's own 1956 study found the bridge capable of carrying them, and a report by the engineers Gronquist and Steinman, published in 1960 after wind-tunnel tests, called the installation feasible and practical. A 1959 survey by the Independent Journal found 87 percent of Marin residents in favour. The bridge district was not. Its retired designer Clifford Paine reported in 1961 that trains would violate the original permit, and in April 1962 a review board of three eminent engineers, Othmar Ammann among them, concluded that rails would cut the margin of safety more than was advisable. BART's president complained that had the bridge's own builders been held to that standard, it would never have been built. San Mateo County had already pulled out, taking its tax base with it, and in May 1962 Marin's supervisors voted to leave at the district's own request, since the bonds, which needed 60 percent approval, could no longer pass. A week later they tried to reverse the vote and the district refused. The historian Louise Nelson Dyble has argued that the bridge district feared for its toll revenue more than for its cables. Marin got buses instead. Golden Gate Transit began service in January 1972, and the Larkspur ferry started in 1976. Rail returned in 2017 as SMART, running north from San Rafael into Sonoma County, and reached Larkspur in 2019, a short walk from the ferry that BART never replaced.