Needed from MTC:  The in-house efforts at MTC to tackle some of the Region’s knottiest problems are commendable but the MTC Staff leadership needs to become more pro-active when it comes to recognizing regional problems and acting to help resolve them when the need arises. It needs to become more assertive and more professionally independent when it comes to determining what makes regional sense and what doesn’t. It needs to become more directly involved when regional problems are proving difficult for individual transit agencies to resolve. To ensure consistently smart and productive utilization of tax dollars for the benefit of the entire region, it will be necessary for the MTC commissioners and above all its professional staff leadership to dedicate themselves to independent objective thinking and effective regional coordination.

Needed from the Large Transportation Bureaucracies:  They can also do better. To be seriously considered, proposed capital improvement projects should be both compatible with regional planning objectives and genuinely cost effective. The staff leaderships of the large transit agencies need to react in a consistently objective and otherwise professional way to each proposed project regardless of the source of the proposal. They should also commit themselves to consistently meeting high standards of administrative efficiency and management effectiveness.

Parochial projects sometimes have their place, but the failure during the last 45 years of the Bay Area’s large transportation agencies to use their incoming tens of billions of dollars to gradually bring about an effective regional transit alternative to the automobile is inexcusable.

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Current capital project development practices need to change. Here are a few that warrant close attention:

• Bonafide alternative analyses should once again become the norm. Pet projects being pushed to the top of the priority list without objective independent analysis should become a thing of the past.
• Cost estimates should be carefully prepared by experienced professional cost-estimators.
• Transit commissions and boards should assign only experienced and highly qualified individuals of proven ability to upper-level management positions.
• Transit funds should be consistently used only for their intended purposes.
• Defined scopes, budgets and schedules should be rigorously adhered to.
• Transit agencies facing critical operating and capital funding shortages must streamline their operations even if it means reorganization and/or cutting jobs when conditions call for it.
• Highway planning and development in the Greater Bay Area should proceed in conformity with the interests of the Region at large rather than parochial and special interests that do not take regional coordination and cost-effectiveness into account.
• To ensure consistently top performance, each large public transportation agency should undergo an independent financial and management audit conducted by highly qualified and completely independent outside experts at least once every three years.

BATWG will work with any group or participate in any discussion geared to achieving the above-described objectives.