The Bay Area Just Rescued Its Public Transit System

In a huge win for public transit, voters in the San Francisco Bay Area appear to have approved a measure that will slightly increase the sales tax to fund transportation in the region over the next 14 years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The measure will allow transit agencies, including BART, to preserve their service and avoid deep cuts to stations and transit lines amid the end of emergency pandemic funds.  

Unlike other ballot initiatives in the state, the Regional Transit Measure didn’t face a well-funded campaign advocating against it. But it presented voters with a big ask: to rethink their relationship to public transit dramatically, and shift to a system where all residents—not just riders—pay to keep their region connected.  

The measure reflects a growing reality for many metropolitan public transit systems post-Covid, which have had reimagine their funding models as ridership patterns have shifted and people’s lives have become more digital. It is especially salient in the Bay Area, where BART, the primary transit system connecting the region, had warned it could cease to exist if it continued to struggle financially.

In response, transit advocates and scholars say we need to figure out how to fund a system where high quality transit is accessible to everyone, even when it might not be profitable.  

“We need to make adjustments in thinking about what we want to get out of transit and how we do it,” said Elizabeth Deakin, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think we ought to treat this as a public service. We ought to manage it well as a public service.”

The alternative, rejected by voters, was to cut down operations, though policy analysts have warned limiting transit could worsen residents’ quality of life and aggravate social and economic inequities, especially impacting low-income residents and people with disabilities. 

Bryce Maples, a power wheelchair user based in Berkeley, said he doesn’t think California politicians have given enough attention to the bus system AC Transit, his most common mode of transportation, which the ballot measure will also fund. “It’s very clear that for the decision makers and politicians, the [bus] is essentially a welfare system,” Maples said. “This country spends billions and billions of dollars on roads.”

“It’s ironic that a system that was highly successful is now being beaten up because of the success.”

In 2019, BART got 71 percent of its operation budget from fares and was seen as a model of self-sustainability in the United States—a system that other metropolitan transit agencies that relied on state and local subsidies could look up to. But this funding model quickly became the agency’s Achilles heel when ridership plummeted during the pandemic.

“It’s ironic that a system that was highly successful is now being beaten up because of the success,” said Deakin. The aftermath of Covid didn’t help. Jobs in tech, the Bay Area’s signature industry, are easy to do remotely. Many require workers to commute to their office only a few days a week, if at all, leading to massive, ongoing reductions in transit usage. Though ridership patterns have picked up over the past year, and more people are using transit during the weekends, the new shifts in behavior are not enough to cover the cost of operating BART’s transit system—in the last fiscal year, fares covered about 32 percent of the agency’s operating budget.  

“We don’t believe, at least not in the next decade, that we’ll return to the ridership levels that would be needed in order to fund the majority of our operating budget, which is what it was pre-pandemic,” said Alicia Trost, chief communications officer at BART.

Proponents of the measure warned that, in the absence of a new funding model, cuts across BART and other regional transit agencies like Caltrain would have brought drastic consequences to the Bay Area. In September, the nonprofit SPUR published a report outlining how cuts would negatively affect the region’s cost of living, air quality, and economy. Cities would become more disconnected and car-reliant, increasing traffic congestion and severely limiting the mobility of people for whom transit isn’t a choice, such as people with disabilities, students, and low-income workers. 

“We are dealing with an affordability crisis here in the Bay Area and California,” said Laura Tolkoff, SPUR’s Transportation Policy Director. “That’s a lot for families to absorb.”

The Bay Area’s transit systems, Tolkoff pointed out, don’t receive huge investments from the state. And federal funds can only be used to pay for capital projects, not for day-to-day operations. In 2023, State Sen. Scott Wiener proposed raising bridge tolls to help pay for transit, but the bill stalled as it faced opposition from other lawmakers in the region. Transit advocates decided to go directly to voters. The resulting ballot measure will implement an additional regional sales tax of 1 percent in San Francisco and 0.5 percent in four surrounding counties to fund the system.

Even when they get more government support, other metropolitan areas across the US are also being forced to rethink their funding strategies in the face of fiscal cliffs. Last year in Philadelphia, the city’s transit system, SEPTA, cut services and implemented fare hikes as part of the agency’s solution to a $213 million funding crisis. The decision was soon challenged in a lawsuit arguing that these cuts disproportionately burdened low-income riders and spared routes serving wealthier communities. 

After a judge ordered SEPTA to reverse the cuts, the agency asked the state of Pennsylvania to allow it to tap into its capital funds to keep its operations going. The additional funding—a temporary fix—allows it to preserve services for two years. The agency, however, is still struggling to obtain state funding that could help it preserve transit services in the long run. 

Boston’s public transit system, meanwhile, is getting a share of a 2023 voter-approved state millionaire tax to fund operations, but is still facing a deficit in the hundreds of millions. City officials are currently exploring the idea of congestion pricing, much like New York City’s, as a source of additional revenue. And in Illinois, in order to avoid service cuts, Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill late last year that would provide $1.5 billion to public transit in the Chicago area, relying on redirected funds from an increased sales tax and parts of the state’s road construction fund. 

Not everyone is on board with these shifts, as evidenced by the way some metropolitan agencies have struggled to get more state funding approved by Republican legislators. In the Bay Area, Gregg Dieguez, who heads the Committee for Affordable Bay Area Transit, a civic group opposing the Regional Transit Measure, argued that rather than getting funds from a sales tax, BART should focus on its management strategy and on meeting riders where they now are. 

“This transit system was designed for a world that no longer exists, and it was designed for a world when you brought everybody from everywhere all at once to the same place at the same time, and we don’t need to do that anymore,” he said. As of last night, fewer than 40 percent of voters seemed to agree with him. 

“Even if you don’t ride transit, even if you don’t drive, people around you do.”

There are ways, though, that transit agencies say they can meet the region’s changing needs, without limiting service for those who still need to rely on transit every day, so long as they have enough funding. Tolkin, of BART, said the agency has been running shorter trains, providing fewer peak period services, and running more trains on weekends. Even if the measure succeeds, she said, the agency will still have a $50 million structural deficit, which will push the transit system to keep finding efficiencies and “focus on the customer experience.” 

Transit researchers, like Deakin, also make the case for building medium- and high-density housing around metro stations, as well as retail and offices that might encourage more movement among less frequented stations. “We ought to think of it as an investment in our own futures,” Deakin said.

And in the Bay Area, at least, it seems like voters are willing to fund futures beyond their own. 

Public transit “is central to keeping the region affordable, to making sure that people have the ability to get to work, to get to school, to get to appointments,” said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for the Connect Bay Area campaign that was pushing the measure. “Even if you don’t ride transit, even if you don’t drive, people around you do.”

Julia Metraux contributed reporting.