BART is a botched clone of the NYC subway. Idiosyncratic gauge and voltage, no front doors(A&B cars), no express tracks, cylindrical wheelset tyre profile. They copied New York but failed to bring along the obvious features, instead opting for proprietary just to be stupidly different. As if it was not obvious in 1966 broad gauge was a dumb idea that had been abandoned one hundred years earlier. And why 5'6"? Why not Brunel's 7' gauge? They did not even make the cars appreciably wider. Dumb and lots of people recognized it at the time but Bechtel was obdurate like Jerry's PB of today. The Palmdale deviation is the 2016 broad gauge scandal.

In 1962 they promised Rube Goldberg but knew all along it would be an NYC style subway because powerful interests wanted to Manhattanize SF. They were ashamed of building a railroad thus "supported duorail".

They did not have the stones to go truly exotic, say French rubber style metro or monorail. At least rubber would have been quieter.

Instead of a subway they should have done exactly what the SP loathed - seize their property and build an RER or S-bahn, similar to the possible electrified Caltrain maybe we'll see. Market Street should have been left to Muni and the blinking highrises to Oakland.

Tear the mother up and convert to standard gauge. At the very least any new tube and lines should be standard gauge and driverless.