In a key decision on April 20, the Oakland City Council unanimously approved Oakland’s segment of the LPA, which comprises the great majority of the full BRT route.  Oakland’s LPA includes dedicated median transitways on Telegraph Avenue (south of the Berkeley city limit to 20th Street) and on East 14th Street (south of 14th Avenue to the San Leandro city limit), with some shared and mixed flow lanes in Eastlake and along Broadway in downtown Oakland.

On May 17, the San Leandro City Council also approved its own segment of the project LPA.  The San Leandro LPA  proceeds south of the Oakland city limit, featuring dedicated lanes and station platforms in the median of East 14th Street as far south as Sunnyside Drive, where it transitions to mixed curbside operation for the southernmost segment of the route, then terminating at San Leandro BART station.

Berkeley, naturally, went its own direction.  On April 29, the Berkeley City Council fell short of endorsing the build alternative in Berkeley.  With Councilmember Max Anderson absent from that meeting, the resolution failed as 4 pro-BRT votes were matched by 2 votes against the project and 2 abstentions.  Berkeley’s rejection of full-build was accompanied by adoption of a diluted LPA, which discards the dedicated transit lanes and replaces them with mixed curbside operation and potential queue jump lanes.  The lack of dedicated lanes, when taken in combination with other proposed non-BRT changes (mainly converting one-way streets near the University campus to two-way operation), could transform the Berkeley portion of the route into a slow, unreliable northern appendage — hampering reliability on the rest of the line, despite dedicated facilities in Oakland and San Leandro.

This split of support among the three cities — exacerbated by the revelation that AC Transit might eliminate 1R rapid bus service north of downtown Oakland to close its current budget deficit — created fresh concern about what the next step should be for BRT.  Despite staff including 1R truncation as one potential measure to address the budget, AC Transit prefers to preserve the full 1R route.  Still: would Berkeley’s refusal to accept dedicated lanes accordingly deprive Temescal and North Oakland of the transit, pedestrian, and bicycle improvements that would accompany the full-build BRT?  Would AC Transit instead reduce the scope of the BRT project by cutting it off at MacArthur BART, or even downtown Oakland?

There has been an encouraging and re-energizing development this week.  Berkeley Councilmember Anderson, who was not present at the April 29 meeting, has indicated that he would support full BRT.  Councilmember Arreguín, who abstained on April 29, has also indicated that he would support full BRT.  If so, the 4-4 vote on April 29 would become a 6-3 vote endorsing BRT.  The agenda has not yet been set as of the time of this writing, but the current plan is for Berkeley to revisit BRT at its June 22 meeting.

The AC Transit Board of Directors intended to adopt an LPA for the whole project on June 9, incorporating the local preferences of the three cities.  However, the Board continued the item and delayed its decision on BRT until June 23, just one day after the Berkeley meeting.  This will give the Berkeley City Council an opportunity to reverse its prior decision.  The way forward is not crystal clear if that vote gets delayed, or if Berkeley insists on substantial changes, but the process should be straightforward if Berkeley promptly approves the build alternative on June 22.

BRT will be a stronger, more reliable, and more heavily patronized project if it includes dedicated transit facilities in all three cities.  The Berkeley Councilmembers are encouraged to join their colleagues in Oakland and San Leandro by approving the build alternative.

But AC Transit had originally planned to execute a 15% system-wide service cut.  In a revision to its original service adjustment plan, AC Transit temporarily “restored” many of those proposed cuts while undergoing negotiations concerning funding for the BRT project.  So the District must now go back to the chopping block to eliminate 182,000 platform hours of service each year, in order to save about $11.5 million.  If these reductions are implemented as planned, the resulting level of service would be the lowest that AC Transit has provided in a generation.  Indeed, the proposals that are now on the table are all too reminiscent of the significant service cuts that AC Transit made in the 1990s.

Having already taken advantage of many key opportunities to realize savings through means of increasing efficiency, AC Transit is now placed in the difficult position of making more undesirable cuts to lifeline service.  AC Transit planning staff is currently considering three strategies moving forward:

• Reduce weekend service. This proposal seeks to preserve weekday service at the expense of the least utilized weekend service.  Under this proposal, only the most popular routes would operate on weekends.  The routes that would continue to operate on weekends are: 1, 18, 20, 22, 40, 51A, 51B, 57, 60, 72, 72M, 73, 88, 97, 99, 210, and 217.  Other routes would operate only on weekdays.
• Reduce All-Nighter Service. AC Transit already offers skeletal owl service (lines 800, 801, 802, 805, 840, and 851) along its most productive corridors.  This strategy could do one of two things: (i) eliminate all but routes 800 and 801, which mirror corresponding BART corridors and receive funding through Regional Measure 2; or (ii) preserve existing All-Nighter routes, but reduce service on other routes after 10:00 p.m.
• System-wide reduction. This proposal would proportionately reduce both weekday and weekend service throughout the system by about 8%.

