Bay Space Public Transit Companies Lay Out Their Case for Emergency Funding – Streetsblog California
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Transportation companies in the San Francisco Bay Area rely more heavily on fare box revenues than most of the rest of the country. In the past, that was something to be proud of, but given the sharp drop in ridership during the pandemic, it’s become something of an Achilles’ heel.
Federal aid has helped agencies continue to provide services to workers who have depended on them during the pandemic shutdowns, but that emergency aid is coming to an end. Meanwhile, a variety of factors have prevented ridership from returning to pre-pandemic levels, and major transit companies that have relied heavily on paying passengers are facing an existential crisis.
Representatives from multiple agencies and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission presented the issues to the Senate Special Committee on Bay Area Public Transportation, which met for the first time this week. No decisions were made or laws discussed at the hearing. However, there is pressure to take action, particularly after Governor Newsom’s May budget review continued to ignore transit.
California has never played a big part in funding public transportation — SPUR’s Laura Tolkoff said the bulk of public transportation funding in California comes from fares and taxes, with only a small portion of that provided by the state. This is why many of their agencies rely so heavily on ticketing revenue, supplemented by local and regional tax measures. This is low compared to other states, she said, citing New York (where the state provides thirty percent of operational funding) and Pennsylvania (fifty percent) as examples.
“California’s policy goals are ambitious,” she said, “and funding levels have fallen short of mobility, climate, equity and housing goals.”
Several speakers called for a one-off emergency funding from the state to give agencies time to find other sources of funding, which may take a while. For example, the MTC plans to draft a regional tax measure, but it must be approved by the legislature and then passed by voters, which would take at least several years.
“The only way to stop a death spiral is to provide emergency funding in the short term to avoid major benefit cuts,” Tolkoff said. “If you want transit traffic in fifty years, you can’t let it collapse in the next five years.”
Meanwhile, some of the larger agencies would reach the end of their funding and be forced to cut their services so drastically they might never recover. SF Muni, for example, estimates that about twenty bus lines would have to be eliminated, forcing BART to completely halt all weekend service and limit weekday service as well.
“This is not a crisis caused by financial mismanagement,” said committee chairman Scott Wiener. “No amount of tightening of the belt, no fare increases or cuts in services could have prevented this.”
“We need to work to identify long-term sources of funding, and we need short-term help while we implement service changes and other reforms to get ridership back up.”
The pandemic has led to enormous shifts in the use of public transport in recent years. “Remote work has increased massively, particularly in the Bay Area,” said MTC’s Rebecca Long. This has forced authorities to reconsider their purpose and find ways to efficiently accommodate passengers outside of normal commute times. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District — which manages all routes across the Golden Gate Bridge, including the bridge itself, buses and ferries — says commuters are staying home, but leisure and tourist travel has mostly returned. Their efforts at efficiency include “right sizing” of staff – they employ 100 fewer bus operators than before the pandemic. Also, “we will not be running empty buses,” said Denis Mulligan, the district’s general manager. “If we did that, we would have already run out of government aid.”
The district has suffered dramatic losses in revenue in recent years. Before the pandemic, Golden Gate Bridge tolls were their top source of funding, and public transit fares were their second-biggest, above all the other sources. Fewer people now commute on the bridge and only seventeen percent of passengers have returned to their express buses that took passengers to Santa Rosa and across the Richmond San Rafael Bridge.
BART recently conducted a major survey to find out what it would take for its former commuters to return, and safety and cleanliness were top of the list for nearly all of them. So they increased the presence of BART officers on the trains — they were extremely rarely seen before the pandemic, but are now commonly seen driving and chatting with people on board — as well as unarmed ambassadors. They’ve expanded their cleaning regimen, sweeping every car at each end of its journey and doing a “more thorough cleaning” at night.
However, the former drivers, some of whom have switched to cars, will not hear of these changes unless they drive with the system and far less attention is paid to safe and clean than dirty and mean.
