Caltrain, unlike other transit operators that have been deprived of State Transit Assistance funds, does not enjoy a dedicated revenue source.  Rather, its operations depend mostly on farebox revenue and contributions from San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, the three member agencies that make up the Joint Powers Board.  It’s no small problem, then, that San Mateo has suggested it may reduce its contribution by 70%, which would trigger corresponding reductions from San Francisco and Santa Clara.  The end result, if that were to happen?  A roughly $30 million budget deficit off of a $97 million budget.  Caltrain has indicated that balancing the budget under those circumstances might require cutting all off-peak service — midday, nights, and weekends — by no later than June 2011.

It hardly needs to be said that this would be a fundamental change for the worst.  It would reduce rail service on this corridor to bare commuter operations, while decimating the utility of Caltrain for transit-dependent and recreational off-peak riders.  If such a deep service cut were approved, it would be a giant leap backwards, in the exact opposite direction from where Caltrain should be headed as it moves toward electrification.

It is not yet clear whether the situation will actually turn out to be that bad.  So far, all we have had to go on  is Mike Scanlon’s initial doomsday pronouncement at the April 1 JPB meeting.  Clearly, though, there will be an important discussion in the near future about Caltrain’s upcoming budget and the viability of its service.  In some sense, Caltrain has so far held on surprisingly well under the circumstances, since it was able to deflect an unpopular cut to weekend service when closing a $10.1 million budget deficit for this fiscal year.  But ridership has decreased as compared to last year, so there is reluctance to further depress ridership by increasing fares — and even a steep fare hike would not be nearly enough to close a $30 million deficit.  State funding, restored by the gas tax swap legislation, would also not be enough, providing Caltrain with just $5.1 million for this fiscal year and $4.5 million in FY12.  With the JPB’s three member agencies threatening to turn inward and reduce their financial support to Caltrain in these tough economic times, there are limited options available under the current governance scheme that would ensure Caltrain’s long-term financial sustainability.

Passenger rail on the Peninsula was almost laid to rest in the 1970s, but was ultimately saved.  It could be saved again (though the threat now does not look that severe).  But is there the political will to make the necessary changes?  Caltrain has come a long way even with minimal means, but it has been subject to the whimsy of its member agencies, who have other priorities.  Meanwhile, the progress that has been made on electrification has been sluggish, even though electrification points the way toward the promise of the future.  Since introducing Baby Bullet service, Caltrain has assumed a more prominent role in the Bay Area’s regional rail network, but it has outgrown its existing, primitive method of financing.  It is worthy of a three-county special district, along the lines of the BART district.  By reconstituting as a special district, Caltrain would be granted valuable taxing authority and dedicated funding.  Making this change will not be easy, because it requires enactment at the State level — but doing so would give Caltrain access to tax revenue, while ensuring the security of future service.

So what’s the beef now? Rather than employ the downtown extension alignment and station location previously adopted by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the CHSRA would instead like to override the TJPA’s previous efforts and study alternative locations for the San Francisco terminus in its project-level EIR/EIS for the San Francisco-San Jose segment. In particular, the CHSRA has set its sight on another terminal to accommodate its exaggerated capacity requirements — the Beale Street terminal, situated parallel to Beale Street, and stretching roughly from Mission Street to Harrison Street. But this is an alternative that was resurrected from the dead. In the 1990s, a handful of potential Caltrain downtown extension alignments were considered. Most of those, including alignments leading to a Beale Street terminal, were rejected as undesirable or infeasible:

Rejected DTX alternative alignments. Courtesy of TJPA.

California has submitted project requests to the U.S. Department of Transportation, including a $400 million request that, if granted, would allow the Transbay Transit Center’s train box to be excavated sooner rather than later, using a “bottom up” construction approach. Transbay, by virtue of its completed environmental documents, is classified as a “ready-to-go” project, eligible for a Track 1 high-speed rail stimulus grant. In just a few weeks, the Federal Railroad Administration will announce the Track 1 projects that it has selected for grants.

