SF Chronicle: transit tax scaremongering is overblown
Local media leaned on a report from the “independent” nonprofit SPUR to scare voters into supporting the massive, five-county transit tax. But the SF Chronicle finds that even if transit agencies make good on their threats to cut 15 BART stations, (not likely), a so-called “Carmageddon” might make it 90 seconds longer to cross the Bay Bridge. SHIFT Bay Area breaks down the numbers:
For two months, Bay Area voters have heard one message about Measure RTM: pay up, or else. The “or else” has a name - Carmageddon. A report from the San Francisco policy group SPUR said that rejecting the regional transit sales tax would double Bay Bridge delays, add roughly 498 million miles of driving a year, and strand commuters in gridlock. Newspapers, TV stations and elected officials repeated it, and some outlets called it an “independent” report. It was neither independent, nor accurate.
This week, the evidence shifted
On October 26, the San Francisco Chronicle published its own traffic simulation, built with Mobiliti Labs, a Berkeley Lab spinout that models the region’s road network. Its central finding is that the “added congestion may be more modest” than the tax campaign has warned, depending on how displaced riders adapt.
That is the conclusion our volunteer committee reached twelve days earlier in Off the Rails, a 20-page technical review of the SPUR report: unjustified assumptions, unreproducible results, unsupported conclusions, and none of the real alternatives analyzed. Now a mainstream newsroom, working with independent modelers, has found the same fault line. The real traffic outcome hinges on what transit riders do if transit agencies decide to cut services and close stations, and the SPUR/Jacobs model overlooked human adaptation – assuming BART riders would just get in cars and sit in traffic.
The New Independent Findings, In Plain English
• Today: crossing the Bay Bridge westbound at the morning peak takes about 13 minutes.
• Worst case: if every rider at a closed BART station switched to driving, the average crossing stretches to nearly 24 minutes. This is the scenario the “Carmageddon” messaging treats as a certainty.
• Realistic case: if half of those riders instead carpool, use another station, take a bus, stagger work hours, or work from home, the crossing takes about 14 minutes - roughly a minute and a half longer than today.
• The capacity check: fewer than 1,400 people an hour ride through the Transbay Tube in the morning peak from the 11 East Bay stations on BART’s worst-case list. The bridge carries about 7,300 vehicles an hour and can handle roughly 9,000 or more.
Our own reconstruction, built from BART’s published October 2025 station data, points the same way. The 15 BART stations in the worst-case service cut would add about 8,900 car trips per weekday, spread across an entire day. (The math is in Off the Rails.)
Read the whole thing here…
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