Before the coronavirus ravaged lives and the economy, ambitious plans to overhaul the Bay Area’s public transit were in play. Now with budgets in freefall, those plans could be in jeopardy. They shouldn’t be.
Many agencies are running on fiscal life-support to shuttle workers for essential services: Muni cut 75% of its bus lines, closed its subway system, and is still considering a fare hike. BART is running trains just every half-hour, with even more drastic cuts on weekends and evenings.
Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said essential workers for the clinic’s supportive housing services were struggling to make their overnight shifts, with some of them commuting from as far as Antioch, 45 miles away. “BART’s cutback in evening service required us to pay workers overtime to come to work a few hours early or stay at work longer,” Shaw said. He and other service providers have lobbied City Hall to provide taxi vouchers.
Some money is coming. Congress recently approved $25 billion in emergency funding as part of its stimulus package. The Bay Area’s share will be divided among transit agencies by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which coordinates regional planning. It is voting next week to approve distribution of the first $780 million tranche.
But the commission, a conglomerate of representatives from the nine counties and special districts, may also be part of the problem under its current mandate. It has little authority to compel the region’s 27 agencies to coordinate to improve service and increase ridership.
Solo car travel in the Bay Area still dominates commutes, at 64.5% of all trips as of 2016. That’s better than what we had in 1970, but it’s not much to celebrate — just a 13% decrease in five decades. Meanwhile, transit ridership still lags short of its peak in 2001.
‘You only have to discourage traffic a little to have a big impact at rush hour.’
— Transportation economics and engineering professor Lewis Lehe
Transit advocates hope that a budget bailout will also, finally, bring reforms.
Alon Levy, a mathematician and transit journalist based in Berlin, sees potential for a regional authority like the MTC to manage transit operations more directly as a Verkehrsverbund would in Germany — coordinating schedules, fares, and even sharing revenue among local agencies. “In Berlin, there are exact passenger counts every three years to determine how to distribute revenue between agencies,” Levy said. “But that requires willingness to coordinate, and the Bay Area so far has not had it.”
One transit system for the Bay
The most important step toward better transit would be a unified regional system. State assemblymember David Chiu, who represents San Francisco, was working on new legislation, AB 2507, before the pandemic struck. He says the bill is still very much on the table. “As shelter-in-place orders are lifted, we need to rebuild our transportation system in a truly seamless and integrated way, to increase ridership, stabilize budgets and protect our environment,” Chiu said in a statement sent to The Frisc.
Still in early phases, Chiu’s legislation would push for much more coordination, if not complete unification. Ideally, Caltrain commuters would no longer miss their BART transfers at the Millbrae stations, and people who take Muni and the ferry every day would no longer face the hassle of multiple, inconsistent fares.
“Users’ fares should correspond to the quality of service they receive, not what or how many agencies provide it,” said Ian Griffiths, a former BART planner, now policy director for the bill’s sponsor, Seamless Bay Area, a nonprofit established by transit planners and advocates in 2017.
The political obstacles to regional coordination would be steep. “Regional transit cooperation usually involves tradeoffs that require some counties to contribute more than they currently do, and provide benefits to some counties more than others,” said Jason McDaniel, professor of political science at San Francisco State University.
Agencies like BART and Golden Gate Transit that cross county lines collect revenue in their own special districts, leaving them with more incentive to defend their respective turf.
As if turf battles between transit agencies weren’t difficult enough, Chiu’s bill, like all legislation this year, now faces additional headwinds. State lawmakers have to shelter in place, too, and it’s possible that only short-term, emergency measures will be considered in the near future.
But the pandemic could have silver linings, creating new political opportunities to boost other transit-friendly policies.
Cars and money
With most drivers off the road, many people across the state have noted that our air is remarkably clean. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District estimates that traffic is down by 70% in the region. Los Angeles, the birthplace of smog, recently had some of the cleanest air of any large city in the world, and views across the Bay Area have been spectacular.
Cars and drivers will inevitably return to the roads, but with COVID-19’s deadly spread, awareness of the life-and-death stakes of respiratory health is at an all-time high. Perhaps this is a moment to accelerate measures to meet the state’s 2040 targets for lower emissions, which the California Air Resources Board warned in 2018 would require a 25% reduction in car trips.
Lewis Lehe, a professor of transport economics and engineering at the University of Illinois, and a UC Berkeley graduate, explained that downtown congestion pricing in San Francisco, which the county’s transit agency is exploring, could pay dividends for Muni during a recession. Even a mild congestion toll discourages traffic, “and you only have to discourage traffic a little to have a big impact at rush hour,” Lehe explained. “Doing so would help Muni operate with fewer buses if there are service cutbacks, because buses would move faster and not bunch together much.”
Congestion pricing would not necessarily plug local transit’s funding gap. In San Francisco, there’s also political pushback against a proposed fare hike for Muni. (The agency’s board is voting on April 21.)
Another upcoming political decision could make a huge difference, however. Californians will vote in November on one of the most significant tax overhauls in decades. A state ballot measure dubbed Schools and Communities First would increase property taxes for large business owners. It’s also known informally as “split roll,” because it takes the sacred cow of 1978’s Prop. 13, which froze residential and commercial property taxes, and splits off the commercial part for reform.
If voters approve it, a small fraction of the projected revenues could help some transit agencies bounce back to pre-pandemic service levels. San Francisco could gain an estimated $600 million to $700 million in property tax revenue; if 10% were earmarked for Muni, it could cover Muni’s $66 million projected budget deficit in 2021.
Other counties might require even smaller percentages because of higher projected benefits. Santa Clara County could gain an estimated $1.1 billion in 2021. Transit advocate Monica Mallon of Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action noted that with just 3% of this annual revenue, Santa Clara’s VTA could make up nearly all of its $34 million projected budget deficit for the previous fiscal year.
Beyond stimulus money, transit agencies will need more help, particularly if they keep running reduced service. Lower ridership means less fare revenue, which is how BART covers most of its operating costs (73% in 2017). In Santa Clara, VTA leans on county sales taxes for 75% of its budget, another vulnerability in what could be a prolonged recession.
To avoid a downward spiral, agencies will be counting on California voters and lawmakers alike to make difficult decisions. Riders, commuters, entire communities, and environmental health are depending on them, too. It will take all of California’s political levers — direct and representative democracy — not just to recover, but also reimagine regional transit that emerges from the coronavirus crisis much better than before.
Diego Aguilar-Canabal is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, CA.