August 28, 2023

Dear Director Tumlin,

In this letter we have listed several cost-cutting opportunities, some that you are already seeking to implement and others that do not appear to be under current consideration.

As you know, the financial fortunes of San Francisco, and therefore also of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA), have changed. From recent MTA reports it is clear that your organization has been struggling to find ways of coping with the new conditions under which you will be required to operate. However, it is unlikely that the financial crisis you face today will be resolved in the manner that fiscal difficulties have been resolved in the past. The MTA staff’s presentation at the MTA Board Workshop on 2.7.2023 included a pie chart showing that 65% of the MTA’s 2023 revenue is expected to come from the CCSF General Fund, and State and federal subventions. This is not reassuring. Given that the huge drops in downtown property values will soon result in corresponding drops in CCSF property and sales tax revenues, it is unlikely that the past level of General Fund subsidy to the MTA will continue. Moreover, given conditions in Sacramento and Washington DC, the hoped for State and federal subventions are by no means assured.

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Back in 1985 AC Transit racked up an average of 245,000 unlinked trips (one-way riders) per weekday. By 2000 this average ridership had dropped to 225,000 riders a day. By 2019 the ridership had dropped again, this time to 182,000 riders a day. And then COVID hit. By 2021, the latest year for which the National Transit Database shows data, AC’s average ridership came in at just 65,000 one-way riders per weekday.

The AC Staff and Board of Directors have set out several times to make changes designed to attract more riders to its system. It’s now trying again, with an ambitious plan to respond to rider, and we hope also non-rider, needs.

On July 26, 2023 the Staff and its consultant reported on the status of this latest effort to the AC Board of Directors. It was an effective presentation and included several interesting revelations, followed by some very apt responses from the AC Transit Board.

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Why would anyone ask such a question? It seems obvious that the purpose of a commuter rail system is to carry passengers.

Yet the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit District’s (SMART’s) application for $468 million in State of California funding to extend its rail line north from Windsor to Cloverdale says absolutely nothing about ridership. SMART’s 118-page application for funding from the California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program includes details about the proposed rail extension, as well as a new bike/pedestrian pathway along the rail alignment but says nothing about the degree to which its new rail extension would be used.

SMART commenced commuter rail service between Santa Rosa and San Rafael in August 2017. Its cumulative (capital plus operating) expenditures between that date and June of 2022 were over $1.11 billion. The most recently published data, for FY21-22, shows over $78 in operating expense for every one way passenger trip, with only $3.61 of that expense paid for by the passenger, leaving the other $74.39 per trip for the tax payer to pay.

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Sent to Columnist Gary Richards and published in the San Jose Mercury:

Dear Mr. Richards,

A couple of your readers are a little mixed up about the Caltrain extension to the Salesforce Transit Center. In 1999, 69.3% of the San Francisco voters voted for Proposition H approving this extension to downtown San Francisco. The cost of getting the trains up and running into the waiting Salesforce Transit Center was recently reported as being $5 billion, a significant portion of which has already been raised from San Francisco, regional and State sources.

Unfortunately, a handful of greenhorn planners in the San Francisco Department of City Planning have for years been trying to slip their proposed but unvoted-upon $3 billion Pennsylvania Avenue subway quietly under the umbrella of the Caltrain extension project. If this uniquely ill-conceived “add-on” were ever built, it would become the single most expensive grade-separation in the entire world. There is no reason for creating two to three miles of subway 100 feet west of the at-grade tracks where Caltrain currently operates. Given the fact that these tracks north of Potrero Hill are appropriately located directly under the massive I-280 freeway viaduct, the tracks and trains blight nothing. The 16th Street/ railroad grade crossing is troublesome, but it could be eliminated by depressing a short section of 16th Street for as little as five percent the cost of the subway.

The Caltrain budget for FY2024 and FY2025 was adopted by the Board on June 1, 2023. The FY2024 budget shows Caltrain’s average daily ridership as increasing from today’s roughly 18,600 riders per weekday to a projected 28,300 average riders a weekday in 2024. We regard this projection to be unrealistic.

Despite the fact that only 92 Caltrain trains per weekday operated pre-pandemic, at a time when Caltrain’s ridership was almost four times what it currently is, the Budget shows Caltrain as continuing to run 104 trains per weekday in FY2024. In part because of this increase in the size of the operation, the FY2024 budget shows operating expenses as increasing by 6.7% and administrative expenses by 21% over the FY2023 level.

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On March 21^st 2023 the San Jose Mercury’s Eliyahu Kamisher provided important new information about the VTA’s grotesquely ill-conceived BART Phase II extension, the projected cost of which has increased from $4.8 billion in February 2018 to today’s astounding $9.5 billion.

Unfortunately, the VTA’s ridership forecasts have proven to be no more accurate than its cost estimates. Back when the BART extension was first being promoted zealots were projecting 70,000 riders a day or more by 2040. The VTA later reduced these rosy early projections to a total of 54,600 riders a day at the four Phase II stations. On April 14th the San Jose Mercury reported that a new federally-mandated forecast had dropped the projected 2040 ridership by another 40% to just 32,900 riders a day.

If this latest ridership estimate is accurate, it would mean that under no circumstances could a project cost of anything close to $9.5 billion be justified.