Advocates celebrated a major victory Tuesday when they learned that their efforts had successfully restored a $1.1 billion allotment in the state budget for transit operations.
From Seamless Bay Area, one of several groups involved in the effort:
...we blocked the cuts AND won an additional $750M loan to Bay Area transit agencies so they can get through 2026 without needing to make drastic service cuts.
You – along with tens of thousands of Californians and our coalition of 120+ organizations – spoke out in support of transit and won. Whether you sent an email, called your elected representatives, put up flyers, donated, shared the alerts, or did something else to help speak out for transit, this victory wouldn’t have been possible without the work you and everyone else put in. Thank you for being part of this big team effort.
Of course, that is worth celebrating. But it is also just a bridge. Rallies are already planned to push for a regional measure, which, one hopes, will successfully get on the 2026 ballot so the Bay Area can continue to fund vital transit operations. Every few years advocates end up in this same damned fight for funding scraps to keep trains and buses running.
Meanwhile, the advocates at Transform are urging people to sign a petition to stop the California Transportation Commission from awarding $73 million to widen State Route 37 from Solano to Napa. That vote will take place Thursday/tomorrow. As covered in Streetsblog California, by 2040 that highway will be under water—literally.
Jeanie Ward-Waller, interim director of ClimatePlan and the former deputy director of planning and modal programs at Caltrans, and Craig Segall, former deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, had a great Op-Ed in Tuesday's Chronicle about the state's obsession with burning money widening roads, despite the reams of studies that show it actually makes traffic worse:
Right now, the California Transportation Commission is set to vote on half a dozen of these lane widening boondoggles that will widen highways in Los Angeles and Riverside counties, the Central Valley and the Bay Area at a cost of $1.25 billion in our limited tax dollars. It’s well past time to put a stop to this.
They highlighted I-405 through Los Angeles, which has been widened multiple times over the past few decades, making traffic worse every single time. (Caltrans is still planning lots more 405 widening.)
Ward-Waller and Segall are absolutely right. This madness just has to stop. And that's going to start with a different approach to advocacy overall.
This was hinted at during a well-timed SPUR panel discussion Tuesday on state-funding and transit. As Georgia Gann Dohrmann, Assistant Director of Legislative Affairs at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission put it, the state needs to start looking at transit operations as a basic service—like it does with roads and schools. It's not something that should require a struggle every year just to get funding for basic maintenance and operations.
I would add that the same should be true of providing routes that are safe for walking and biking.
But how can that happen in an era of limited budgets? Transform has the right approach: go on the attack on freeway widening, which is the real money pit for transportation dollars. So do the advocates down in San Mateo. The days of fighting for slivers of transit funding or scraps for bike lane while billions are pissed away on freeway widenings must cease. Advocates need to be clear, absolute, and even "radical" about this. If that means, in the short term, sacrificing a bike lane project or even losing transit funding because it's bundled with road widening, so be it.
Want to widen a road, Caltrans? The answer has to be "no." But there's unmet transportation demand? Caltrans has to be told their options are build a new bike route, one fully independent of any road, or a new rail line to solve the problem (or both). If transit already exists on the corridor, Caltrans can fund electrification, double tracks, and operations so trains run every four-to-six minutes all day long. Is there already a bike lane? Then Caltrans can install concrete barriers and make it safe for all users, including children. But widening for more cars has got to be a non-starter.
Highway widening is the true transportation boondoggle that is strangling budgets, fouling our air, and literally killing us. And it makes our transportation problems worse. If we really want to transform our cities, first it has to be stopped cold.
