ELECTION 2020
Bay Area mass transit is staring into the abyss.
On the November 3 ballot, San Franciscans will consider a one-eighth percent sales tax to fund Caltrain, appropriately titled Measure RR, that backers frame as a desperation bid to save the commuter rail from extinction. The coronavirus pandemic has wiped out ridership, Caltrain’s main source of funding.
To pass, RR must gain a combined two-thirds approval from San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties. (SF’s sales tax would rise from 8.5% to 8.625%.) If Caltrain fails, it could feed into a death spiral for other local transit, BART Board of Directors member Janice Li tells The Frisc.
“Our agencies rely on each other. Every time there [is] a BART breakdown, we see the immense pressure it puts on other transit systems,” Li says. Take away one route and the others suffer. Take away too many, and all may collapse. (Li supports Measure RR.)
“We’re in an existential crisis,” she adds. “We’re getting a budget update about different future scenarios, and if I told you some of the things we’re considering you wouldn’t believe it,” invoking the specter of station closures, entire BART lines eliminated, and the end of weekend service.
Caltrain may be even worse off: It faces up to a $31 million shortfall through mid-2021 if nothing changes. Measure RR could generate up to $100 million annually. Earlier in 2020 the service reported losing as much as 95% of its daily ridership, a devastating figure for a system that has no dedicated source of funding and depends on fares for 70 percent of its revenue. The rest comes from the three counties in its service area.
‘Race to the bottom’
“This rail service has been in existence since Abe Lincoln was president,” says Steve Heminger, a board member of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency who sits on the Caltrain joint powers board. Caltrain may be venerable, but the current three-county arrangement is only a few decades old, and to some people’s minds has never worked very well.
“The subsidy that the train received from the partner counties had always been unreliable, candidly,” Heminger tells The Frisc. “Each of the counties took turns acting up and saying ‘I can’t pay my dues this year.’ It was almost a race to the bottom.”
This put an even greater burden on Caltrain to increase ridership. After COVID-19, there’s not even a bottom left to race to. “An ordinary economic downturn tends to put more people on transit as incomes come down,” says Gerald Cauthen, founder of the nonprofit Bay Area Transit Working Group. “I don’t think we’ve seen a crisis that knocks ridership in the head like this.”
Thanks to political gamesmanship, it looked briefly as if RR would not even appear on SF’s ballot, after two district supervisors declined to bring it to the board to vote in July without a promise of Caltrain reform. Sup. Shamann Walton, who also sits on the Caltrain board, and Sup. Aaron Peskin engineered the delay.
‘We were within an inch of the whole thing sinking, and even now we’re looking at the very real possibility of suspending service.’
— San Mateo County supervisor and Caltrain board member David Pine
“As an SF representative, I can’t support continued inequitable representation of Caltrain’s governance,” Walton said, defending the move later on Twitter. Walton and Peskin argued that the current system puts too much power in the hands of the San Mateo County transit agency SamTrans, an arrangement that stems from the county’s role in the 1991 rescue of the then-failing service.
“Right now, Santa Clara and San Francisco don’t have authority to discipline or fire or even hire the general manager,” Walton tells The Frisc. “Let’s say all the trains got run into a wall; our two counties do not have any authority” to respond.
OK, but was this an appropriate time, with Caltrain teetering “on the brink of nonexistence,” as Walton puts it?
Asked about the timing, the District 10 supervisor stood by the move, saying “I represent folks in San Francisco, I have to do my job” and prosecute their interests at Caltrain.
Eventually the parties compromised “with minutes left before the deadline,” according to David Pine of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. “We were within an inch of the whole thing sinking,” he tells The Frisc, and even now “we’re looking at the very real possibility of suspending service.”
The Bay Area’s transit web is complicated, delicate, and prone to gamesmanship at every level. San Francisco is committed to “Transit First” and fighting climate change, but talking a good game is often at odds with the wearying politics that bog down transit progress. How, in a transit-first city, has it taken more than 20 years to build express lanes for the 38-Geary bus, which pre-pandemic carried 52,000 daily riders?
Right now the SFMTA board is down to just five members out of seven seats. For a while it was at four, the quorum minimum, which meant every decision had to be unanimous.
“For all this talk about response to rapidly changing circumstances, we’re not exactly equipping our boards to do that,” says Jane Natoli, a former SF Bike Coalition board member whose mayoral nomination to the SFMTA board was shot down in August; opponents didn’t like her stances on housing and openness to e-bikes and scooters.
Some advocates have campaigned for years to combine Bay Area transit networks under one authority, but the very politicking these proposals are supposed to fix makes that harder. “There are a lot of people with a lot of power who are very parochial,” South Bay transit advocate Monica Mallon tells The Frisc. Mallon even predicts that Santa Clara County could try to secede from a united regional transit plan down the road.
In ordinary times these politics are annoying. With the transportation web undergirding SF’s economy in danger, transit backers say the self-interest and gamesmanship verge on nihilistic. Much the same way a diesel train cannot stop and start at a moment’s notice, rail service, once halted, would take significant momentum to restart again. “There’s no transit recovery without continual service,” says Ian Griffith, cofounder of the transit advocacy group Seamless Bay Area.
No alternative ideas
Eric Garris, a libertarian activist, wrote the official voter guide argument against RR, calling it a regressive tax on working people, perhaps playing on class resentment that frames Caltrain as a Silicon Valley interest. (Caltrain recently set in motion an equity plan to boost lower-income ridership, acknowledging that its customer base has skewed higher-income.)
He also argues that since ridership is down there’s no need to increase funding, which seems a little backward when in normal times many people consider Caltrain to be infrastructure as essential as sewer pipes and the electric grid. Garris did not return requests for comment. Taking a different route to oppose RR, Menlo Park lawyer Michael Brady actually argues that Caltrain “doesn’t deserve” taxpayer revenue.
Asked how Caltrain could survive a failed vote for RR, no one interviewed had any ideas. Walton refused to even discuss whether a different save is in the works, saying several times that he is “laser-focused” on the sales tax.
Even if it passes, Caltrain and its contemporaries still face a potentially bleak future. “We are entirely dependent on federal emergency funding to survive” in the long term, says BART board member Li, who calls steps like RR and potential BART budget cuts mere stop-gaps.
In other words, Bay Area riders can only hope for a saving grace, while our transit’s long-term future is actually staked on the outcomes of state and national elections. In that context, a ⅛-percent sales tax vote seems like a tiny matter. But as we’ve learned the hard way in recent years, every election choice can have consequences far outstripping what voters may expect at the time.
Adam Brinklow has lived in and written about San Francisco for 13 years, covering local communities for outlets like Curbed SF, SFGate, San Francisco magazine, SF Weekly, and EDGE SF.