AC Transit will not make all these reductions, nor will it necessarily adopt one strategy to the exclusion of the others.  Rather, service planners have indicated that there is considerable flexibility in selecting the specific proposals that move forward in this process, as long as the necessary savings are realized.  Strategic, fine-grained analysis informed by public commentary and real data will be necessary to make the right combination of changes that minimize hardship to riders.

Nonetheless, depending on the proposals that are ultimately adopted, the service changes will make life more difficult for those who depend on transit, particularly those who rely on off-peak and owl service to get to work.  It will be all the more difficult to live in the East Bay without a car.

The proposed reductions to weekend service (strategy #1) and night-time service (strategy #2) hit especially hard.  Minor lines might be considerably less productive than trunk routes, but they are lifelines for those that they serve.  They are important to the success of an urban transit system because they fill out the grid and connect to trunk routes. At the same time, though, it also makes sense to isolate trunk routes from serious cuts, in order to diminish the overall impact and ensure that robust services remain successful.  It’s a delicate balancing act.  Still, given that completely depriving swathes of the inner East Bay of all-night transit service — including important corridors like Broadway, San Pablo Avenue, and MacArthur — is so serious a proposition, it may make sense to instead spread the pain, by judiciously reducing other off-peak service to a level commensurate with demonstrated demand.

The system-wide proportionate reductions (strategy #3) generally either reduce frequency, or narrow the time span of operation of various lines.  A few lines would run on weekdays only, and a handful could be eliminated altogether, including new service that was introduced in the package of March 2010 changes.  There would, however, only be minor changes to Transbay service, since the Transbay lines already suffered an almost 17% cut in the last round.

Given that so many routes have already been redrawn recently, not many map changes are proposed.  The most significant restructuring of routes could occur in Oakland, in part by splitting service on the planned BRT corridor (Telegraph/East 14th Street).  One proposal realigns line 40 service back to Telegraph Avenue and isolates the 1/1R to its most productive segment (East 14th Street, between downtown Oakland and San Leandro).  The 1R would retreat to San Leandro BART, thus abandoning the southernmost segment of the route; only the 1 would run all the way to Bayfair.  Another proposal discontinues parallel service south of 73rd Avenue.  A new line 90 would operate between Eastmont and San Leandro BART via Bancroft, but the southern termini of both the 40 and the NL would retreat to Eastmont.

It bears repeating that AC Transit will not be making all of the above changes.  But the agency must now determine which changes will have the least adverse impact to riders, while still making the necessary reduction of 182,000 platform hours.  Regular riders are strongly encouraged to stay on top of this process and offer commentary, so that AC Transit is armed with the information it needs to make wise changes.  The schedule for putting these changes into effect will be relatively fast-paced.  A public hearing will be held in just one month, on May 26, and the service changes are planned to go into effect on August 22, 2010.

Included in the transit funding are the New and Small Starts grants, which set aside a total of over $1.8 billion for capital investments in transit around the nation. The bulk of the New Starts funding is proposed for major transit projects outside of California.  Three major projects serving New York City (Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access, and ARC) are allocated $612 million.  Other allocations include those for Salt Lake City projects ($180 million), Houston projects ($150 million), Denver projects ($120 million), Seattle University Link ($110 million), Dulles Metrorail ($96 million), Dallas Northwest/Southeast light rail ($86 million), Honolulu Rail Transit project ($55 million), Hartford busway ($45 million), Twin Cities Central Corridor ($45 million), and Orlando’s Central Florida Commuter Rail project ($40 million).  A total of $200 million of Small Starts funding is also included for distribution to several other projects, mostly bus rapid transit.

