A Compendium of Trouble Spots

When it comes to developing major infrastructure projects, the performance of the Large Bay Area Transportation Agencies has been lackluster at best. It’s easy to write this off as inexperience, too many cooks in the broth, unwillingness to admit error, or plain incompetence. And those factors are unfortunately often present. But that’s not the whole story.

Here are a few of the largely ignored trouble spots:

Outreach: It is necessary to give people an opportunity to respond to proposed public actions. That’s what outreach used to mean. But in recent years it’s become much more than just giving interested parties an opportunity to weigh in. Instead, a great deal of effort (sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees) is often put into asking everyone in sight what he or she wants by way of new transit. Does someone who hasn’t ridden a bus for 30 years have a good answer to such a question? Does someone worried about his job or sick child or looking forward to next Thursday’s bocce ball match? Probably not, but if the question is asked, people will try to answer it in some fashion. What is the value of this kind of off-the-top “input”? Answer: minimal.

Instead of beating the bushes to elicit as much abstract comment as possible, a better approach would be to first develop concepts sufficient to give people something to respond to, and then reach out broadly to let those who are interested have an opportunity to speak or write their opinions. This kind of outreach would improve its quality and usefulness and likely cost much less.

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One of the essential elements needed early in any large infrastructure project is a valid alternative analysis to determine which of several approaches has the best chance of achieving community goals at a reasonable cost. Despite the fact that this need is set forth in both the NEPA and the CEQA Acts, Bay Area agencies often either ignore the requirement or tip the scales to favor a “preferred” pet project. In some cases, eager promoters are left free to rush blindly ahead with the advancement of a favored scheme without bothering to consider either its public value or its cost.

The results of this careless practice are dire. Here are some Bay Area examples:

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It is generally agreed that the world has been warming and that this has caused the melting of ice and, according to the EPA about 9 inches of sea level rise since 1880. There is also agreement that there is more man-caused greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than there used to be. And that’s about where the agreement ends.

The nature of the climate debate has shifted. There are now at least four ways of looking at the situation.

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California seems determined to rush into hydrogen-powered cars, trucks, ships, buses, trains, airplanes, you name it. Never mind that today 95% of the country’s supply of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. And never mind that every kilowatt of green energy (from wind or solar) that is devoted to making hydrogen would be a kilowatt not available to meeting some other energy need.

What about efficiency? Does anyone in Sacramento care? According to Mechanical Engineering Professor David Cebon of Cambridge University, with the thermal energy loss of manufacturing, transporting and consuming the hydrogen thrown in, the average hydrogen-powered vehicle would operate at 30% efficiency, compared to a battery-operated vehicle that operates at 59% efficiency. Even hybrids do better than 30%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlOCS95Jvjc

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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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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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