Both Muni and BART have recently started upgrading their trains for the first time since 1996. A total of 215 new Muni trains, manufactured by the company Siemens in Sacramento, arrived in the Bay Area on November 17th, 2017. Each car cost around $5,581,395. “The [total] cost for the trains was $1.2 billion, which is paid for from sales taxes, revenue bonds, and federal funding,” said Erica Kato, a deputy spokesperson for the SFMTA.
In an article in Curbed SF by Adam Brinklow, “Muni says that eventually it will deploy all 215 of the new cars, upping its overall train fleet by 64 vehicles altogether, but for now 
The new cars are lighter, quieter, require less maintenance, and have “more reliable doors and steps, better visibility for operators and an enhanced braking system” says Muni in the an article on the official SFMTA website. Currently Muni runs Italian-made vehicles weighing nearly 80,000 pounds each. These new trains are about 4,000 pounds lighter, which will hopefully be less harmful to the streets and rails of San Francisco. Additionally, Kato says the Muni trains are more eco-friendly. “The trains will collect energy as they brake, making more efficient use of the hydroelectricity powering our LRVs (Light Reflectance Value). And LED lighting will use up to 40 percent less electricity than standard fluorescent lighting.”
Kato stresses that Muni fares will not increase as a result of the upgrade of Muni’s equipment, saying that “The trains were paid for as a reserved part of our budget, as well as from grants and other sources. Our fares are predictable and transparent and we use a policy called Automatic Fare Indexing Policy to calculate our fares.”
BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit, is also increasing it’s fleet with 755 new trains over a period of about six years. The first ten trains, called the “Fleet of the Future,” went into service on January 19th, 2018. These new trains are “quieter, cooler and [a] more comfortable ride” from the official Bay Area Transit website, in an article on the BART website. Other new features include: “video information screens, electronic signs displaying the name of the next station, the automated announcements, the third door and the quieter ride,” said “BART’s New Railcars Win Praise From Riders,” an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle on January 19th, 2018. The most remarkable and instantly appreciated difference is how squeaky clean the trains are.
Although there has been excessive testing, an apparent brake problem recently caused two of the ten BART trains currently in service to be side-lined. BART has not provided a specific date that they plan to have the two trains back in service. Although there are a lot of new updates, the new trains will not be faster, so the commute to Lick will not be shorter, but since BART is upping it’s fleet, trains will come more frequently.