Although the Bay Area was not in a position this year to receive as much funding as some other parts of the country, the budget nonetheless recommends $50 million for use on three major Bay Area transit projects.  The Central Subway, Van Ness BRT, and East Bay BRT are all considered by FTA to be priorities for funding:

• Central Subway: The $20 million New Starts sum in this budget is a small portion of roughly $950 million in federal funding that the Central Subway is ultimately slated to receive, amounting to 60% of the $1.57 billion project cost.
• Van Ness BRT: The $15 million sum in this budget is a partial allocation of up to $75 million Small Starts for which this BRT corridor would be eligible, assuming that San Francisco opts to construct one of the two serious center lane BRT alternatives (rather than side lane BRT, which would be cheaper to build but would provide only diluted transit benefits).  The maximum $75 million federal contribution would represent 57-63% of the total capital cost of $118-132 million.
• East Bay BRT: The $15 million sum in this budget is a partial allocation of up to $75 million Small Starts for which this BRT corridor would be eligible.  The maximum $75 million federal contribution would represent about one-third of the total capital cost of $235 million.  The exact status of the project is uncertain, in light of a requested swap for operations money. Nonetheless, AC Transit continues to move forward with environmental work and has not abandoned the project.  A match of local funding has also been retained for the time being, so it is good to see that FTA has prioritized this BRT corridor.

An initial set of meetings will be held in San Leandro over the next couple of weeks. The first meeting is tonight, and there will be two additional meetings, on the evening of October 27, and the morning of November 7. The focus of these meetings is how BRT will operate on the southernmost segment of the route, in San Leandro along East 14th Street, between the Oakland city limit and the Bayfair BART station. AC Transit, plus all three cities along the route, should know that despite the recent funding setback, this project remains an important priority for their constituents who want to see better transit in the East Bay. So these meetings are not only a nice opportunity to learn more details about the project, but are also a key opportunity for advocates to express their support for BRT.

The meeting details:

• Thursday, October 22 – San Leandro Public Library (300 Estudillo Avenue, San Leandro), 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
• Tuesday, October 27 – Bayfair Mall, 2nd floor (15555 East 14th Street, San Leandro), 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
• Saturday, November 7 – City Hall South Office (835 East 14th Street, San Leandro), 10:00 a.m.-12:00 noon

Click here to see the flyer (PDF) with full details, including information about how to win a free AC Transit ticket.

The AC Transit Board of Directors held a meeting to confront head-on the risk that the agency’s current financial crisis poses to its planned 17-mile bus rapid transit (BRT) project, which would extend from downtown Berkeley to San Leandro, via Telegraph Avenue, downtown Oakland, and East 14th Street. The State has postponed allocating an important chunk of funding for BRT, which will delay the project. AC Transit also plans to cut about 15% of its service hours to set right its operating deficit. The agency is thus considering using BRT funds to enhance its operating budget. Doing so would alleviate the pain of service cuts, but it would also put on hold a major regional project that is the centerpiece of AC Transit’s planning vision.

The directors finally decided upon a compromise solution, authorizing some of the money to be redirected toward operations and restore some service that was to be cut. However, they also decided to hold onto another portion of the funding, at least for now. That likely won’t be the end of the story.

The discussion revolves around the two pots of money that AC Transit has considered tapping into. The first pot of money is from the Congestion Mitigation & Air Quality Improvement Program (CMAQ), which is a federal program that provides money for surface transportation projects that improve air quality and reduce congestion. The second pot of money is Regional Measure 2 (RM2), a bridge toll increase authorized by Bay Area voters in 2004, the proceeds of which are spent on transportation projects that have some nexus to improving congestion in a bridge corridor.

AC Transit staff recommended that $35 million of CMAQ funds and $45.6 million of RM2 funds, both slated for the BRT project, be reallocated toward operations. This would provide an additional $80.6 million for operations — preventing layoffs and restoring about half of the service slated to be cut. It is possible for the funds to be reprogrammed from capital to operations, although doing so requires some effort and bureaucratic maneuvering.

CMAQ and RM2: A Smelly Bowl of Alphabet Soup

The CMAQ chunk of money is relatively uncontroversial. There is general agreement that the CMAQ funds should be redirected toward operations, because doing so would give AC Transit access to an additional source of operations money that could lessen the severity of the planned service cuts. The agency was essentially forced to implement these cuts by the State, which left transit operations out in the cold by zeroing out State Transit Assistance (STA) funds from the budget. Redirecting CMAQ funds for operations would require the approval of both MTC and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). There is also the caveat that CMAQ money must be used within a 3-year period, and only for new or expanded service. This means that technically, AC Transit could only use CMAQ money to operate the new routes it has proposed as part of its service adjustment plan; but that would free up more non-CMAQ money to restore service that doesn’t qualify as new or expanded. Thus, if reallocated, the CMAQ money would offset part of the service cuts and reduce hardship to riders who depend on bus service as their lifeline.

