I found out that the reason BART has the non-standard guage is because back when BART was first being conceived, Southern Pacific didn’t want BART competing with them for freight business, so they got BART to go with the 5 foot guage instead of the standard 4’8″.
Also, the airports around here, pariticularly San Jose, don’t want people to take public transit ( light rail or BART) because they would lose the revenue they get from parking, which is a significant portion of their income. So if anyone wondered why both VTA and BART don’t go to SJC, that’s it. I got this straight from a from a former member of the SJ airport commisision.
Ed