On the surface, the CHSRA’s interest in the Beale Street alternative appears to reflect the simple desire to comply with a legal opinion it has obtained (endorsed by Gensler Architects), which stands for the proposition that Transbay will have too few platform tracks, and that the CHSRA is legally required to study the Beale Street alternative. But it does not seem coincidental that the agency’s temper — presumably largely fueled by, or embodied in, its ever-colorful former chairman, Quentin Kopp — flares up at the exact points in time when the TJPA competes with the CHSRA for access to new pots of funding that are being made available for high-speed rail. In November 2008, it was the Proposition 1A bond, and now, it’s the high-speed rail stimulus funding. Given that the FRA will announce its Track 1 selections in the next few weeks, it is perhaps the near-term implication of the legal opinion that explains why the CHSRA has resurrected the Beale Street terminal at this time.

Californians observing this process, as well as most government agencies, believe that the location of San Francisco’s rail terminal has been finalized. The DTX alignment adopted by the TJPA is, after all, long-standing, and it is supported by a Record of Decision from the Federal Transit Administration. But if the CHSRA can introduce a fog of uncertainty by evincing interest in (and carrying out subsequent environmental review of) the Beale Street terminal, then the Transbay Transit Center will lose its air of shovel-readiness and will no longer be a promising candidate for stimulus funds. What the FRA will see is that two key agencies, the TJPA and the CHSRA, cannot even agree on the answer to a simple question like where the shovels should begin digging. That strikes a chord of administrative dissonance, and it may leave the FRA with the impression that Transbay is not ready for prime time. Why, then, would the FRA dignify it with a handsome $400 million award? California’s HSR project has a high profile and is poised to become a national model. If Transbay were not awarded a grant, then surely, given the importance of California HSR, other components of California’s application falling more directly under the CHSRA’s purview would be in a better position to receive funding instead.

And for how much longer must we endure Quentin Kopp’s anti-Transbay/DTX agenda? California voters, when passing Proposition 1A in November 2008, explicitly authorized a high-speed rail line whose northern terminus is the Transbay Transit Center. A Beale Street terminal might be near Transbay; but the length of its platforms would lie orthogonal to the length of the bus station, and it would not strictly be located in Transbay, as called for by voters. The CHSRA’s essentially obstructionist reopening of alternatives also demonstrates an utter lack of respect for a years-long land use planning effort in San Francisco. The Planning Department’s work to date strives to guide the city through the complex process of transforming uniquely valuable, downtown-adjacent former freeway parcels into a living, breathing neighborhood. But that process has operated under the assumption that a significant rail and bus transit hub would eventually be built at Transbay.

Let’s allow decade-old rejected alternatives to rest in peace. San Franciscans, and a majority of Californians, have supported a high-speed train project terminating at Transbay. I do not want to sweep under the carpet, so to speak, the Transit Center’s design flaws. Those are real, albeit distinct from the CHSRA’s pet complaints; and they would ideally be vigorously addressed, rather than weakly justified. But the CHSRA’s last-minute resurrection of Beale Street does a disservice to the high-speed train project it purports to manage. If you happen to be interested in maximizing our chance of securing $400 million of ARRA federal stimulus funds for the Transbay train box — to construct the station from the bottom-up, and to extend commuter and high-speed rail service downtown, preferably within our lifetimes — then it wouldn’t hurt to mention that to the Governor’s office, which will soon send a letter about California’s high-speed rail priorities to Secretary Ray LaHood.

But like the Ugly Duckling, this story also looks like it will have a happy ending. For high-speed rail will soon sweep into the region, transforming and re-energizing interest in the ex-SP corridor. BART’s gauge, unlike Caltrain’s, is incompatible with high-speed rail; so, when all is said and done, BART’s once-futuristic technology will be exposed as the dinosaur, while the ugly duckling Caltrain will at last transform into the swan.

Creating swans out of ducklings of course requires money, but money is almost certainly on the way. Fast on the heels of the Workplan released by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has released its draft plan for the Bay Area’s high-speed rail stimulus application, which has been dubbed the Peninsula Corridor Investment Strategy.

MTC envisions a two-phase strategy. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has already prepared a programmatic EIR/EIS, which examined the environmental impacts and benefits of the high-speed rail project at a broader level. CHSRA is now preparing more detailed environmental documents that will assess environmental impacts and mitigation measures on individual segments of the HSR route, for example, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor. This will probably be completed sometime in the next couple of years and will shed light on various other HSR-related infrastructure projects, including: Caltrain stations that will need to be redesigned to accommodate high-speed rail, and various tunneled and elevated segments of track needed to separate the many grade crossings along the Caltrain corridor. These projects are deferred to Phase II. They are not ready to be constructed; indeed, it’s not even clear how much they will cost to build, so we will not pursue ARRA stimulus funds for them.