Redirecting the RM2 funds is another issue entirely. Earlier in September, Rick Fernandez (AC Transit’s General Manager) contacted MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger, proposing the idea of reprogramming funds. The response from MTC more or less tied together the fate of the CMAQ and RM2 funds: if CMAQ is to be reprogrammed, then so must RM2. This condition was ostensibly issued on the ground that AC Transit should produce an operating plan that is “sustainable” for some length of time, and that redirecting only part of the money would be an insufficient emergency stopgap measure. It was basically this directive that led to the staff recommendation to reprogram both CMAQ and RM2 funds together. Reprogramming RM2 funds would be problematic, however, for a few reasons, beyond just the fact that shifting money around, while technically permitted, nonetheless appears dodgy to voters.

First, there is the “swap” mechanism that would be used to reprogram the money. RM2 money is used for both capital investment and operations, but MTC cannot simply decree that an RM2 capital dollar be switched to an RM2 operating dollar. Rather, AC Transit must undergo a swap with another agency’s project. MTC would facilitate a transfer of AC Transit’s RM2 capital share to another project, and then the agency sponsoring that other project would commit to AC Transit the same amount of operating funds. It was suggested in so many words that the other agency in question here could be BART, and that the swapped capital funds could shore up the dreadful Oakland Airport Connector. (The OAC still has a 20% funding gap, which BART plans to fill using a TIFIA loan from the federal government.) Even if some AC Transit service is restored in the bargain, there would still be something ironically tragic about cannibalizing BRT to build the worst-than-useless airport connector.

Another problem, though, is what shifting RM2 would mean for the BRT project. Reserving this store of money for BRT demonstrates that the Bay Area has made a financial commitment to the project. This strong local match has made the BRT corridor an attractive candidate for federal Small Starts funding, which was planned to supply almost one-third of the $235 million project cost. Rick Fernandez suggested that reprogramming RM2 is not unduly problematic, believing that once AC Transit had that pot of money at its disposal, it could use it for a variety of purposes, including BRT. This is really a red herring, as it’s extremely unlikely that cash-strapped AC Transit would redirect precious operating funds in this fashion. The more likely scenario is that RM2 would simply fund operations, not BRT. To the extent that losing RM2 also means losing out on federal funding, what we have on our hands is an evaporating BRT budget. Work on the environmental document will continue, with an estimated completion date in Spring 2010 — and it’s also possible to reduce the scope of the project, by focusing on the high ridership East 14th Street segment of the route. But withdrawing these critical sources of funding would realistically postpone BRT indefinitely.

Where Things Stand (For Now)

The Board ultimately decided to support the redirecting of CMAQ, but it refused to disturb RM2 for the time being — instead wanting to take a few months to evaluate the issue further and explore other potential sources of funding. In light of how little notice was given to the public about this special meeting, holding off on such a major reprogramming of RM2 funds was the correct decision. Indeed, given the precarious circumstances of this meeting, the Board’s vote here was just about as good as we could hope for at this time, and the directors should be commended for not immediately giving way to MTC’s directive. But the vote also means that this issue remains unresolved. MTC will likely not be pleased to learn that the directors held back on RM2, and we may see another showdown over this issue in the near future to decide the fate of this funding, and the fate of BRT.

But leaving aside alphabet soup for the moment, what’s at stake here? Although San Francisco has as a number of transit corridor projects in the works, the Telegraph/East 14th BRT corridor is the only true transit expansion project in the eastern half of the Bay Area’s urban core. (We omit the Oakland Airport Connector, which, for all intents and purposes, is closer to a toy than true transit.) For an urban area with more than a half million people, which is projected to absorb significant future growth, it will not be sufficient in the long-term for AC Transit to merely grasp onto any straw it can find, in a desperate (and, in this case, unsuccessful) attempt to maintain current service levels. That approach is merely defensive. Indeed, the long-term health and viability of the agency may well depend on its ability to go on the offensive, by delivering more robust service on trunk corridors. That service must be more reliable, faster, and more comfortable than current bus service to entice a significant number of people from their cars. Investing in some form of dedicated transitway will be necessary to eliminate transit delay due to congestion, streamline operating costs, and to ensure livability on the major avenues that are well-suited to absorb higher density.

