At the present time transit agencies across the country are hurting. Ridership is down and funding is scarce. To keep themselves in the financial game, the large Bay Area transit agencies, backed by MTC, the public employee unions, business groups, developers, consultants and contractors, have been quite aggressive in seeking additional State and federal funding in order to keep their doors open.

On top of the just announced State funding (and previously approved federal grants), there are new plans afoot to enact another Bay Area transit tax measure. That’s because even with the federal grants and state aid, the transit agencies in this region will almost certainly run significantly short on funding by 2026 or 2027.

What’s missing in all this is the tough and innovative thinking required for the benefiting local and regional agencies to become more effective stewards of the public funding that comes their way.

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If Bay Area voters were to accept these new tax burdens, what value would they receive in return? To answer this question, it is first necessary to focus on past policies and actions of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the Bay Area’s “regional planning agency”, and the region’s seven largest and most expensive transportation agencies: namely Caltrans, BART, SFMTA, Caltrain, SMART, AC Transit, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), and now also the Tri-Valley San Joaquin Valley Regional Rail Authority (TVSJVRRA). Since these groups are by far the largest recipients and consumers of transportation dollars, it is they that warrant the most outside attention.

MTC:  In 1970, when the California State Legislature created MTC, the intent and expectation was that MTC would bring the cities, counties and transportation agencies together under the regional banner so that the transportation system as a whole could work to everyone’s benefit. To give MTC the authority it needed to bring about needed regional improvements, the Federal Department of Transportation and State of California agreed to respond to a regional transportation plan developed by MTC. It was expected that this would put MTC in a strong position to bring regionalism into agency programs and otherwise positively affect Bay Area transportation performance. But the regional perspective, while set forth and dutifully expressed in MTC’s many planning documents, never materialized. Instead of sitting down and defining a regional plan or at least some regional criteria against which local and Caltrans projects could be evaluated, MTC soon evolved into an organization that repeated nice-sounding regional goals and objectives but when it came time to decide on funding priorities ignored its regional obligations and instead brokered deals between the various local transit agencies and political jurisdictions.

Here’s how it worked:  MTC ascertained the project objectives of the various “stakeholders” and then worked with them to get everyone to agree to everyone else’s project. With that approach MTC’s job became less taxing. All it had to do was to get the various parties to come together in agreement and then put together an uncoordinated mix in which every political power center “brought home its share of the bacon”. This mix was then defined as The Regional Transportation Plan and shipped to State and federal funding authorities, a practice that continues to this day.

Lost in the process was any semblance of comprehensive regional coordination and therefore any real commitment to either easing traffic congestion or better integrating the Region’s network of rail, bus and ferry boat lines. This historic failure on the part of MTC to provide regional leadership in this regard is responsible to a significant degree for the seemingly endless parade of large Bay Area transportation boondoggles. As Editor Dan Borenstein explained in the July 9, 2023 Mercury News and East Bay Times, “The [MTC] commissioners have for decades shown little to no interest in standing up to the individual transit agencies’ demands, [or] pressing for elimination of service duplication, coordination between transit systems, reduction of overlapping bureaucracies or pushing back on inefficient and excess labor contracts.”

Since 1980, at least $100 billion in capital funding has been received and spent by the Region’s transportation agencies, without bringing about the anticipated improvements.

However there are signs that this passive attitude on the part of MTC may be changing. Now under new management, MTC is reportedly moving ahead in certain areas long in need of attention. Fare Integration:  There are plans to expand the existing integrated fare collection system to include all the Region’s transit services. This proposal is reportedly already being tested in Sonoma County. Mapping and Wayfinding:  On July 8, 2022, a contract with Applied Way Finding Inc. was executed to develop a single mapping and wayfinding system for the Region. The current status of this ambitious undertaking is unknown. Transfers:  There is also talk of making transfers between agencies free. The practicality of this idea is currently being tested in pilot projects at several Bay Area colleges. Bus Bypass Lanes:  MTC reports that it is working with other agencies including Caltrans in an ongoing program to create bypass bus lanes at the congested eastern approaches to Bay Bridge and elsewhere. Paratransit Services:  There is also a program underway to significantly improve and better integrate the Region’s deficient paratransit services.

While these efforts are all important, it is difficult to ascertain just how far along they actually are. With the possible exception of the bus bypass lanes, it does not appear that the efforts described above will result in changes on the ground any time soon. We will have more to say about this in future newsletters.

For additional information of about ways of improving MTC and large agency performance, go to the article entitled:  Needed Transportation Agency Changes