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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By now everyone who reads a newspaper or listens to a radio knows that major transit agencies across the nation are heading toward a “fiscal cliff”

Large Bay Area public transit operators like BART, SFMTA, SCVTA, AC Transit, Caltrain, SamTrans and Golden Gate Transit have seen their riderships and fare revenues drop precipitously while operating costs increase and tax revenue sources dry up.

If a private business operating in a competitive environment were faced with this situation it would be required to find ways of raising revenues and/or cutting costs, or facing the prospect of having to close its doors. With a public agency, things are different. When a large bureaucracy is faced with the same problem it seldom looks very hard if at all for cost-cutting opportunities. Instead, there is a strong tendency on the part of most agencies, backed by labor interests, business groups, and other advocates, to sit and bewail the situation while demanding more tax money from other levels of government.

In any event, transit has fallen on hard times and the question is what to do about it.

Need for Better and More Prudent Cost Control:  Transit provides an important public service and for this reason needs and deserves taxpayer support. But that’s not the whole story. There is also a need for the transit agencies themselves to look for opportunities to increase their farebox revenues and reduce their administrative and operating costs. As things stand, transit agencies and their Boards of Directors focus too much on “new or additional revenue sources” and not enough on improving existing service, cost-effectiveness, controlling operating and administrative expenses and sound management. But what used to be tolerated may no longer be. Given the State of California’s $31.5 billion deficit and the even greater national fiscal woe, the hoped for State and federal bailouts may not materialize. If so agencies that fail to streamline their operations may be putting themselves at substantial risk.

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