Bay Area transportation is in a royal mess, due in large part to the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s failed policies.

With the upcoming appointment of a new MTC executive director there is now an opportunity to improve things. As things stand MTC is little more than an echo chamber for powerful interests. It is not receptive to new ideas and its endless series of “public outreach” meetings are geared more to selling than listening. Perhaps this is in part because every four years the MTC Board members are selected through a weak and secretive process that is again in progress at this time. Continue reading →

Life in the Bay Area is getting worse, not better. The housing agonies increase, the commute trips get longer and the highway backups and urban traffic congestion become increasingly oppressive. Unfortunately the local and regional agencies involved in public infrastructure seem unable to deliver the smart infrastructure improvements needed to make things better. And yet without agency change there can be no resolution of the Region’s land use and transportation problems.

How did a wealthy, environmentally and tech-savvy region get so burdened with governmental dysfunction? To answer that question it is necessary to first examine the way things are in more detail. Continue reading →

In recent years the SFMTA has often yielded to the demands of assorted pressure groups. In so doing it appears to have lost sight of the big picture. Here are excerpts from what letter-writer “Shamelessly” had to say on the subject in a recent issue of Streetsblog:

“…. Residents concerns should be heard……but unless a fundamental issue of justice is raised or a [positive] compromise found…residents should be expected to adjust to [productive] changes….there’s a balance to strike, and right now it’s too often weighted in favor of the loud voices of people who simply don’t like change or [remain committed to the complete and free use of the private automobile over all over considerations]. That balance needs to shift.”

Bay Area Transportation won’t get Better until Government gets better.
It was recently noted that until local and regional transportation agencies become functional the Bay Area’s transportation problems will just get worse. Not every agency in the Bay Area is dysfunctional but quite a few engaged in the transportation field are. Here are five examples. We will have more to say on this subject in subsequent editions of this Newsletter.

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Dear Supervisor Peskin:

Last month the SF Board of Supervisors, acting as the SF County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), took back $9.6 million it had previously allocated to help pay for sending the Caltrain trains into SF’s new Salesforce Transit Center. According to the San Francisco Examiner the reason for this was to avoid paying for the “expansion planning” of the Transit Center. But the $9.6 million in question was not for expanding the Phase I Transit Center, it was for completing the preliminary engineering design of the Phase II Downtown Caltrain Extension Project (DTX). According to the Examiner the reason given for blocking the DTX funding was to hold the leadership of the Transit Center project (presumably meaning the Transbay Joint Powers Authority and Staff, and the SF County Transportation Authority’s own well-funded oversight staff) “accountable for alleged mismanagement of the $2.2 billion Transit Center”.

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California Senate Bill 1 was signed by Governor Jerry Brown on April 28, 2017.  State Prop 6 would have rescinded SB 1 but it was defeated by the voters of California on November 6, 2018. For this reason SB1 will continue to raise $0.12 a gallon in additional gas taxes. It is estimated that by 2020 this new funding source will be raising $5.1 billion a year in new State revenues, 2/3rd of which has been earmarked for road projects.

Given this large new source of funding now would be a good time to take a close look at how Caltrans spends its roadway money. One way of assessing Caltrans efficiency relative to that of other states is to compare its administration and engineering costs (soft costs) to construction costs. The table below shows California’s soft costs as a percentage of construction costs in comparison with those of other large and populous states:

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