So what will we seek federal funds for? For specific projects that have already passed through or are exempt from thorough environmental review, or which will be cleared within a couple of years. These projects will be ready for construction, pending detailed design work. The funding allocations are as follows:

Transbay Transit Center, San Francisco: Constructing the above-ground portion of the Transbay Transit Center facility will cost $1.19 billion, and building the subway station box in the first phase of construction will require $400 million extra upfront, but TJPA projects this move will save $100 million over the course of the project. As such, the Bay Area will request $400 million of ARRA money to fast-track the train box. Moreover, $52 million will be requested for design of the 1.3-mile downtown rail extension (DTX), and an additional $205 million toward lengthening the platforms at the Transbay Transit Center, in response to the CHSRA’s demand for 1,312 feet of fully tangent platform (see schematic below, which shows the curvature on the western side of the platforms, and the platform extension eastward). The 250-foot extension increases station length to about 1,750 feet, so it is curious that this relatively short extension generates the need for a disproportionately high amount of additional funding (over half the total to excavate the rest of the train box).  This amounts to a total of $657 million ARRA money requested for Transbay/DTX.

Courtesy of MTC/TJPA.

4th & King, San Francisco: Pending alteration of the DTX track layout to allow trains to move efficiently in and out of Transbay, the platform track allocated to high-speed rail would provide sufficient capacity; but some Caltrain or high-speed runs may terminate at 4th and King as necessary. In any case, $98 million will be requested toward funding a $100 million reconfiguration of the existing Caltrain terminal at 4th & King.

San Bruno: $212 million (out of $275 million) will be requested to construct grade separations at San Bruno Station.

Corridor-wide Improvements: $230 million (out of $231 million) to be requested for positive train control, which, by federal mandate, must be implemented by 2015. $301 million (out of $785 million) will be requested for Caltrain electrification.

San Jose Diridon: This is a high-speed rail station that we have spent noticeably less time on than Transbay. $149 million (out of $150 million) will be requested to expand and reconfigure Cahill Str… ahem, San Jose Diridon Station, which will be served by high-speed rail, Caltrain, Capitols, ACE, Coast Starlight, VTA light rail, and maybe even BART one day. As we discussed several months ago when 2008 Measure B passed, the City of San Jose and SVLG are positively salivating at the idea of creating a Grand Central in the Bay Area, because it would place San Jose in conscious competition with San Francisco (which for years has informally referred to its planned Transbay Transit Center as the region’s approximation of Grand Central). The City of San Jose has partnered (PDF) with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to reimagine “the premier transportation hub of northern California.” The question is: which station, Transbay or Diridon, will be grander?

No, scratch that; the real question is, or should be: how are we going to plan, fund, and build a well-coordinated and efficiently-operated rail corridor?  At this point in time, our regional dollars should be directed entirely toward fulfilling this latter concern, because there is no shortage of engineering issues that lie ahead. To the extent that any of the requested Diridon money, if obtained, goes toward designing the functional layout of the station, that’s fine. But note that Caltrain already plans to reconfigure this station with two additional island platforms and four platform tracks, in addition to a fourth track between the station’s north end and CEMOF, Caltrain’s maintenance facility. As is true with certain other transportation projects planned for San Jose, this station seems to be more about glitz than effective transportation, and using stimulus dollars to design an architecturally grand structure is not really at the top of the list of regional priorities. It is, nonetheless, still unsurprising that this piece of the pie will be requested on San Jose’s behalf. The standard rendering and a diagram below:

Top: courtesy of Newlands & Company. Bottom: courtesy of MTC/City of San Jose.

All in all, these projects total to $3.378 billion, but the Peninsula Corridor Investment Strategy recommends that only $1.647 billion (49%) of that be directed to our high-speed rail stimulus grant application. Even so, $1.6 billion is a full 20% of the $8 billion that the stimulus has allocated to high-speed rail nationally, and many other states are naturally interested in pursuing new rail service. So it remains to be seen how much stimulus money we will actually get.

Tonight, May 27, Caltrain will hold meetings to receive public comment on its proposals to increase fares and cut service, in order to close a budget shortfall that is projected to expand to $10.1 million by next fiscal year. Caltrain, along with the SFMTA and AC Transit, may declare a fiscal emergency, both to reflect the shortfall and to exempt service cuts from environmental review under CEQA.

