Transportation Funding

Phil Matier, a pundit for KCBS and the SF Chronicle, has been betraying a rather stunning lack of policy knowledge recently, painting transit in the Bay Area as a boondoggle and wagging his finger at "bicycle lobbyists" for opposing a statewide mandatory helmet law.

Although Governor Jerry Brown's proposed FY 2015 budget showed a decrease in the line item for the Active Transportation Program (ATP), Caltrans Budget Chief Steven Keck assured the California Transportation Commission at its meeting last week that the change was technical and the funding level would be the same as last year's.

Any doubts that most of San Francisco's public space is consumed by private automobiles, whether moving or stored, could probably be put to rest with a quick glance at the city's car-dominated streets. But a new study pulls together some eye-opening numbers about just how unbalanced SF's priorities have been in allocating street space, prioritizing cars over people, and in charging drivers little relative to the costs they incur.

The Board of Supervisors yesterday unanimously approved the original agreement to fund Transbay District transportation upgrades, like the downtown rail extension to the Transbay Transit Center, through development charges. Although supervisors had announced a compromise agreement two weeks ago, some developers apparently backed out of it. City Hall officials decided to move forward with the original agreement, since those developers threatened to file a lawsuit either way.

Developers agreed to pay nearly the full property assessment rates to help fund transportation projects in the Transbay Transit Center District, under an agreement announced by the Board of Supervisors yesterday. Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee stood their ground against the developers, who hired former mayor Willie Brown as a lobbyist to try to lower the rates on the special infrastructure tax district, known as a Mello-Roos District. The move threatened to cut funds from the extension of Caltrain and high-speed rail downtown into the Transbay Center under construction.

Developers who are building towers around the Transbay Transit Center in SoMa are fighting to reduce a special property tax that will be levied on developments in the area. The biggest loser could be the downtown rail extension to bring Caltrain and California high-speed rail into the terminal, as more of the funds for the regional rail hub and other long-term projects would have to come from taxpayers.

The California Transportation Commission has released a list of recommended projects that could get funding from the state's Active Transportation Program. The ATP is a new statewide grant program that funds bicycle and pedestrian improvements throughout California. The list is expected to be approved by the full CTC at its August 20 meeting.

BeyondChron editor Randy Shaw, who gets funding from the Mayor Ed Lee's office for projects like the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, penned a predictable defense of Lee's recent attack on Supervisor Scott Wiener's transit funding ballot measure today. Shaw backed Lee's decision to drop support for the vehicle license fee increase, and argued that Muni's share of the city's general fund has increased enough in recent years, compared to other city services.

Mayor Ed Lee, who has cut into transportation funding by nixing Sunday parking meters and abandoning a proposed vehicle license fee increase, now says that he will punish the six supervisors who voted to approve a ballot measure to increase transportation's share of the general fund. Supervisor Scott Wiener proposed the charter amendment as a stop-gap measure to fund the city's transportation needs, while SF waits two years for the mayor to support a vehicle license fee measure.