Sara BarzSara Barz

SF YIMBY is proud to endorse Sara Barz for Bart Board District 8. Sara has years of experience in transportation and supports more housing in the Bay Area. She is a co-founder of Seamless Bay Area, an organization dedicated to making transit fares more integrated across the region. Her technical experience has enabled mobile payments for public transportation around the world. Housing needs transportation and transportation needs dense housing. Sara has the vision to support BART and housing in both the nearterm and longterm. She supports building more housing near BART stations (transit oriented development) which would help both BART’s ridership recovery and address our housing crisis. As part of her long-term vision, she supports planning for more rail transit on the West side of San Francisco, enabling more connectivity in an area recently upzoned by the City. SF YIMBY endorses Sara as someone with the technical knowledge to fill the role and as someone who understands the need for better housing and public transportation in the Bay Area.

SF YIMBY is proud to endorse Sara Barz for Bart Board District 8. Sara has years of experience in transportation and supports more housing in the Bay Area. She is a co-founder of Seamless Bay Area, an organization dedicated to making transit fares more integrated across the region. Her technical experience has enabled mobile payments for public transportation around the world. Housing needs transportation and transportation needs dense housing. Sara has the vision to support BART and housing in both the nearterm and longterm. She supports building more housing near BART stations (transit oriented development) which would help both BART’s ridership recovery and address our housing crisis. As part of her long-term vision, she supports planning for more rail transit on the West side of San Francisco, enabling more connectivity in an area recently upzoned by the City. SF YIMBY endorses Sara as someone with the technical knowledge to fill the role and as someone who understands the need for better housing and public transportation in the Bay Area.

BART is the lynchpin of the Bay Area's climate ambitions. Every trip the system carries is a trip not taken on a freeway, and no local election this November matters more to regional emissions than who governs it. And this election comes at a critical time. Voters will also decide the Connect Bay Area regional funding measure, the region's answer to the fiscal cliff that has hung over transit since the pandemic. If it passes, the next board must spend that money credibly, keep the independent financial oversight the measure requires, and deliver the service riders were promised. District 8's stations, Glen Park and Balboa Park, sit in neighborhoods that need that delivery most. They are busy transfer points where getting to the train on foot or by bike still means navigating some of the city's least forgiving streets. Few first-time candidates for any office arrive this prepared.

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

We endorsed Barz for the Democratic County Central Committee (https://growsf.org/voter-guide/san-francisco-voter-guide-march-2024-dccc-democratic-party-election/) in March 2024, and this is the job her career has been pointed at the whole time. She co-founded Seamless Bay Area (https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/about-us-3) to push the region's agencies to work as one system rather than two dozen fiefdoms, and co-authored SPUR's 2015 report (https://www.spur.org/sites/default/files/2015-04/SPUR_Seamless_Transit_print.pdf) 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 (https://www.masstransitmag.com/40-under-40/article/55128978/2024-40-under-40-sara-barz) 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 (https://growsf.org/news/2026-02-20-bart-warns-of-2027-service-collapse/) 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 (https://sfstandard.com/transportation/bart-probes-350k-homeless-contract-ethics-violations/) 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 Barz, Co-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.

Source (https://growsf.org/voter-guide/san-francisco-voter-guide-november-2026-election#bart-board-district-8)