We discussed Caltrain’s proposed service cuts briefly here before. Since that time, the proposed $1 bicycle surcharge has not been moved forward as a potential avenue to increase revenue. But different configurations of fare increases and service cuts are still up for discussion. This table (PDF) charts the possible schemes for fare and fee increases:

• For individual fares: (i) an across-the-board 25-cent increase in base fare, (ii) a 25-cent increase in fare for each successive zone of travel, or (iii) both.
• Increase Eligible Discounts and other fares by a similar proportion as above.
• Increase fees for the Go Pass. (Companies with at least 70 employees currently pay an annual fee to give their employees a Go Pass, which provides the employee with unlimited rides on Caltrain. That annual fee is the same price as a monthly pass within two travel zones. A proposed increase would raise the Go Pass fee to the price of a three-zone monthly pass.)
• Increase parking fees.

And then, the proposed service cuts (to see which exact runs would be cut, check out this table):

• Instituting 60-minute midday headways during the week (a reduction in service from the current 30 minute headways).
• Eliminating service south of Tamien Station.
• Eliminating all weekend service.

Among these cuts, the weekend cut would be especially devastating. Although it is technically possible to travel approximately parallel to most of the Caltrain corridor by bus, this is a slow, unattractive option for riders. Given that the tracks mostly run through suburban territory, where car ownership rates are high and many transit trips are discretionary, it is unlikely that this bus alternative will capture many riders — except, of course, those who have no other choice but to endure long travel times. Eliminating weekend service would be a blow to car-free mobility within these three counties, and it would damage Caltrain’s ability to serve as a vital regional link, as it has done increasingly in recent years. The JPB is thus strongly advised to pursue other methods of closing the budget shortfall — increasing parking fees, raising fares, or cutting staff on board the train — before resorting to service cuts. And if service must be cut, the first cuts should be made to the more lightly used midday weekday runs. Caltrain has already suggested that reducing midday service would save more money and result in fewer lost riders as compared to eliminating weekend service.

There will be three meetings on the budget proposals, and all will take place this evening, May 27, at 6:00 pm. Riders are encouraged to attend and speak at the most convenient meeting:

• San Francisco: 25 Van Ness Avenue (Lower Level Conference Room)
• San Carlos: 1250 San Carlos Avenue (Caltrain Headquarters Auditorium)
• San Jose: 3331 North 1st Street (VTA Administrative Offices Auditorium)

Alternatively, you can phone or write in. Send emails to changes [at] caltrain [dot] com, send regular mail to District Secretary, Caltrain, P.O. Box 3006, San Carlos, CA 94070, or call 800.660.4287 (TDD for hearing impaired only 650.508.6448). Finally, on Thursday, June 4 at 10:00 am, there will be two additional public hearings on the fiscal emergency and the proposed fare/service changes, at Caltrain headquarters.

The last post discussed the SFCTA report on Geary BRT, so here is a roundup of other recent news:

SFMTA Budget is up for debate: To close a $128.9 million shortfall, the SFMTA Board adopted a budget that raised the adult and paratransit individual fares to $2 and adult fast passes to $60 on January 1, 2010. The budget also raises some parking fees, but it eliminates several lines altogether and institutes considerable service cuts on many other lines. As promised, Board President David Chiu will introduce a motion (PDF) at today’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting to veto the MTA-adopted budget. If you’d like to attend, the meeting is in the Board chamber, 2nd floor of SF City Hall, at 1:30 pm.
Update: At the Budget and Finance Committee, the vote was 4-1 (Carmen Chu dissenting) against the MTA’s budget, and Chiu has the seven votes needed to overturn the budget at the full Board.

New parking lot in Oakland defeated: Last night, I learned via Twitter that the Oakland City Council rejected the Redevelopment Agency’s proposal for a temporary surface parking lot on Telegraph Avenue in Downtown Oakland, next to the Fox Theater. The City Council requested that staff investigate the possibility of art installations instead, which would be a considerable improvement over a parking lot. Whatever use is ultimately installed will be temporary, to be dismantled in 2011 when construction will begin on the second phase of Forest City’s Uptown project.

