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%.

Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) will likely be going up for the ballot again this November. Most recently, in the November 2006 election, the Measure R quarter-cent sales tax for SMART failed — falling just short of the required 2/3 of votes in both counties, despite cleaning up with 70% of the votes in Sonoma, a county whose rapid growth calls out for a rail line to channel sustainable development patterns. The plan for SMART is to operate DMUs (possibly light DMUs, use of which would require approval from the FRA) along the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad right of way, a roughly 70-mile, generally single-tracked route with passing sidings, running from Cloverdale in northern Sonoma County to Larkspur in Marin County, serving North Bay downtowns, including Santa Rosa and San Rafael, and within shuttle access of other employment centers. The plan also includes a pathway for cyclists and pedestrians along the right of way. The southern terminus is a quarter-mile from the Larkspur ferry terminal, where riders can transfer from the train to a ferry for San Francisco via a connection that is not nearly as seamless as it should be for a regional connection point. Naysayers — headed by Mike Arnold and his gang, the Marin Citizens for “Effective Transportation” — emphasize that the route is predicted to capture just 5,300 daily riders and hence is not cost-effective as measured on a per passenger basis. (Of course, the original ridership forecasts date from when gasoline cost half what it does now. And prices were still substantially lower than they are now even when the updated forecasts were released, thus not weighing the potentially powerful persuasive effect of $7 per gallon gas.) In the interest of keeping this post to a reasonable length, we will postpone more detail about the actual SMART proposal and its opposing forces for another day, taking it here as a given that the project should be built. This post is meant to be about brainstorming and fun pipe dreams, not politics.

SMART’s supporters have worked to convince voters that even though trains would not directly serve San Francisco, it is nonetheless not a “train to nowhere.” In a very real sense, they are correct. Although there are details to work through in terms of station placement, the proposed SMART route goes exactly where it should, serving what is really the only corridor that will accommodate travel between Marin and Sonoma Counties. Most future SMART riders will not ride the train to transfer to a San Francisco-bound ferry in Larkspur. This may be in part due to the additional fare and time associated with the imperfect mode shift from train to ferry — but an important factor is that most North Bay commuters work in the North Bay, not in San Francisco. In 2000, a little over 75% of Sonoma County home-based work trips remained in the county; for Marin, a smaller percentage but still over half of home-based work trips remained inside the county. Clearly, then, San Francisco is not the predominant travel market, but it is far from inconsequential. There are still a lot of trips between Marin and adjacent counties across the water, and transit is carrying a small share of these trips. Annual average daily traffic at the Marin/San Francisco county line in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge span was roughly 118,000 in 2007; annual average daily traffic at the Marin/Contra Costa county line, on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, was roughly 69,000 in 2007. But on an average weekday in 2007, Golden Gate Transit carried 24,109 trips, merely 8,014 of which were peak-hour transbay trips, and Golden Gate Ferry carried 6,590 trips.

The lower predicted ridership at Larkspur highlights the fact that the ferry + SMART combination will capture few additional transbay trips to San Francisco, and it will not do a great deal to increase transit share in the Golden Gate corridor in the way that BART has for travel between San Francisco and the East Bay. That this should be so is not really that surprising. Even if the connection between SMART and the Larkspur Ferry were made to be as tight as possible, the process of unloading a train out onto a ferry is not instantaneous, and this mode shift will unavoidably lengthen travel times and increase fare cost. (The analogy is not perfect, but imagine a version of BART that terminated in Jack London Square, forcing East Bay riders to hop on a ferry to access San Francisco. Not only would ridership be lower, but such a system would create an inherently lower cap on capacity.) All in all, the current SMART proposal is a worthy project to bring rail transit back to the North Bay, and it is necessary to increase capacity in a commute corridor that promises to be only more heavily used in the future. But the rail line still remains isolated from the Bay Area’s rail network. So we present the following map — very much a pipe dream — which strives to integrate an electrified SMART into the Bay Area regional rail network, while still fulfilling MTC’s vision for building a regional rail link along two “stretch and grow” corridors in San Francisco: Folsom Street and Van Ness Avenue. This branch of the SMART extension is superimposed on the San Francisco subway dream map that was posted a few months ago. Another branch extends across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to join the Capitol Corridor in the East Bay.

The map color-coding scheme:

	Capitol Corridor; Caltrain (the Caltrain ROW includes high speed rail).
	SMART
	BART
	Muni Metro Light Rail

The first map depicts a branch along the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. SMART trains would meet BART trains at Richmond Station, but, what’s even better, would also meet the standard gauge Capitol Corridor, opening up new possibilities for enhanced regional connectivity.