While many of the public speakers in favor of the funding shift were people from Berkeley who have been vocally opposed to BRT all along (and thus showed a less than good faith interest in preserving transit service), others were transit-dependents who were genuinely worried about how the service cuts would affect their lives. I do not want to discount these concerns. The Board’s support of reprogramming CMAQ while maintaining RM2 for the time being is a good compromise that favors riders, while acknowledging the need to take the time to collect more information. Even if the RM2 money is ultimately diverted to operations as well, at least that decision would theoretically follow a more thorough investigation and public process, rather than being rushed with little public notice.

It is incredibly sad that the State of California’s theft of transit funds has put AC Transit into such a difficult position, pitting the hardship of a disenfranchised ridership against a good project that will attract more people to transit. If we lived in a state and nation that truly recognized the value of good transit — and that put its money where its mouth is on the same — we would not be allocating untold billions of dollars to new freeways, while artificially forcing transit agencies to make the difficult and unfair choice between running current service and setting aside a modest sum of money for future investment.

Install photovoltaic capacity to generate “green” hydrogen: Install multiple PV modules at its Central Maintenance Facility in Hayward. Combined with AC Transit’s already-installed solar capacity, this solar installation will produce the renewable electricity equivalent to what will be required to produce 180 kg/day of “green” hydrogen.

Separately, the FTA also announced that the Central Subway has received a $9.9 million grant, which will the SFMTA will apply toward carrying out further design of the T-Third Street light rail extension from 4th & King, through South of Market to Chinatown. The federal government will ultimately supply roughly $950 million toward this project (about 60% of  the $1.57 billion that is now believed will be the total cost). To date, the Central Subway has received $66 million of federal New Starts funding.

Finally, no hard cash, but some good news, for the Transbay Transit Center. The most recent dispute between the TJPA and the CHSRA about where high-speed rail should terminate in San Francisco may have jeopardized our chance to secure a $400 million high-speed rail discretionary grant to build to the Transbay subway station box, but that is not the only piece of federal funding that the TJPA has sought. Since long before the stimulus plan, the TJPA planned to pursue a Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan as one of many sources of money for the transit center. (The TIFIA loan is the same funding mechanism that BART will use so that it can build everyone’s favorite transit project, the Oakland Airport Connector. This recent post on the OAC is an illustrative cross-reference for those who delight in the minutiae of TIFIA.) Anyway, in October 2008, the TJPA applied for a $171 million TIFIA loan, which would cover a little over 14% of the capital costs for the first phase of this two-phase, $4.2 billion project. And just last week, the Credit Council unanimously recommended approval of the $171 million TIFIA loan. The Secretary of Transportation will produce a term sheet and loan agreement, which the TJPA Board is expected to approve this November.

Regular readers may recall our previous discussion of Transportation 2035, the latest update to MTC’s ongoing efforts on the Regional Transportation Plan. Earlier this year, we wrote a special feature that describes the multifaceted plan, fleshing out how MTC has proposed to allocate $226 billion of local, state, and federal transportation funding that was expected to become available to the Bay Area over the next quarter century. However, changes in the economy and funding climate have necessitated that MTC revise a few aspects of the RTP. The State of California yanked away STA money that funds transit operations; in the Bay Area, this means that local transit operators will lose access to over $55 million that they were relying upon for the remainder of this fiscal year, and no STA funding at all will be provided in upcoming years. Assuming that the state reinstates STA funding in five years, the Bay Area will have lost $1.2 billion of STA and spillover funds in the interim; MTC also projected a $4.5 billion loss in TDA revenue over the 25-year RTP timeline. Another change is VTA’s recent announcement that it can only afford to build the BART extension to San Jose as far as Berryessa Station, postponing the construction of the downtown subway alignment. This, in turn, is connected to the issue of declining transportation sales tax revenue; this is potentially problematic throughout the region, not just in Santa Clara County, although it is not yet clear just how problematic. Considering the new forecasts for transit revenue, the region’s transit operation shortfall will increase from $3.2 to $8.5 billion. This includes a $283 million shortfall for AC Transit, a $442 million shortfall for Golden Gate Transit, a $1.6 billion shortfall for SamTrans, a $1.9 billion shortfall for Muni, and a whopping $3.2 billion shortfall for VTA, which is the worst operation shortfall in the region. Meanwhile, the transit capital shortfall will increase from $16.1 to $17.1 billion. It also takes into consideration that the cost of the BART extension to San Jose has increased from $6.1 billion to $7.6 billion (year of expenditure). Overall, the $226 billion plan has been reduced in size to a $218 billion plan. The plan adds $1.3 billion of revenue: about $280 million in connection with AC Transit’s Measure VV parcel tax, and $1 billion of VTA joint development revenue. It also anticipates $3 billion of funds for high-speed rail, with half coming from Proposition 1A, and the other half coming from the federal stimulus package’s $8 billion allocation to high-speed rail.

