☆ Opinion: more sales taxes for San Mateo will miss the transit connection
Will SB 63 disenfranchise San Mateo County and Santa Clara County residents, and heap more of their hard-earned tax dollars onto unaccountable transit agencies like the MTC? After another BART meltdown, SHIFT-Bay Area's sustainability director Gregg Dieguez argues against continued wasteful spending. He says the agencies need outside oversight, and the region needs a competitive transit marketplace. An Opp Now exclusive op-ed.
With Friday's BART shutdown fresh in our minds, it's timely to discuss the additional sales tax measure (probably RM5) which SB 63 will foster. What makes that difficult is that the bill keeps changing at every presentation I’ve watched in San Mateo County (SMC). And that is in itself part of the problem: our elected officials have voted to opt in to a bill that isn't even complete. But we can discuss, broadly, the two major concerns voiced about SB 63, and then the two major concerns NOT being addressed.
Lack of accountability
The first concern, voiced by Assembly Member Gina Pappan, as well as San Mateo County Supervisor Speier and Mueller, is the lack of accountability in the bill. SMC reps are asking for the ability to withhold funds if performance lags. But that is a small matter compared to the massive lack of accountability in the oversight of BART, Muni and other transit agencies. It will take another, longer article to detail the astounding financial mismanagement and imprudence at those agencies but for starters:
1. The MTC losing over $100 million by gambling public money on interest rate swaps.
2. BART deciding to buy 1,159 new rail cars while facing an uncertain fiscal cliff
3. BART undermining their Inspector General so that she quit.
Accountability is clearly a priority, but the provisions requested to date are minor compared to the scope of the problem, which must be addressed by new entities above and outside the current transit establishment.
Disenfranchising county government
The second concern voiced by San Mateo County electeds is that giving hundreds of millions (over 50% of the SMC tax proceeds, in one draft) to BART, San Francisco and the MTC prevents the county from addressing the many other county priorities requiring funds, especially under the Trump Austerity Administration: wildfire, stormwater, education, health care, water & sewer, etc. If San Mateo (and likely Santa Clara) passed their own taxes, then the counties could decide where best to invest their residents' tax monies. SB 63 disenfranchises our county, both its voters and its leadership, putting regional priorities above ours.
But two issues NOT discussed are at least as important, and SB 63 will do nothing to fix them.
Solving the wrong problem
The major issue is whether our current transit infrastructure deserves to exist in its current form. The current network design is based on a premise of “Everybody from Everywhere All At Once To The Same Places” – as shown below in a recent transit planning diagram. And that centralized design causes peak demand problems and costs that should be unnecessary in the 21st century. We can now work from home, and shop from home.
We don’t need everyone to work on the same schedules, even in person. And other metropolises have long established decentralized employment centers, such as Route 128 around Boston, and LA's dozen separate “downtowns” – putting the jobs near where people want to live. Face it, people don’t WANT to commute, and we should design our civilization to save the money and let them NOT commute.
Wasting our money
The related overlooked major issue SB 63 will not fix is the massive inefficiency of our current transit vendors. Major local agencies are as costly per mile as wheelchair vans. At stake are tens of billions of dollars, well beyond the Band-Aid proposed in SB 63. BART alone is now saying it needs over $24 billion in capital funding over the next 10 years.
Meanwhile, we have emerging, agile and affordable technologies which could provide more convenient transit (door-to-door) at less cost, if allowed to compete with the Traditional Transit Monopoly. But 5 years after COVID punctuated the possibility of a new transit paradigm, the current transit establishment hasn’t figured out how to cut costs, or how to capitalize on new approaches (such as Seoul, SK’s embrace of express bus lanes). SB 63 now promises to spend extra tax money to study the problem that the transit establishment has been studying - and should have already figured out over the past 5 years. But they have not made meaningful progress, perhaps because if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, or perhaps because the actions of the Transit Industrial Complex are dictated by the vested interests of its members. As with accountability, progress cannot come from having the MTC redesign itself. What is needed are Inspectors General outside and above the current establishment, and competitive forces unleashed to move us into a more cost-effective and convenient transit future. Especially if it means LESS transit is required.
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