The public services death spiral is real. Services get defunded -> they get worse -> reduced user base -> more cuts. The only way to break the cycle is to improve the services.

Safety is only one of the issues. Convenience and comfort are others. Basically a city needs to decide whether it wants people to use the bus, and then act like it.

I was in SF middle of last year and was on the BART a good bit, and it was... fine? It remains the most objectionably noisy mode of transport I've ever been on, but it didn't feel any less safe than when I've been there previously.

Mass transit systems generally reduce anti-social behavior with either fare gates or heavy policing. For whatever reason, when you crack down on fare evasion you filter out a lot of troublemakers.

BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service).

Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.

Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.

Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?