Update: For more details about the MTC meeting at which these numbers were revealed, please also see SF Streetsblog’s great write-up.

When Is Transit Service Redundant?

The numbers are grim, and they confirm that properly funding transit in the Bay Area will be a serious issue in the future, as operators struggle to produce a balanced budget each year. But looking beyond the latest set of numbers, the revised RTP does not constitute a substantial change in methodology. It does include a few new recommendations, but we believe that these recommendations — like many aspects of the RTP itself — fall short. In light of the regional shortfalls, MTC says we must investigate “transit sustainability,” carrying the implication that transit service must be cut until it attains a level that is “sustainable.” MTC suggests that such trimming is most natural in places that already enjoy “redundant” transit service. The Bay Area’s approach to transit operation and management has resulted in certain service inefficiencies on the regional level, in that each operator resembles an independent kingdom that cooperates only occasionally and reluctantly with neighboring kingdoms. Some areas receive too little service, while other areas receive more robust service than is arguably necessary. Sometimes, transit services do not quite connect; other times, they awkwardly overlap. At first blush, the idea of regarding the Bay Area’s many transit agencies as components of a larger network, in order to promote efficiency throughout the region, has underlying merit — particularly if it addresses uncoordinated fare policies. Then again, if MTC is so interested in investing money efficiently, then how are we to explain the agency’s longstanding commitment to projects like BART to San Jose and the Oakland Airport Connector? And if MTC is so interested in avoiding redundancy, perhaps it could also have guided us toward a superior regional vision in the first place, instead of scrambling to correct mistakes after the fact when the redundant infrastructure has already been built.

MTC has provided little in the way of precise detail about its regional study — but it did suggest a few initial examples of “redundant” inefficient transit service that it intends to scrutinize. The corridors that the agency has chosen as exemplars of “redundant” service are themselves a cause for concern, in that they either overlook or misunderstand the different roles fulfilled by various transit services. For example, MTC suggests that the Peninsula currently enjoys “redundant” service because SamTrans, Caltrain, and BART all operate in this area. BART and Caltrain between Millbrae and San Francisco do not serve identical corridors, but if you were going to make a redundancy argument on the Peninsula, that would be the place to start. But the purpose and reach of SamTrans bus service should not be perceived as being redundant to BART and Caltrain, which both function as commuter rail on the Peninsula. Even long-distance bus routes that parallel the rail corridors and feed into rail stations carry short haul trips that give those routes a fundamentally different purpose and ridership than the rail corridor they ostensibly duplicate.

MTC also considered the Bay Bridge/Transbay corridor, pointing out that BART, AC Transit’s Transbay buses, and ferries all provide redundant service between San Francisco and the inner East Bay. The Transbay corridor is the highest demand transit corridor in the Bay Area, capturing transit share that well exceeds the regional average. This is not surprising, in light of short headways, and the fact that BART’s Transbay Tube is one of very few places in the Bay Area where a transit trip is legitimately faster than its equivalent trip by automobile. The high demand means that “redundant” service is actually advantageous. We should remark that BART and the Transbay buses are not precisely duplicative, because AC Transit serves many East Bay neighborhoods that are distant from any BART station, thus allowing residents of those neighborhoods to travel to and from San Francisco via transit without driving and without suffering the time and fare penalty associated with transferring to BART. To the extent that BART and AC Transit actually do provide duplicate service in the literal Bay Bridge corridor, the duplicate service is an advantage. AC Transit provides additional seats that supplement BART’s strained capacity at peak commute hours, and many riders actually prefer the bus over BART for its comfort and wireless Internet connection. The services are complementary, rather than competitive. Particularly because the design of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge precludes reintroducing surface rail on the bridge itself, the portfolio of Transbay bus service is one that we would ideally grow, or at least maintain at its current levels — not cut, based on a cursory perception that the service it provides is redundant to BART.

