America’s Billionaire Capital Is Poised to Gut Public Transit

When Jillian Crochet, a disabled power wheelchair user and artist in Oakland, California, waits to take the bus, she already faces delays that many other riders don’t. People are invariably blocking the wheelchair spot, even if it’s not too crowded, and she can end up waiting 20 minutes longer for a new bus. That wait may soon get even longer.

The San Francisco Bay Area is facing a funding crisis for many of its public transit programs. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), which serves riders across five of the area’s most populous counties, is considering cutting 70 percent of its service and closing up to 15 of 50 stations, some 30 percent. Caltrain, the area’s leading local commuter rail system, could discontinue weekend service and shutter up to a third of its stations. Two major local transit systems, San Francisco’s Muni and AC Transit in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, could also shut down lines. Paratransit would also be impacted, even beyond the potentially longer wait times and fewer slots that transit cuts will inevitably cause.

“The biggest thing about paratransit [that] people don’t realize is it’s tied to our fixed route,” said Michelle Rousey, a member of the East Bay Paratransit Access Committee. “So if you cut fixed-route [lines], you’re inevitably cutting paratransit users too.” 

In November, voters in the Bay Area counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara will vote on whether or not to pass a sales tax of up to one cent on the dollar for over a decade to continue to fund transit and improvement projects. Proponents of the measure estimate it’ll bring in just under $1 billion annually. Despite a court case by opponents arguing that the ballot measure was biased and misleading—which a judge ruled against, finding it “unpersuasive”—the ballot measure has received relatively little organized pushback.

In effect, San Francisco–area voters are faced with a referendum on whether the general public in a highly car-dependent area—and one of the richest parts of the country—will consider further taxes to fund a public good.

The area’s transit funding crisis was exacerbated by ridership that plunged at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and remains too low to fill the coffers of BART and other services. A poll published in early October by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit that has provided regional data for over 30 years, found that 48 percent of voters surveyed across the five Bay Area counties voting on the tax supported it, leaving the outcome an open question.

“For a few years there was federal funding that helped keep the agencies going, as obviously there was hope that ridership would recover,” said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for the campaign in support of the ballot measure. But Bay Area public transit is still in crisis, leaving no adequate options beyond the November ballot measure.

At the state level, California—despite its size and wealth—does not fund its transit as well as some large states.

“Pennsylvania, New York, they deliver more of the proportion of the transit systems’ budgets than places like BART do,” Cretan told me. San Francisco also has a separate ballot measure for a parcel and property tax to continue funding city-level public transit, which would generate around $180 million annually.

Bay Area transit already has gaps and shortcomings, especially around accessibility for disabled people. In interviews, more than half a dozen transit-dependent disabled and aging Bay Area residents I spoke to—groups that are disproportionately reliant on public transit—highlighted the importance of adequately funded transit for their autonomy.

“The Bay Area has a very uneven transit network,” San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute education director Asha Weinstein Agrawal told me. “There are some communities, particularly the downtowns of some of the older cities, that have quite a rich network of bus and rail service. But there are many, many parts of the Bay Area where there’s [already] virtually no transit service, or it is so infrequent as to be of relatively little use.” 

For Jackie Liu, an autistic artist with Long Covid who lives in Daly City, the fact that a region like the Bay Area has allowed transit funding to reach a crisis point feels like a “slap in the face.” Liu depends on public transit to get to her doctor’s appointments in San Francisco.

“Considering the fact that we are in the heart of one of the most economically prosperous regions of the economy for the upper echelons,” Liu said—the area boasts the country’s highest concentration of billionaires—“I just feel like it’s a stark demonstration of the inequality that exists in our society.”