A new poll finds that many Bay Area voters want improved public transportation and roads, as long as wealthy residents and businesses foot the bill. But a related proposed bill to improve transit and roads is already drawing pushback from the Valley Transportation Authority, which serves Santa Clara County.
Nearly six in 10 poll respondents said they would support a future Bay Area-wide ballot measure that would raise income taxes on upper-income earners to pay for affordable and coordinated bus, rail and ferry systems, as well as improvements to roads, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.
“Voters are very unhappy with the state of transportation in the Bay Area,” said Matt Hogan, a partner at Impact Research, which conducted the poll on behalf of Seamless Bay Area, a nonprofit group that promotes a unified transit system in the Bay Area, and the Beneficial State Foundation, which promotes financial fairness in banking. “And that applies to both public transportation and roads and highways.”
The move to improve public transportation comes as local transit agencies struggle to recover from huge declines in ridership caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread shift to remote work.
The poll of 600 voters found that 57% of respondents would support a ballot measure in 2026 to consolidate the region's myriad transit agencies and raise revenue to improve public transit service, roads and infrastructure, as long as strong audits and oversight were in place and funded by a 1% tax on people earning more than $300,000 a year, or households earning more than $500,000.
In a presentation last week on a poll conducted in January, Hogan said respondents showed strong support for funding the project through an increase in payroll taxes on employers with more than $4 million in annual revenue, excluding businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
But the poll also revealed a deep division. “We see pretty strong opposition among Republicans,” Hogan said. Nearly half of respondents wanted local officials to focus on improving roads and highways, while just under 40% wanted them to focus on improving transportation.
The poll was intended to guide ballot measures that would reach voters in the nine Bay Area counties. A bill introduced in January by Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco is the first step in that process. SB 925 would seek permission for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area's master transportation agency, to seek funding for transportation and road improvements through local ballot measures.
Supporters of the funding package hope to coordinate service across the Bay Area's 27 transit agencies to make travel across the region as fast and smooth as possible, encouraging utilization, lowering vehicle emissions, and reducing traffic. As the University of California, Berkeley Transportation Institute noted in August about the region's post-pandemic road conditions, “freeways are congested again.”
“Bay Area residents, businesses and visitors want a world-class transportation system with safe, frequent, reliable and seamless transit service, smooth roads free of dangerous potholes and safe access for pedestrians and bicyclists,” Wiener said in a news release.
Wiener's bill does not include any details about how the money would be raised, what improvements it would be used for, how a streamlined transportation system would be managed or how spending would be monitored.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission voted in support of the measure and submitted a ballot wish list. The commission hopes to raise $1 billion to $2 billion annually through the funding measure through such methods as sales taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, land taxes, vehicle registration surcharges, or local vehicle mileage taxes.
Hogan said voters surveyed strongly opposed raising sales and property taxes.
The MTC also hopes the funding measure will give it the authority to set policy for all 27 Bay Area transit agencies and withhold funding from those that don't meet standards on fare collection, integration between services and schedule adjustments.
Wiener spokesman Eric Mebst said Friday that the senator will release an amended bill detailing the plan on March 18. VTA external relations director Jim Lawson said this week that Wiener's staff has said the senator is “considering following” the MTC proposal.
The MTC has already faced backlash from the VTA board and San Jose politicians.
“I have great reservations about giving more authority to the MTC,” San Jose City Councilman and VTA board member Dev Davis said at Thursday's VTA board meeting. “Giving them more authority over the local transit system seems to me like it would result in less local service, not more.”
Lawson said Bay Area-wide transportation coordination would “provide little benefit to the VTA,” in part because 70% of trips in Santa Clara County, by public transportation or other means, remain within the county. Lawson and Davis also expressed concern that the county would shoulder an undue financial burden.
But MTC spokesman John Goodwin said a strong, efficient transportation network benefits everyone, including those who don't ride trains, buses or ferries.
“When more people see public transport as a viable, attractive and competitive alternative to driving, it means there are fewer people competing for limited road space,” Goodwin said.
Goodwin noted that nearly every trip, whether by car, public transit, bicycle or other means, begins and ends on local roads, but added that it has not been determined how any funds raised by such a measure would be divided between public transit, road improvements and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
Adina Levin, policy and advocacy leader for Seamless Bay Area, said during a webinar Wednesday that cooperation between the region's transit agencies is voluntary, but the group wants to make cooperation a legal requirement to overcome the “transportation fragmentation” that impedes travel in the Bay Area.
Levin said the funding measure would be a critical boost for public transport systems that have suffered not only from the effects of the pandemic but also from “decades of underinvestment.”
The poll's margin of error was +/- 4.0 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
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