The BART to San Jose Fund

In this sense, MTC’s standard methodology, which prioritizes big-ticket suburban BART extensions above more cost-effective solutions, has not changed. MTC posits that the Bay Area must trim “redundant” transit service. This almost certainly refers to bus routes, which are crucial lifelines for the the transit-dependent — rather than, for instance, underutilized midday BART runs to Pittsburg/Bay Point and Millbrae. One of the great ironies of MTC’s redundancy analysis is that the revised RTP is in part geared toward providing additional funding for BART to San Jose — a project that itself involves constructing grade-separated BART infrastructure that directly duplicates miles of existing standard gauge track through Fremont, Milpitas, and San Jose. Santa Clara County projects a $2 billion shortfall in 2000 Measure A funds. How should this shortfall be filled? The proposal is to use $2 billion of revenue gathered from MTC’s planned network of High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes (click here and scroll down to read more about the HOT network). This is a problematic suggestion on its face, because it is unclear that the HOT lanes will even generate the revenue that MTC has alleged.

Furthermore, applying HOT revenue to fill the Measure A shortfall would constitute a rather startling reversal of policy. MTC itself has articulated an equitable principle that should guide funding choices for HOT revenue: the money that comes from toll lanes in a given corridor should be applied toward transit and other related improvements within that same corridor. For instance, HOT revenues could potentially fund better transit or bicycle/street improvements parallel to the freeway corridor from which those revenues were collected. It could also fill the transit operating shortfalls, which MTC has suggested could be reduced by cutting redundant service. However, many of the HOT lanes planned for Santa Clara County are not in the corridor of the proposed BART extension — for example, the lanes on Highways 85, 87, and 101 (south of Interstate 280 and Downtown San Jose). So there is a danger that HOT lane tolls collected on freeways that are distant from the BART alignment will nonetheless be appropriated in order to deliver the $2 billion necessary to fill the Measure A shortfall, which VTA has devoted primarily to BART. It is not enough, then, that VTA plans to either downscale or indefinitely delay on its promises to construct a full portfolio of transit improvements, all in the name of bringing BART to the South Bay. Now, even HOT revenues — which could nicely supplement efforts to remake the greater Valley into a more transit-oriented place, by investing in local transit and streetscape improvements — have now instead been proposed to shore up Measure A and the BART extension.

MTC has given the public a two-week window in which to comment on its proposed revisions to the Transportation 2035 plan. Comments will be received until 4:00 pm on Thursday, April 8, 2009. You can send a comment via mail to 101 Eighth Street, Oakland, CA 94607, Attn: Public Information; via E-mail to info@mtc.ca.gov; or via fax to 510.817.5848, Attn: Public Information.

Posted in AC Transit, BART, BART to San Jose, Caltrain, Ferries, Freeways, Golden Gate Transit, High-Speed Rail, MTC, Muni / SFMTA, Peninsula, Regional Rail, Regional Transportation Plan, SamTrans, South Bay, Transit Funding, VTA ]]> http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/26/shifting-funds-shifty-priorities/feed/ 8 transbay http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/09/transit-ridership-increases-in-2008/ http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/09/transit-ridership-increases-in-2008/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:39:54 +0000 Eric http://transbayblog.com/?p=3138 ]]> Transit ridership has reached a 52-year high, reports APTA, with 10.7 billion transit trips taken in the year 2008. This represent a 4% increase over 2007, and vehicle miles traveled decreased 3.6% nationwide during the same period of time; it also represents a 38% increase since 1995, a rate that outpaces growth in both population and VMT. APTA’s data indicates that light rail systems enjoyed the largest ridership jump (8.3% increase), followed by paratransit (5.9% increase), commuter rail (4.7% increase), buses (3.9% increase), and heavy rail subways (3.5% increase). Although the Overhead Wire cautions us with a reality check, it is so encouraging to see that interest in transit nationwide survived both job losses and the decline in gas prices from a high near $5/gallon earlier in 2008.

