The pandemic is well behind us, yet transit ridership levels nationwide – and in the San Francisco Bay Area in particular – have only recovered somewhat from pre-pandemic levels. In fact, those pre-pandemic levels weren’t particularly great as transit ridership has been falling for years. Despite California’s reluctance to invest in freeway infrastructure and the resulting congestion, residents continue to choose cars over buses, light rail and commuter trains.
If public transit were operated like a business, the owners would try to answer these simple questions: Why are people avoiding our service? What can we do to make it better and lure more customers? Can we more efficiently use our current resources without harming service? Because transit is run by the government, its operators only seem to ask this question: How can we get more tax revenue to keep the current system operating in the current manner?
And if they get that money, they’re not looking to boost service as much as to pay for costly union contracts and to “invest” in projects – climate resiliency, expanding electric bus charging stations, and perhaps reducing road lanes around transit stations via “road diets” – that conform to an existing agenda rather than meeting customers’ needs. The result is always the same: higher taxes, but lackluster ridership levels. There’s apparently no way to break out of this death spiral.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed a budget deal that diverted $5.1 billion to public-transit systems, despite an overall budget deficit that currently is estimated at between $38 billion and $73 billion. In a statement, the governor said the emergency relief will help “keep California moving forward on aggressive, world-leading climate goals.” It promised that the funds will help transit agencies “retool their long-term operations to better align with the needs of the public.”
But it’s hard to see that the funds will retool anything. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is facing “about a $97 million increase in labor and benefits costs over the next two fiscal years.” The emergency relief keeps the agency operating as usual, without cutting back routes and service. It’s partly a backfill for generous union deals, as “ridership remains at about 45% of 2019 levels.” In other words, the extra cash won’t increase ridership, but might stem additional losses.
The Chronicle added that BART will soon burn through its $1.9-billion emergency state subsidy, so the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees 27 Bay Area transit agencies including BART, is sponsoring Senate Bill 1031 by Sens. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, that would allow MTC to place a $750-million measure on the ballot as soon as 2026 to increase sales, payroll and parcel taxes or through a vehicle-registration fee hike.
It’s also designed to artificially gin up transit ridership. As Politico reported, SB 1031 would allow the tax measure to require “employers with 50 or more workers located within a certain proximity to transit to purchase unlimited transit passes for each employee.” The bill applies to all MTC transit agencies and is designed to cover their combined $600-million annual budget gap. Since the news report in March, the bill has passed its first committee votes.
Per the Senate Transportation Committee bill analysis, supporters say that “solving the Bay Area’s affordability, climate and housing crises will require revolutionizing our public transit system.” Some environmental groups will only support the measure if “it also prohibited new highway widening projects and included other revenue raising options, such as a means-based income tax or corporate tax.” Nothing surprising there.
But it’s hard to believe that dumping more money in the current system will solve anything – let alone major crises such as housing affordability and climate change – by merely giving the same old transit agencies more money to spend in the same old ways. No one should expect anything revolutionary. Those environmentalist demands give the game away: they want to stop highway-oriented projects and essentially prod people onto transit.
The analysis summarizes the expected – but entirely accurate – opposition from business and private-sector labor groups, which fear any resulting measure will further downplay roadway expansion and impose new financial burdens on area residents. But, ironically perhaps, it notes that several smaller transit agencies oppose the tax because they are concerned about how the money will be distributed – and fear centralizing more decision-making with the MTC.
As I wrote for the Free Cities Center in January, Sen. Wahab had introduced Senate Bill 397, which was designed “to start a ‘conversation’ about the administrative structure of Bay Area transit. It directs the existing Metropolitan Transportation Commission to ‘develop a plan to consolidate all transit agencies’ within its region.” It’s a classic “rearranging the deck chairs” move – an effort to re-jigger the bureaucracy and centralize power in a mega-bureaucracy rather than deal with the fundamental reasons that people are avoiding transit systems.
That bill has run aground, but it epitomizes transit advocates’ outlook. And if they can’t centralize power, they can seek more money – and centralize funding decisions in the hands of MTC’s vast administrative apparatus. I pointed to a survey sponsored by the Bay Area Council last April that found BART failing at the most fundamental levels. Only 17% of respondents viewed the rail system as safe and only 16% viewed it as clean. It shouldn’t take another cash infusion to deal with those basic issues.
Note that Bay Area transit systems have had the slowest post-pandemic recovery of any major systems nationwide, prompted perhaps by San Francisco’s declining population and the area’s tech-driven move toward remote work. However, that reinforces the need for BART and other area transit agencies to respond more quickly to changing consumer demand – not merely to slam taxpayers with another tax to fund current operations and routes.
But that would mean having agencies more interested in viewing the region’s residents as consumers rather than merely taxpayers.
Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center.
