Transportation Funding

Municipal Transportation Agency Executive Director Nat Ford has been on the job for more than three years now and is a veteran public transportation manager. He began his career as a train conductor 26 years ago at New York's MTA before moving on to a number of managerial positions. He was an assistant chief transportation officer at BART before being named to oversee Atlanta's public transit system.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty, armed with numbers and documents he obtained detailing MTA work orders from other city departments, scolded two members of the San Francisco Police Department's top brass Wednesday, calling the department's raid on Muni's budget "excessive" and "unbelievable."

The Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), a division of the MTC, is expected to approve a $1.3 million contract with TY Lin International consulting to prepare a Project Study Report (PSR) that would analyze the feasibility of adding two pedestrian and bicycle paths on the west span of the Bay Bridge (PDF). TY Lin is already a contractor on the new east span of the Bay Bridge being constructed between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland.

The Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors, in a marathon meeting that lasted nearly six hours, voiced support for fare hikes, but balked at a budget proposal to charge 50 cents for transfers and indicated it favors service reduction options that will impose the least impact on Muni riders to close a $129 million deficit.

The MTA holds its first public hearing today on its proposals to raise fares, fines, fees and reduce service. The agency is facing a $129 million deficit and proposing eliminating up to nine bus routes and reducing service on at least 29 other routes. The hearing is part of the MTA Board's regular meeting. It begins at 2 p.m. in Room 400 at City Hall. We'll be staffing.

The Municipal Transportation Agency has released a revised budget proposal for the 2009-2010 fiscal year that calls for eliminating up to nine bus routes, and scaling back service on as many as 29 routes, including some popular lines, in a series of cost-cutting moves that would help Muni close a $129 million budget gap.

When we wrote about the trial pedestrian plaza on 17th Street and Market Street that DPW expects to start this May, the story generated numerous doubts about how the city would create a successful public space out of a busy street abutting a gas station. 

In 2005, with frustration and anger mounting over service cuts and fare hikes for AC Transit riders, who are mostly people of color, a coalition of riders, labor and environmental justice advocates filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), accusing the agency of racial discrimination in the way it doles out transit funding. It claimed the MTC has a long history of channeling funding to mostly white riders on Caltrain and BART at the expense of AC Transit bus riders of color.

I'm sorry I'm late.  You know how it is, if it's not in the Facebook calendar, I'm pretty much worthless at remembering.