With the notable exceptions of VTA’s light rail system and San Francisco Muni generally (both of whose ridership growth per mode fell behind the national average), ridership increases for major Bay Area transit operators not only reflect, but in most instances actually outpace, the national trend. Our commuter rail operators (ACE, Caltrain, and Capitol Corridor) significantly outpaced the national average, as did bus ridership for AC Transit and VTA:

APTA’s statistics also noted that some of the largest jumps in bus ridership occurred in cities with population under 100,000 (9.3% increase for smaller communities, compared to a 3.9% average increase across all bus operators). This trend was also reflected in the Bay Area. Some of our smaller bus-only transit operators enjoyed comparable increases in ridership, e.g. Fairfield-Suisin Transit (9.73% increase), Tri Delta (9.91% increase), and Rio Vista Delta Breeze, whose 3,400 daily bus riders in 2007 jumped to 8,400 in 2008. WHEELS ridership increased just 5.35%.

This past July, the Berkeley City Council voted to place Measure KK on this November ballot, thanks to the efforts of a vocal, persistent group of Berkeley NIMBYs whose goal is to prevent AC Transit from building dedicated bus lanes in Berkeley (only one to one-and-half miles long) as part of its bus rapid transit project on Telegraph Avenue and East 14th Street. The BRT project, estimated to cost $250 million for a roughly 17-mile corridor, would upgrade service on the 1/1R line, which is AC Transit’s most popular trunk line, carrying roughly 10% of its daily ridership. Running buses in a dedicated transitway that is wholly separated from automotive traffic, when combined with signal priority and Proof of Payment, will allow AC Transit to make better use of a fixed amount of resources; it will also ensure line reliability, thus creating a superior and dependable riding experience that will attract more riders.

If passed, Measure KK would require that a “designation plan” be prepared whenever a lane is planned to be reserved for transit vehicles or high-occupancy vehicles — not just for this BRT project, but also for all similar future projects carried out in Berkeley. The language of the measure is vague as to what exactly must be contained within a designation plan; but, at a minimum, it is required to describe how reserving an HOV lane could affect “drivers, transit riders, pedestrians, bicyclists, businesses, parking and emergency access.” The process of creating a designation plan would itself be required to include extensive public hearings. Once the designation plan has been completed, the City Council would then submit it to voters for their approval. No transit-only lane could be reserved unless its corresponding designation plan was approved by voters.

The extra expense of carrying out these procedures is hefty — each designation plan could cost $250,000-$500,000 to prepare. On top of that there would be $15,000 for placing the plan on the ballot, and $350,000 or over $700,000 to hold a special election, depending on whether it is conducted by mail or at polling places. Moreover, the need to prepare a designation plan and get it approved by voters would add considerable delay to BRT planning and implementation, not least because it would make it more difficult to line up the diverse array of funds needed to build the project. But still another potential problem lurks behind Measure KK’s vague language: if modifications are made to the project after the official close of the planning process, it is possible that such changes could trigger still another “designation plan” and another vote, thus compounding the delay and project cost.

Measure KK, by instituting ill-advised planning from the ballot box, seeks to inappropriately undermine and usurp the authority that California Vehicle Code § 21655.5(a) confers upon the City Council — that is, the authority to reserve lanes for high-occupancy vehicles (of which transit-only lanes are a special case) on its city streets. Measure KK also violates the transportation element of Berkeley’s General Plan, which quite clearly and unambiguously provides for the construction of transit-only lanes on major corridors, including those that would be served by the proposed BRT route. If Measure KK passes, this language in the General Plan would have to be amended to be less supportive of transit. Furthermore, given 2006 Measure G (in which an overwhelming 82.3% of Berkeley voters supported the 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050), it would indeed be counterintuitive for a self-proclaimed “progressive” city like Berkeley to approve Measure KK, particularly during a time in which ever-clearer recognition of the climate change crisis has encouraged cities across California to pursue superior transit.

This BRT project has already been (and will continue to be) thoroughly analyzed and vetted both in EIR and at community meetings. Any future projects would certainly be subject to treatment just as robust and as thorough. Measure KK needlessly adds extra delay and expense that would jeopardize improvements to transit. Berkeley voters are strongly encouraged to support better transit in the East Bay by voting NO on Measure KK.

The proceeds from Measure VV will be used to fund operations and maintenance, with expenditures monitored by a citizen oversight committee. This money is necessary to allow AC Transit to maintain its current level of operation without having to penalize its most transit-dependent customers by slashing service and hiking fares. Yes, it’s another tax — but as such, it requires 2/3 approval by voters in order to pass. When the state budget is unkind to transit, sometimes it falls on local taxpayers to tie up the loose ends. So all we can do is ask East Bay voters to find it in their hearts to protect vital transit service by voting Yes on Measure VV.