Another attempt to hike taxes to prop up failing transit
By Steven Greenhut | April 4, 2025
When it comes to the Bay Area’s multiple transit systems, the numbers tell the story. As the San Francisco Chroniclereported last week, ridership at one suburban BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) stop (North Concord) “was down 66% in 2024 compared with 2019,” with trips from the East Bay station to downtown San Francisco down 75%. System-wide, “yearly BART ridership has continued to struggle to rise to anywhere near 2019 levels.”
The pandemic obviously shook up commuting patterns, but transit ridership in and around San Francisco has been on a downward trajectory for years. The UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies found that “in 2017 and 2018 the (San Francisco) region lost over five percent … of its annual riders, despite a booming economy and service increases.” That’s long before anyone even heard of COVID-19.
And the problem isn’t confined to the Bay Area. Between 2012 and 2016, Southern California “lost 72 million transit rides annually. That number seems daunting, but the region has a population of 18.8 million, and about 77 percent of those people (roughly 14.5 million), ride transit rarely or never,” according to a 2018 report from the Southern California Association of Governments. Falling ridership is a common theme for more than a decade.
Although there’s been a slight ridership rebound post-pandemic, transit systems are suffering financial problems because of the steady overall ridership declines. That reality separates two types of transit thinkers: Those who think like bureaucrats and those who think like customers. The former see gaps in funding—most recently the result of dwindling federal relief subsidies and inflation—and try to come up with ways to plug the funding hole. The second group thinks of ways to make transit more appealing.
As I reported on this site in December, San Francisco’s Metropolitan Transportation Agency, or Muni, failed to secure a tax increase at the November ballot (Measure M) and promptly threatened cuts in service—including potentially suspending the cable car service favored by tourists. That measure seemed designed to get people’s attention and create a clamor for higher funding levels. As of March, the agency is continuing to cut back service.
The bureaucratic thinkers also came up with an idea in early 2024 to create a new, well, bureaucracy to address that the region’s transit systems had suffered the worst recovery of any major public-transportation system in the country. Despite a $747-million state bailout for the Bay Area’s 27 transit systems, area lawmakers proposed consolidating them into one mega-agency—something I compared to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
That plan was scuttled, but it reinforced the tired thinking that dominates California’s transit world. And such thinking is back again. In late March, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Sen. Jesse Arreguin, D-Berkeley, held a press conference announcing a new bill that would raise sales taxes by at least a half-cent in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa and possibly San Mateo counties. (They’ve also pushed Gov. Gavin Newsom to spend billions of dollars more on transit in next year’s budget.)
“The proposal would come with strings attached,” Politico Pro reported. But those strings—mainly a financial efficiency analysis and rules promoting more inter-agency cooperation—sound like the kind of toothless oversight requirements with which we’ve all become accustomed when it comes to funding proposals for government agencies. We can expect an eventual report, but nothing substantive to improve efficiency and customer service.
The alternative way of viewing these funding shortfalls and ridership declines jibes with the title of my Free Cities Center booklet, “Putting Customers First: Re-envisioning Our Approach to Transportation Planning.” Here is a short summary of its thesis:
We have no problem with allowing higher densities, or building cost-effective transit lines that serve urbanites. But those systems need to be vastly improved, and not just the recipients of more money to provide transit in the same-old shoddy ways. We need to unleash market forces so that new transportation options can emerge without the government’s unnecessary impediments.
In other words, transit systems need to adjust the way they do business. Instead of punishing riders with service cuts (which only exacerbate the ridership death spiral)—or hammering the mostly non-transit-riding public with higher taxes—they need to build systems that are appealing, efficient and practical. Anyone who has endured the grueling commute across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco would acknowledge the value of better transit options.
Instead of making these systems the best they can be by cutting administrative costs and embracing privatized solutions, transit planners want to do the same old thing and then blame residents for not taking the bus. They view transit systems as civil-rights and environmental projects rather than conveyances for moving people around. They focus on social engineering—trying to coerce drivers out of their cars—rather than luring them with fabulous service and routes that serve their needs.
Transit agencies are facing something of a crisis, but just giving them more money with only nominal strings attached will do nothing more than lead to continuing ridership drops, funding shortfalls and endless calls for higher taxes and bigger bureaucracies.
Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center. Write to him at [email protected].