Caltrain to declare a fiscal emergency: Despite ridership gains in 2008 and already having raised fares 25 cents on January 1, Caltrain is scrambling to close its budget shortfall, in light of the lost STA funds; it plans to declare a fiscal emergency in order to exempt service cuts from environmental review.

High-Speed Rail: The controversy on the Peninsula over high-speed rail continues. Palo Alto has already demanded that trains run in a tunnel, and now Burlingame is following suit, though of course without offering suggestions as to how it plans to foot the bill. Palo Alto’s Vice Mayor Jack Morton is also calling for the High-Speed Rail Authority to be dissolved. But these Peninsula protests may be frustrated by Galgiani’s bill AB 289, which is making its way through the California legislature. AB 289 would exempt from CEQA review all grade separations carried out in connection with California High-Speed Rail. (Grade separations are of course what Palo Alto has already protested as being a divisive “Berlin Wall”, although it would increase safety to fully separate train traffic.) CEQA exemptions are often a thorny subject. CEQA, when placed into the hands of persistent NIMBYs, can be a powerful tool for indefinitely delaying projects, including very desirable projects like high-speed rail. But CEQA is, at its heart, about disclosure; so exempting any type of project from CEQA suggests that the lead agency will proceed without having as full knowledge of the situation as one presumably would have after preparing an EIR. It also sets a dubious precedent to establish CEQA exemptions on a project-by-project basis. In principle, it is preferable to exempt classes of projects, rather than individual projects, because individual exemptions that are not based on some sort of underlying rationale are a double-edged sword. Just one example of this: earlier this year, transit advocates were up in arms at the Governor’s budget proposal to exempt specific freeway projects from CEQA; but now, those same advocates may well relish the idea of fast-tracking high speed rail with a bypass of environmental review. It is indeed frustrating to watch CEQA — legislation whose purpose is to facilitate protection of the environment — be used in ways that delay or block environmentally-beneficial projects, like high-speed rail and the San Francisco Bicycle Plan. But simply exempting projects on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis does little to deepen our understanding of how to implement successful CEQA reform. That said, the AB 289 exemption is also not exactly ad hoc, because railroad grade separations are already exempt from CEQA; this bill explicitly extends that existing policy to construction undertaken by the CHSRA. Aside from the AB 289 CEQA bill, three other HSR-related bills are working their way through the state legislature: SB 783 (requires the CHSRA to prepare a business plan to receive bond funding), SB 451 (endows the CHSRA with certain eminent domain powers), and SB 409 (creates a Department of Railroads).

We have an election in two weeks: On May 19, Californians will vote on Propositions 1A-1F. Ideally, I would have a post for you on these propositions, but I’m not sure if I’ll get a chance to write it. To get up to speed, check out the running analysis at Calitics, the California Budget Project, and the Courage Campaign, among many other sources.

J-Get Me to the Church on Time? Not so fast: For those who ride the J-Church regularly (or who perhaps don’t ride it, instead hiking to BART because your J train never arrived), it may not be too surprising to learn that the J-Church is once again Muni’s worst performing line, with a 65% on-time rate. And yes, Supervisor Bevan Dufty is eyeing another pilot study of the line.

These are just some topics in the news recently. Posting will necessarily be sparse for the next couple of weeks, so please feel free to continue using this open thread as a forum to discuss these topics, or whatever else is on your mind.

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%.

According to the most recent estimates, the Bay Area will receive approximately $490 million of transportation stimulus money, which MTC has discretion to allocate within defined categories. $340 million are FTA transit formula funds pursuant to Section 5307/5309, and $150 million are FHWA/Surface Transportation Program funds.

Of the $340 million for transit, $270 million will be allocated to operators for transit rehabilitation: AC Transit ($25.7 million), BART ($65.3 million), Caltrain ($10.3 million), Golden Gate ($9.4 million), SFMTA ($67.2 million), SamTrans ($7.9 million), VTA ($47.2 million), and $36.4 million for the smaller transit operators.

Rendering of Coliseum BART station; courtesy of BART.

