Borenstein: Why Newsom’s Bay Area transit bailout will likely fail

When Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature agreed on a $5.1 billion statewide package to bail out public-transit systems, they missed an opportunity in the Bay Area to impose meaningful reform on wasteful spending and a confusing web of 27 transit agencies.

The region needs a functioning, fiscally responsible and coordinated transit system to help unclog freeways and reduce carbon emissions. Clearly what we have now is not working. Traveling by bus, train or ferry involves struggling with a confusing maze of agencies, schedules, uncoordinated connections and differing fare structures.

Transit was used for only 12% of all commute trips in 2018, while 75% used cars. That was before the pandemic struck and transit patronage plummeted.

Meanwhile, Bay Area residents pay dearly through taxes, tolls and fares for transit agencies that have some of the proportionately highest administrative expenses in the country and costliest and slowest capital projects.

Rather than directly address these problems, the new bailout plan from Sacramento doubles down on an oversight commission that has failed since its establishment in 1970 to fulfill its state-mandated responsibility to coordinate the region’s transit systems.

Allocation of the Bay Area’s approximately $1.2 billion share of the bailout money over the next three years will depend largely on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Unfortunately, the 21 MTC commissioners, mostly local elected officials through which state and federal transit money usually passes, repeatedly have proven themselves most concerned with raising taxes and getting their local communities a cut of the revenue pie, rather than prioritizing the region’s needs.

The commissioners have for decades shown little to no interest in standing up to the individual transit agencies’ demands, pressing for elimination of service duplication, coordination between transit systems, reduction of overlapping bureaucracies or pushing back on inefficient and excessive labor contracts.

Yet, MTC will be key to determining whether the conditions for receiving the transit bailout money are a catalyst for change or a perpetuation of business as usual.

The terms of last month’s deal, never publicly vetted before the agreement was reached, require MTC to submit to the state three financial plans over the next three years.

Ultimately, it will be up to the California State Transportation Agency to approve the spending plans. Unless the agency, led by Newsom’s transportation secretary, Toks Omishakin, holds MTC’s feet to the fire, and MTC in turn does the same to the transit agencies, we will likely emerge from the bailout period with continued instability in Bay Area transit.

The governor claims the spending-plan requirements, what he calls “accountability measures,” in the agreement will “ensure that transit systems stabilize their programs and retool their long-term operations to better align with the needs of the public.”

What exactly that means in practice is not clear. The criteria in the bill that spells out the terms of the deal are vague and at times seemingly contradictory. This is hardly a clear mandate.

On one hand, MTC’s short-term spending plans must show how they will “mitigate service cuts, fare increases or layoffs.” That seems to enable, for example, the reckless spending of BART, which responded to plummeting ridership and a $1 billion projected budget shortfall over the next five years by increasing spending, hiring more workers and running more trains

On the other hand, the bill requires the commission to submit data showing “opportunities for service restructuring, eliminating service redundancies, and improving coordination amongst transit operators” such as “consolidation of agencies or reevaluation of network management and governance structure.”

That could be an opening for needed change. But it’s doubtful MTC is up to the task.

For years, commissioners have talked about implementing coordinated and integrated fares for the 27 agencies, real-time departure information at transit stops and priority for buses on city streets. But MTC has never made even that happen.

It’s long past time for MTC to question why BART and AC Transit run overlapping transbay service, the suburban East Bay has four different local bus systems, or the South Bay is served by four different transit agencies.

Then there’s the governance issue raised in the bailout bill. In 2021, the transit rider-driven group Seamless Bay Area provided a vision for integration and unified management of the region’s transportation systems.

After examining governing structures around the nation and the world, Seamless called for creation of a Bay Area regional agency run by a 15-member, appointed board of transit experts with a mandate and resources to coordinate the systems into a cohesive, easy-to-use network.

It’s time to dust off the plan and give it serious consideration. But it’s hard to imagine that MTC, which has failed for over half a century to coordinate Bay Area transit, would be able to even consider meaningful governance reform.

Indeed, unless MTC suddenly develops a backbone and sense of urgency, the bailout bill will merely serve to enable and perpetuate the current labyrinth of transit inefficiency.