California is on the brink of a transportation nightmare

Will California leaders follow New York’s lead and fund transit? Or will the Golden State give up on urbanism?

Is this the smoggy future California wants?

Update 6/28/23: The legislature and Governor Newsom have agreed to a budget that includes $1.1 billion in new funding for transit operations, and makes $4 billion in capital funds usable for operations. It’s not everything that transit agencies asked for, but it will prevent serious service cuts in the immediate term. Meanwhile, Sen. Wiener and other members of the Bay Area legislative delegation have proposed a bill that would increase Bay Area Bridge tolls, not including the Golden Gate Bridge, by $1.50 for five years to provide an additional transit funding source.

What would New York City be without quality subway, bus and commuter rail service? 

The city would seize up and cease to function. Millions would be effectively stranded, unable to get to work or carry out their social lives. Remember “Escape from New York”? A transit-starved Big Apple would look something like that — and without a stoic and sassy Kurt Russell to save the day.  

To avoid such a fate, New York governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature passed a multi-billion dollar transit rescue package last month, which will not only keep transit financially stable but will actually increase service on a dozen subway lines. Notably, the plan also includes nearly $1 billion for transit operations outside of New York City. The package drew strong praise from transit advocates — not the easiest bunch to please — who say that New York’s transit system “is now poised for a robust revival.” 

Across the country, in California, the mood could not be more different. This past weekend, advocates in San Francisco held a theatrical “funeral for public transit”, where mourners wept over a BART-shaped coffin. Without aid from the state, transit systems in California face an apocalyptic future that could include the end of weekend BART service, permanently closed stations, and dozens of canceled bus lines statewide. 

Pressure is mounting on Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature to address transit agencies’ fiscal cliffs before the June 15 budget deadline. Transit in California may yet be saved. But no matter what happens, state leaders' reluctance to support transit has been very revealing. 

It’s easy, in a blue state like California, to support transit in the abstract. But it’s clear that many political leaders don’t really understand how important transit is for the basic functioning of cities. Without transit, the economic, cultural, and social life of cities would be impossible. Wherever large numbers of people gather — 9-5 downtowns, sports stadiums, theaters, shopping districts, or any neighborhood lacking the parking and road capacity for everyone to get around by car — transit is a necessity. 

But transportation has been a secondary concern during the political debate around California transit agencies’ fiscal cliff. Instead, key state legislators like Assembly Budget Chair Phil Ting and state Senator Steve Glazer have used this moment to focus on public safety and transit governance. These are both legitimate issues. Perceptions of safety on transit are at historic lows, largely due to a homelessness and drug crisis that transit agencies did not create but are now tasked with solving. Transit governance is a problem too — the Bay Area has an absurd tangle of 27 transit agencies that offer redundant services and fail to coordinate on long-term planning. BART may have some labor and management issues as well, leading to the recent resignation of the agency’s inspector general. BART and other transit agencies could, in theory, have done a better job managing their federal government stimulus dollars and winning back riders, though there was no precedent or playbook for what they went through. 

None of these issues will be solved by letting California’s transit agencies wither to a husk, as some pundits have suggested. In fact, New York City’s MTA is dealing with the same issues — public safety paranoia and governance issues — yet its solution was to double down on improving transit service. It’s a both/and approach: Boosted transit funding will come, in part, from $400 million in “operating efficiencies”, which could come by way of reduced staffing. New York City Mayor Eric Adams flooded the subway system with police in response to safety concerns, but not at the expense of transit service.  

Transit funding in New York state and California are quite different. New York state has historically funded a large percent of the MTA, whereas BART and Caltrain, in particular, are heavily reliant on rider fares. (LA Metro and many smaller California transit agencies have more diversified funding sources from local taxes; SFMTA is somewhere in the middle.) For a long time, BART and Caltrain were national models; transit agencies that, to a large extent, paid for themselves. With the pandemic-era ridership plunge, that virtue became a liability, and now Bay Area transit agencies are looking for a funding mix more like New York’s, at least until the region can pass a new transit funding measure. 

Unlike New York, which has a budget surplus, California is facing a $31.5 billion budget deficit, which requires “balancing different priorities,” Newsom has said. But state Senator Scott Wiener’s $5 billion plan for saving transit would only require a $200 million infusion from the general fund, and mostly draws on existing sources like federal highway dollars and cap and trade funds. So far, the legislature’s only concession has been to restore $2 billion previously cut from transit construction projects and earmark them for transit operations. That money would help prevent some cuts to transit, but it would delay big projects like the downtown extension of Caltrain into the Salesforce Transit Center and BART to San Jose, leaving up to $6 billion in matching federal funds on the table. 

Potential transit service cuts without state support. (Courtesy of SPUR)

San Francisco wouldn’t be as harmed by a major reduction in transit service as New York City would be. Most transit riders in the Bay Area are “choice riders” who also own cars. But a significant percentage of people, mostly very low-income people, are completely transit-dependent, and would be utterly screwed over by cuts to transit service. 

As Wiener has pointed out, high-quality transit is at the core of so many of the state’s goals: building more housing without further sprawl, fighting climate change, reviving downtowns. There would be no more effective way to tank the city’s already fragile economy than by ending weekend and night time BART service.  Imagine how much emptier and scarier downtown would be; how much more congested the Bay Bridge would become; how many empty seats there would be at shows and concerts and games.  

This is an inflection point for California that goes beyond transit itself. At stake is the sincerity of California’s policy commitments. Does California really believe in the more urban future it has sketched out for itself in so many pledges and plans? Or has it remained wedded to its sprawling, car-obsessed identity all along? We’re about to find out.