I'd say the BART administrators overpaying themselves is the bigger moneysink. Not to mention the spending 73M dollars to overhaul the gates to stop fare evaders, when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
The problem is that the Bay Area needs a single transit agency. All the agencies fighting each other for funding doesn’t help. It’s a much easier task to levy a minuscule tax on the entire region that pays for free public transit. If BART wants to do that at the moment, they can’t.
I live in an area with a county-wide transit sales tax, and it just seems to result in them running a lot of empty buses around and building (and eventually abandoning) transit centres. Full price is $1.50 (which if paying cash means fiddling around with coins) except for the 50+ mile express routes which are $2.50.
Well you could be in the Bay Area where you’d have 27 agencies, that still run a lot of empty routes and build useless and expensive transit centers, and then charge way more than what you have.
They also need to get the roads, busses and ferries on board with this plan.
The goal (by law) should be twofold:
1) increase the number of people with a 90th percentile commute under 15, 30 and 60 minutes. (i.e., improve quality of life and encourage economic growth)
2) sharply reduce the average CO2-equivalent emissions of each commuter.
The current statewide policy (by law) is to reduce commute miles.
In practice, this means intentionally sabotaging commute corridors, which slows economic growth (fewer available workers and fewer reachable jobs) reduces quality of life and increases CO2 emissions (due to repeated idling and hard acceleration).
Bay Area has 27 transit agencies and MTC has limited control over them beyond dictating how the state funds are allocated. Thats not what I’m talking about. What I’m suggesting is that the 27 agencies be one agency operationally and get funded as such. You’ll have much better outcomes.
MTC is not just concerned with allocating state funds, though. They administer RM2 and RM3 and the AB1107 sales tax, and they put on a trench coat to act at BATA collecting and using bridge tolls.
But unless MTC is concerned with the operations, you cannot have decent outcomes. If BART has an over reliance on fare but MUNI doesn’t, a single agency would be better able to balance the budget. Similarly if one agency is spending more of the state funding on creating new routes while other is spending more on creating more frequent service on existing routes, MTC won’t be able to direct what needs to happen. If BART is running more often, but the bus I take to the BART station just cut service, I’m not taking BART anymore.
Point of a single agency is not just to collect taxes. It is to make sure there are better outcomes, so that when you do need more taxes to fund public transit, you don’t get the pushback from the public.
I guess I just don't believe in your thesis that larger scale leads to better outcomes. Wouldn't we just end up with Caltrans Lite Edition, spending all the money on car junk? BART already has this problem, with two elected directors who are more likely the chew off their own legs than to ever ride BART.
> when it SHOULD just be free for bay area residents.
There was a study done on this. It turns out that the median income of someone riding under the Bay Bridge in BART is higher than someone driving a car across it.
In other words the wealthier people are using BART. So if you made it free, you'd be subsidizing the wealthy.
That’s a very wrong conclusion to draw from the study. If median income of someone riding the bart is higher than someone driving, it could also mean that they drive because it is cheaper to do so. If you make it free, they would probably ride BART too, making it more accessible and equitable.
The study was more in depth than that. It found that BART goes to more places that wealthy people go (financial district, SOMA, etc) than where poorer people need to go.
That makes perfect sense. Poor people are attracted to cheaper real estate (residential and commercially). Real estate is cheaper because it is less accessible and convenient.
One area is concentrated and the other is decentralized.
So, force the rich people to use the bridge, and increase commute times for everyone?
Seems like a much better plan than synchronizing and expanding the train networks so they cover more neighborhoods in all parts of the bay (except Marin, of course…)
Please forgive me for the ignorance, but is there some significance of “under the bay bridge” for this study, or did they just pick it arbitrarily? It seems like picking a point arbitrarily like that could introduce some skews.
I'm pretty sure it's just being used as a turn of phrase here. Under the bridge means commuters are riding BART, over the bridge means they're driving.
Yes, let's ignore all data saying that it being free would make everything worse and not address any of your concerns about the environment or helping poor people.
I think there should be options for low income residents to ride for free or heavily discounted rates (which exists now). But it's all about implementation: simply letting anyone jump on turns the system into a madhouse. Making sure everyone pays (even if through a government issued pass) and works with the system helps balance equity considerations with maintaining safety and cleanliness.
The price is not the barrier for most people using transit. The service reliability and availability is more important. Would you rather pay fare for frequent bus or wait around for free fares?
Why not? Could you not make a pretty strong argument that avoided negative externalities (CO2 and air pollution from car engines and tires) make public transport worthwhile by itself, and just fund transport by taxing those (gas/cars)?
Saves you all the infrastructure for billing/access control and some enforcement, too.
1) it’s a funding source for transit agencies which are already facing shortfalls and at the mercy of voters for any tax increases or bonds.
2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
If you live in a region of the world that doesn’t have these issues, great, do what you want. We’re talking about the Bay Area specifically, and the thing keeping BART ridership down is that people don’t want to ride BART because it sucks. The actual service is mostly fine. The issue lies in the people.
I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay. In the years prior to the new fare gates being installed, I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
>we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it ...
Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.
>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.
Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.
Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
>2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.
These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.
> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.
I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
Contrary to the popular belief, more ridership makes it more safe and less dangerous. Pretending that a fee excludes the less desirable is laughable. Plenty of people that you describe, ride the trains even now, they just don’t pay the fee. By adding the fee you’re mostly excluding the people who would ride it if it were free: law abiding people who work hard to provide for their families, but can’t afford the fee.
And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.
We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
Because capitalistic incentives work. More riders = more money => incentive to get more riders. More riders = more cost/hassle => incentive to have fewer riders.