And as for the rest of the FTA funds? MTC plans to allocate the remaining $70 million to the Oakland Airport Connector. In November 2000, Alameda County voters approved by an overwhelming 81.47% Measure B, a 1/2-percent sales tax for transportation that rejuvenated 1986 Measure B. The proceeds from 2000 Measure B were to be allocated to many projects, including highways, BART to Warm Springs, ACE improvements, and the Oakland Airport Connector: a 3.2-mile automated guideway transit system that would connect Oakland International Airport to Coliseum BART, the closest BART station; this function is currently filled by AirBART shuttle buses. The people mover, which would complete the trip between BART and the Airport in under ten minutes, is expected to increase transit share to the Airport — to about 13% (13,540 daily riders), increased from 9% in 2007 — and it could accommodate any future market growth at the Airport. And yet, while it seems like it would be a good idea to improve BART access to Oakland Airport, this particular project is in a sickly state. The cost has ballooned to $529 million, and a large funding gap remains. The project was intended to be a public/private partnership, but the private partners who might have filled the funding gap are no longer interested in pursuing the project. $288 million of public funds are allocated to the project, but $241 million more are needed. Some of that additional money might eventually be obtained from other sources: including $71 million from BART and $50 million saved from seismic retrofit of the Transbay Tube. MTC would now like to apply $70 million of FTA stimulus funds to rescue the people mover and close the funding gap.

This would be an unwise allocation of the money. We literally just got through lamenting that the State of California has yanked five years of State Transit Assistance operating funds from transit agencies; these agencies must now put fare hikes, service cuts, or a combination of the two on the table to close their own deficits. To the extent that MTC can help agencies in need, it should, by allocating the money directly for agencies to use for purposes of rehabilitation and preventive maintenance. The plan to withhold $70 million of valuable stimulus money — only to insert it into the funding pot for a project that is basically a luxury item, at a time when we can scarcely afford necessities let alone luxuries — is frivolous. In any case, we have long believed that the sensible course of action would be to at least revisit the less glamorous option of a rapid bus system with signal priority on the amply wide (6-8 total lanes) Hegenberger Road and Airport Drive. This would provide a link between BART and the Airport that is quicker and more reliable than current AirBART service, at a fraction of the cost of the proposed people mover.

The next component of the stimulus funding concerns roadway improvements. Of the $150 million of STP funds, $118 million will be applied to rehabilitation of local roads, according to the following proportions per county: Alameda ($23.8 million), Contra Costa ($17.3 million), Marin ($4.6 million), Napa ($3.1 million), San Francisco ($11 million), San Mateo ($10.7 million), Santa Clara ($25.6 million), Solano ($9.4 million), and Sonoma ($12.5 million). In addition, MTC plans to allocate money directly toward other specific road projects:

• $2.75 million of stimulus funds for safety improvements in the North Bay, including $1 million for a Class I bicycle path along Highway 29 in Yountville; $750,000 for ITS on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa; and $1 million to reconstruct a segment of McGary Road in Fairfield;
• $19 million of stimulus funds to be spent on ramp meters for the Freeway Performance Initiative: $7 million in San Mateo County, and $12 million in Santa Clara County; and
• $10 million of stimulus funds for safety improvements on a collision-prone segment of Vasco Road in Contra Costa County, near Byron and the Alameda County line.

Cross-section of the Transbay Transit Center; courtesy of Pelli Clarke Pelli.

Lastly, there is further stimulus money that might be applied toward Bay Area transportation projects, but those funds do not exist at MTC discretion; rather, those monies are awarded at the discretion of state and federal governments. Caltrans might apply stimulus money to backfill Proposition 1B. This would fund freeway projects that were formerly called to a halt during the budget crisis, including the fourth bore of the Caldecott Tunnel, and HOV lanes for the Sunol Grade, Interstate 580 in Alameda County, Interstate 80 in Solano County, and Highway 101 in Sonoma County. $100 million of funds for Doyle Drive might come from both the State (from Caltrans, via SHOPP) and the federal government (via the National Park Service). Last, but not least, is the train box in the Transbay Transit Center, which will be the northern terminus for Caltrain DTX and California High-Speed Rail. The Transit Center is planned to include a subway station with six tracks and three island platforms; the stimulus funds would allow the station box to be excavated in the first phase when the Transit Center is constructed, where it would await the future rail extension. Although this would require more money upfront, it could save $100 million in construction costs over the timeline of the whole project. MTC originally proposed that some of the transit funds from the stimulus be applied to the train box; but according to the revised proposal, we will instead seek $195-$400 million from the stimulus high-speed rail fund. This is made possible by the the infusion of $8 billion of HSR funds into the final stimulus bill, and California’s HSR project is in a good position to receive a substantial chunk of that money.