Why Bay Area Transit Sucks: BART Funding

Part 1 in a series on the shortcomings of Bay Area public transit.

BART faces a $300 million annual deficit which is approximately 30% of BART’s usual operating budget. Federal bailout money kept Bay Area’s public transit afloat when ridership tanked during the pandemic. Ridership has since gradually returned but BART’s inability to get ridership back up to its regular 400,000 due to remote work by year’s end will doom the system.

Public transit agencies need an infusion of $5 billion from the state over the next five years for transit to properly accommodate returning ridership. Its importance is underscored by California being on track to miss its greenhouse gas reduction target, due to the insufficient transition drivers onto mass transit as 38% of the state’s CO2 comes from transportation

After years of a state budget surplus, inflation has cut down on capital gains revenue and put the state in a deficit. Governor Newsom proposed cutting $2 billion from public transit which would’ve forced Bay Area transit agencies to close stations and end weekend service altogether by year’s end. Thanks to the courageous and exhausting work of Bay Area public transit activists staging public demonstrations and lobbying every newspaper and politician they can, those cuts have been averted.

Led by Scott Wiener (D) of San Francisco who sounded a statewide alarm over transit, legislators announced a new budget deal that gives California public transit $1.1 billion in cap-and-trade funds over the next three years. The $1.1 billion will keep agencies running at post-pandemic capacity and avert mass service cuts but the larger issue of transit funding decline has yet to be resolved.

Battling the legislature for funding was excruciatingly exhausting for advocates. The stubbornness of certain legislators and the governor in refusing to help transit, which as the BART strike of 2013 and subsequent economic slowdown showed is the lifeblood of San Francisco’s economy, was unnecessarily hard. It was an unusual battle because public transit’s most prominent antagonist in the budget negotiations was also from San Francisco, assemblymember and budget chair Phil Ting (D). It was an unusual opposition as Ting, second only to Assemblyman Matt Haney, represents the most transit riders in the state.

He complained that BART and Muni had become increasingly unsafe, unreliable and uncoordinated and didn’t need funding without more oversight and restrictions. But while Ting’s nonsense dichotomy between funding transit and improving transit was absurd, it prompts the common question: why is Bay Area transit so bad? Let’s start with BART.

BART since its inception by the state legislature in 1956 has always gasped desperately for funding, even before the first trains ran in 1972. Between 1956 and 1962, the BART district developed three important mission objectives on funding and fares:

1. That BART would use Bay Area bridge tolls and property taxes to support rapid transit operations. Bridge tolls and transit fares should be coordinated and unified so that BART can always be more financially competitive than the bridges.

2. That BART would always be cheaper than driving and would reduce 2/3rds of Bay Area motorist traffic.

3. That BART’s operation would be fiscally solvent through fares despite external subsidies.

Note that after World War 2, the Golden Gate Bridge and the California Toll Authority (Bay Bridge) was created with the stated intent of using their toll revenue to help subsidize future transbay transit lines. As promised, the California Toll Authority issued initial funds for the BART district in 1959 and did fund much of the underwater BART transbay tube.

But the bridge authorities only supported BART and the transbay tube because they wanted to get the streetcar tracks off the Bay Bridge and make them into car lanes. Once the streetcars died and were removed, the bridge toll authorities didn’t support or move on any initiatives to coordinate with BART. The Golden Gate Bridge toll authority was outright hostile to BART for threatening to take its toll revenue. The bridge authority orchestrated the death of BART to Marin by swaying enough political opinion against BART with borderline fraudulent safety engineering studies about BART trains.

By the mid-’60s, property taxes were the only dedicated tax that BART managed to secure, which was primarily about bond financing than train operations. Thus, BART faced a major budgetary deficit by 1967 since the initial $800 million bond voters approved in 1960 had been fully dedicated or spent before construction could be finished. 

Bay Area legislators attempted to fund BART by dedicating bridge toll revenue in addition to vehicle registration fees and gas taxes. But rural and suburban legislators didn’t want BART to impede on the future of automobiles and opposed any measures to fund BART through automobile-adjacent taxes or freeway funding. Pro-car legislators successfully killed every attempt by urban Bay Area legislators from 1959 to 1968 at raising and dedicating bridge tolls to BART.

Despite 53% of Bay Area residents supporting bridge toll hikes for BART vs. 34% supporting sales taxes, Governor Ronald Reagan and the Senate opposed taxation on cars. BART was eventually saved as the state legislature agreed on an unpopular and temporary sales tax, but this was the failure of BART’s first principle of siphoning and coordinating bridge tolls with BART fares as a consistent revenue source.

But having lost the battle, BART decided to piggyback off overly funded freeways by reconfiguring its construction of Contra Costa, southeast San Francisco and North Oakland lines into the middle of freeway medians. This would curtail ridership even further as freeways were built far away from towns in the suburbs and made walking to transit stations in Oakland harder.

BART was predicted to be a system that would pay for itself through fares, but when BART service was launched in 1972, the Bay Area was quickly disillusioned. BART was just like every other transit system in the United States. Even in the original TV broadcasts and newspaper reportings of BART’s opening, East Bay college students complained that the BART fares weren’t competitive over driving. The fare revenue estimates were based on BART reducing 2/3rds of vehicle traffic in a 9-county system, but politics had shrunk BART to just a commuter train between S.F. and the East Bay.

By 1980, BART had only removed about 35% of car-commute traffic, and as the Bay Area population growth rapidly sprawled outwards beyond BART’s reach, that ratio shrank over time. By 1976, BART was projecting a budget deficit of over $100 million and the dream of a self-funded transit system was dead.

Today the Bay Area is a regional mess of 27 transit agencies and growing. Many of them arbitrarily overlap with each other in continuous urbanized areas and compete with each other for funding. When transferring from one system to another, neither can offer free transfers as the agencies don’t share funding. Consequently, if ignoring car premiums and insurance, everyday driving will often be cheaper than transit in the Bay Area except for when crossing the Bay Bridge into San Francisco.

Rather than making unnecessary transit districts, the legislature should have amalgamated and dissolved all Bay Area transit agencies and toll bridges into a single BART district in 1957. Ideally only one agency would administer transit and control key choke-points for car travel. The legislature can still do this and should. This is how LA Metro works which is why LA is rapidly developing new subways, streetcars and bus lanes at a pace much faster than the Bay Area. 

But instead, to this day, additional transit district after transit district with all its unnecessary redundancy and bureaucracy is made thanks to the disjointed county lines of the Bay Area. It’s completely unnecessary but politically easy. Sadly, it will never be cheaper to ride transit over driving if crossing from the East Bay to the South Bay requires almost $10 in fares one-way and two transfers between three agencies.

While today bridge tolls are often raised to fund BART construction projects, the lack of more dedicated revenues like tolls for operating day-to-day operations means BART constantly wades into deficits and begs voters for bailouts with ballot propositions. BART’s saving grace is that regional population growth, high parking fees and aggressive parking enforcement in downtown San Francisco makes BART’s transbay service extremely competitive over driving. 

Freeways, no matter how little or how much traffic they get, no matter how many shootings they have and how many crimes occur on them, will always receive reliable funding from the legislature. That is the primary problem BART faces.

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