The Bay Area's Regional Transit Measure: what's at stake

Most Bay Area voters will be deciding on a transit tax to fund agencies like BART, Muni, AC Transit, and VTA, which of course have struggled with a decline in ridership since the pandemic. The regional transit measure would raise the sales tax by a half percent in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties, and it would increase by one percent in San Francisco. Bay Area public transit agencies have warned about drastic service cuts if the measure fails. Let's talk more about it. We want to bring in Jared Walker, the author of the book Human Transit and head of a firm that contracts with transit agencies such as VTA and many others all around the world. Jared, we appreciate the time this afternoon. Thank you so much for coming on. What do you think are the most important factors that voters should be considering as they are weighing whether or not to support this regional transit tax in the Bay Area? Look, I understand this is tough for a lot of people. Sales taxes are already very high. The problem we're up against is that transit all over the United States has become much more expensive to provide. Hiring has become more difficult, so salaries have gone up, as the free market in labor would indicate. But also transit agencies are being expected to spend a lot more on security than they used to. So that money has to come from somewhere. A recent poll, I want to put up the latest numbers that we have, the latest sort of reading on this regional transit tax measure and how it might fare. This was released by the Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Bay Area News Group. And it found here, as you can see, that about 48% of respondents say they will support this transit tax. 34% say no, and 18% of people still undecided here. It hasn't yet crossed that 50% threshold that would be needed for passage here. How do you read these poll numbers? Oh, these don't surprise me. Lots of people who aren't particularly focused on this issue are gonna decide at the last minute. And it needs 50% to pass. We're reasonably hopeful. But I wanna assure you that I don't believe the transit agencies are bluffing when they say that they will have to do very destructive service cuts if this thing fails. We'll see. Yeah, I mean, tell me about what these different scenarios may look like here. Because of course, transit agencies, they have warned that if the measure doesn't pass, if it fails, there will be drastic service cuts, stations would have to close. We're also hearing sort of warnings about the potential for increased congestion on Bay Area roadways. What do you think actually happens if this measure does fail? I think there will be service cuts, and I think they will have a really specific effect that I want you viewers to understand. When people decide whether to use transit, they look up a trip and they check to see if the travel time is reasonable. And what this means, these service cuts, even though just the frequency reduction, are going to mean more and more people are going to look up a trip and find that the travel time is not reasonable. So they're either not going to make the trip and some sort of economic activity won't happen or they won't keep their job, or they'll make the trip by some other means. Someone will give them a ride, somehow they'll produce a car trip. So it's not just the congestion impact. It's also the whole access to opportunity impact and what that means economically, particularly for particularly but not only for people living on lower incomes. All those things have to be figured in and all of those things follow from the kinds of cuts that we're talking about. Opponents of this regional transit tax measure in the Bay Area have argued that transit agencies like BART haven't done enough to manage their budgets and they should be making cuts in other areas, including cutting administrative salaries. We often hear about this, what about this idea that there are other ways to keep these transit agencies running without turning to taxpayers? Administrative salaries look big, but I would rather have the best possible people and for the best possible people pay them. The salaries in any case are tiny numbers when you look at the flows of funding that are necessary to keep the transit system running, they don't matter at all. Every transit manager I know in the Bay Area wants very badly to protect service and will cut anything they can before they cut that. But you do need an administration, you do need lots of things going on in the background. And when you cut other things, other things start breaking. So these are difficult choices. And every transit manager that I know is a service advocate. But they're not gonna be able to make money out of nowhere. What happened, is there a way to sort of, would there be a way to, how difficult would it be to sort of unwind some of these service cuts that we're talking about if this transit tax were to fail in this election? I think if the measure fails, there will be some attempts to find a last minute source, but there isn't much time. Art says they have to cut right away in 27, and I believe them from what I've been able to tell. So what's more likely is that some cuts will happen. There would be serious ridership losses as a result of that cut. And remember, the ridership losses happen instantly. But when you put the service back, the recovery takes years. So the cuts will be very damaging. And even if you put the service back later, you won't get the ridership back for a while. Once you've disrupted people's travel patterns, it takes a while to bring them back. And finally, before we wrap up here, can you just explain a little bit more about the work that you do with transit agencies? And, you know, people might sort of hear that you're a transit consultant here. Do you have a vested interest in this measure passing? We don't have a financial interest. We're a little consulting firm, 20 people who specialize in helping transit agencies think about service planning issues. We work for tiny amounts of money compared to what the big engineers do. And frankly, we've been hired all over the country to help agencies do service cuts. So we'll be fine either way. It's not about our financial interest at all. It's much more about the dire impact on the region if this thing fails. All right. Well, really appreciate your perspective and thank you so much for the time. Jared Walker, author of the book, Human Transit.