Where did you get the idea that real estate developers ever gave the environment a second thought? Even in pretense? And which one ever endorsed BART? Or any other modern public transit project?

They actually opposed them, because transit can skew land values (lowering them if you ain't close to the station). They actually push hard for more roads and highways at public expense, because more land can be opened for development that way - without the price skewing.

As has been proven in Europe(especially Switzerland), if the public transit gets there first, before the developers, they are constrained by economic reality to concentrate development near the stations. In Europe, this has greatly reduced sprawl. And it would here too, except that in America, the transit always seems to get there after the fact - too late to prevent sprawl.

Perhaps what you are referring to is actually ancient history, when automobile transportation was not generally considered reliable or economical enough for day to day commuting. In those days, developers did briefly subsidize rail commuter services of all sorts (chartered the trains) to stimulate sales. But that did not result in sprawl. Development was clustered near stations, creating small towns, with plenty of open space in between, just like in Europe still.

The problem was, that after the developers had milked what they thought they could, they abandoned the subsidy, leaving the railroad and its new found customers high and dry. Either, the railway continued service at a loss (usually by PUC mandate), or the people did without and had to buy an actually crappy unreliable american car to commute in.

This ignited the huge demand for more paved roads and highways, which then did cause urban sprawl - in spades! Of course, that is what developers wanted; more land open to economic development. A nice bait and switch game - indeed! Seems the American people are always being played for suckers

But BART had notta dang thing to do with it. Indeed, if BART had already gotten into open country first, most of the recent sprawl would not have happened. Smaller, more tightly planned villages surrounding each station, with open space in between, would have naturally resulted instead; as has been the historical pattern worldwide for at least a century now.

OPB