The second map depicts a possible San Francisco branch. South of San Rafael, stations could be added in Corte Madera, Mill Valley, and Sausalito, as shown above. In San Francisco, the line would align along Lombard, Van Ness, and Folsom to serve Civic Center and South of Market, with transfer opportunities to Muni Metro, a future Geary BART subway, and also to Caltrain and high-speed rail at the Transbay Transit Center.

The cost-effective but politically challenging version of the San Francisco extension would be to dedicate two lanes on Highway 101 for exclusive bus use, and then run buses in the dedicated BRT transitway that is currently in planning for Van Ness Avenue. But given the lack of a regional rail link to the North Bay and a goal of connecting more closely to the actual SMART proposal that will hopefully succeed on this November’s ballot, it is tempting to strive for more in the long-term. It is a general rule that rail lines attract more ridership than their BRT alternatives, but it is also interesting to note that even without an existing rail option, North Bay transit ridership trends for the past several years have shown a clear shift away from buses to the one available non-bus option: the ferry. Along with other transit agencies across the Bay Area, the year 2000 was a dot-com bubble peak ridership point for Golden Gate Ferry, with over 6,000 daily riders; this number declined over the next few years, but then increased about 32% by 2007, exceeding the 2000 figure. During the same period in which the ferry experienced a decline followed by a surge in ridership, Golden Gate Transit bus ridership decreased steadily by about 25%. Ridership on GGT’s transbay bus routes followed a downward trend similar to that experienced by the system as a whole. Rising gas costs have helped to reverse this trend just this year — bus ridership has increased, and ferry ridership has decreased, per the District, because of vessels in dry dock. It is likely that this shift is attributable to a greater interest in transit that would, in turn, extend to a rail line. The SMART line as proposed for the ballot, while diverting some bus riders onto the train, would also encourage people to travel more often without an automobile and to take advantage of bus service as a means of filling in gaps in the train schedule, with the ultimate goal of increasing overall transit share. Of course, because the real-life SMART proposal does not connect to San Francisco, no negative impact is expected on Golden Gate Transit’s transbay bus routes. It is almost certainly the case that the pipe dream version of SMART, with a direct rail link to San Francisco, would severely decrease ridership on the GGT transbay lines (though AC Transit is an immediate example suggesting that some transbay bus routes could be maintained). But once again, the overall goal here is not to preserve the currently existing transbay bus routes indefinitely. Rather, the goal is to increase transit share, balanced against the need to not adversely affect the reach of local bus service.

We should note that Marin was part of the original five-county BART district, before both San Mateo and Marin Counties opted out of the plan. The decision to opt out was related to bridge studies carried out at the time, in which it was determined that both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge — to varying extents, and for a mixture of financial and engineering reasons — could not carry both automobiles and BART trains. So the above maps really are a pipe dream, in the truest sense of the word, and not least because it would require another look-see at the engineering, potential bridge modifications, narrow sections of the NWP right of way, and other issues. This pipe dream configuration would not be a starting point because of the extreme expense, and the San Francisco branch makes the most sense when bundled with one or more other rail services in the same corridor (in the above map, a Muni Metro line that we would not see for a long time). Not only that, but the the 2025 projection of SMART ridership per route mile, while higher than that of ACE, is closer to ACE levels than it is to Caltrain. So this discussion may be premature, but if we never brainstorm and think big, we’ll be boxing ourselves in before we even get started.

The configuration that is a starting point is the actual SMART proposal going on the ballot this November. ABAG forecasts predict that 130,000 new residents and about the same number of new jobs will be added in both counties by the year 2025, which will increase trips within the North Bay and between Sonoma and Marin. Where those new jobs and homes are placed matters. The presence of an active rail line in Sonoma and Marin can act as a catalyst to jumpstart dense growth near the stations, building a natural ridership of those who live and work near the line. Once that happens, a pipe dream extension like the one mapped here could provide the incentive for still more concentrated growth in downtowns along the route. It would bring the isolated, auto-dependent North Bay into the fold of the greater Bay Area, by connecting to the Capitol Corridor and to BART. It would also enhance a rail transit spine that could be complemented by a network of local streetcar routes serving San Rafael, Mill Valley, Tiburon, and other cities in Marin County. The land use point needs to be hammered home, though. We do not want to write off the North Bay as a hopeless case for smart growth, because the Bay Area really cannot afford to write off any of its cities as hopeless — least of all cities lying along a regional rail link. North Bay communities should reconsider the long-term feasibility of staunchly maintaining small-town charm at all costs, and they should seriously question how it is that such a policy has somehow masqueraded as being “pro-environment.” They will have to radically rethink their current land use policies to maximize home and job density within a half-mile to a mile of SMART stations. Given that we cannot simply continue to widen Highway 101 every few years, cities should really be doing this anyway.