Automobile use has risen to pre-COVID levels. But transit ridership has remained at roughly half of what it was pre-COVID. Moreover, it is far from certain that the lavish State and federal largess of the last two years will continue.

For these reasons, now would be a good time for the Bay Area’s Transportation Establishment to think about tightening its belt and putting every available dollar to maximum public benefit. To maintain its economic viability the Bay Area continues to need to put a high priority on mobility. People need ways of getting around and it can’t all be by automobile.

But things are not going that way, in part because of the inefficient and counter-productive policies and practices of the Region’s large and entrenched bureaucracies, for whom spending the tax payer’s money often seems to have become an end unto itself. Here are some of the unacceptable results of the current system:

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The pace of planning, designing and building new public transit projects has slowed down to a creep. Most of the wasted time occurs before construction ever starts. Once in construction things tend to pick up because, while having zero inclination to police themselves, the agencies often hold suppliers and construction contractors to high standards of quality and schedule adherence.

 A case in Point:  Waiting for MTC to eventually come up with an all encompassing plan for solving the Region’s connectivity ills is an exercise in futility. Most of what needs to be done could be accomplished better and certainly faster through cooperation and coordination between and among the affected transit agencies, with support from the impacted cities and counties. It bears repeating that riders don’t care a whit about the color of their bus or train, they just want to get there.

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When it comes to approving ballot measures designed to advance Bay Area transportation capital improvements, voters used have reasonable confidence that for the most part the funds raised would be spent on projects of merit and public usefulness. Unfortunately, that confidence has ebbed away.

A Case in Point:  The 1.3-mile extension of Caltrain has merit because the project would complete the popular and successful 78-mile Caltrain commuter and intercity rail line. This extension into the waiting Salesforce Transit Center would bring together four BART lines, six Muni subway lines, the California cable car line and Caltrain, as well as Muni’s Market Street F streetcar line and roughly 40 bus lines, all in a major employment center that now includes 19 close-by new highrises and tens of thousands of new transit-oriented housing units. For these reasons it should be getting top billing, but it’s not.

What it lacks is a committed, determined and persuasive advocacy by the local and regional officials, and by the influential public and private organizations that could give it the push needed to stay in competition with lesser but more effectively-backed projects.

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On September 20, 2022, BART Link 21 team members updated BATWG on the status of their project. We learned a lot. We learned about the strenuous and costly efforts that the BART team and its five consultants under the leadership of BART Project Director Sadie Graham have made to try to explain their project to stakeholders around the Region. And we also learned about the difficulty they were having in trying to make sense of a new and unpredictable set of circumstances brought on by COVID and its aftermath.

The Link 21 team is clearly struggling to pin down the nature and effect of the oncoming changes in employment, housing and commute practices on general travel patterns, and how these changes would affect Link21’s plans for an ambitious new regional rail system.

Yet without resolving these issues, by October 2022 the Link21 planners had already gone through a total of $60 million, including a mind-boggling $24 million spent on “program management, project controls, consultant management & strategic advice” and another $10 million spent on outreach. Despite September 20th’s thorough and effective presentation, the results of the Link21 effort to date remain cloudy and it remains difficult to understand how and why so much money has been spent and where the project is headed.

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