BART said it would have to close stations and stop weekend service.
AC Transit said entire lines would be cut.
With anemic ridership and rising costs, Bay Area transit agencies have one common rescue plan: a sales tax on the ballot this November.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission announced this week that the tax measure, officially known as Connect Bay Area, qualified for the November 2026 ballot after election officials certified more than 300,000 signatures in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. This significantly exceeded the required number of signatures – by approximately 66%.
“The overwhelming number of signatures that brought this measure to the ballot reflects broad public support for transit and a growing awareness of the urgency of the future of public transportation in the Bay Area,” the agency said in a press release.
The measure proposes an additional 0.5% sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties and an additional 1% sales tax in San Francisco to raise approximately $14 billion for public transit over 14 years.
But some people paying attention to the measure have expressed concern about whether the widespread rejection of the Bay Area tax measure in June’s primary election could mean voters could oppose the measure.
Voters in counties that would need to pass the measure for it to take effect rejected tax initiatives at the ballot box in June, sending a signal that they were tired of paying more taxes for the same basic services. Oakland saw the collapse of Measure E, the package tax. In Contra Costa County, a sales tax measure designed to help health care programs for low-income communities failed. San Francisco’s tax on overpaid CEOs failed. Even a tax measure to build new libraries in El Cerrito failed.
Yet when we spoke to the activists leading the ballot initiative this November, none of them seemed particularly concerned. They told The Oaklandside they see momentum toward securing a simple majority and giving transit agencies a much-needed boost.
No “coordinated and funded opposition”
Carter Lavin of the Transbay Coalition, a transit advocacy group, noted that the only transit-related tax measure on the June ballot, Marin County’s SMART sales tax, passed with 70% of the vote. And he noted that at least one of the tax measures that failed, Measure G in Contra Costa County, failed despite exceeding the 50% plus one threshold needed to pass a transit measure in the Connect Bay area. (Measure G required 55% of the vote to pass.)
He said it was easy for voters to understand how the collapse of public transport could affect everyone, increasing traffic and pollution and making parking and access to jobs more difficult. Lavigne said that’s why the transit measure hasn’t faced the kind of organized opposition that Oakland’s Measure E or San Francisco’s CEO tax faced.
“We feel like people are still looking to invest in their communities, and I think what’s really key is that we see a difference in elections where there was a concerted, funded opposition versus elections where there wasn’t,” Lavigne said. “The regional measure is supported by labor unions, businesses, progressives, immigrant rights groups, health care and housing groups.”
However, LaVine said the lack of opposition doesn’t mean the measure will be a cakewalk.
He told us that the groups he works with in the region have amassed an army of more than 1,000 volunteers who are knocking on doors, making public service videos and interacting with people at major events this month, including World Cup parties at Plaza San Pedro in San Jose.
“We help people do the math so they understand what the tax does for them,” he said. “For the vast majority of people in the Bay Area, the sales tax money will more than pay for itself.”
Abibat Rahman-Davies, transport policy manager for TransForm CA, an Auckland-based public transport advocacy group, said campaign leaders recognize people are more worried about costs than ever given the economy is not in the best shape. That’s why the TransForm coalition, which includes Voices for Public Transit, has focused on detailing the benefits of the measure to powerful groups such as labor unions like SEIU 1021.
“We educate nonprofits and advocacy groups about the nature of the measure, convince them to endorse it, then they take it back to their communities and talk to the people they serve to get them to support the measure and vote yes in November,” he said.
Rahman-Davis said many of the groups they made presentations to were unaware of the financial straits facing transit agencies. He said communicating the severity of the problem will be a focus over the next two months, now that signatures have been verified and the measure is on the ballot.
Rahman-Davis said he is confident the measure will pass because the November general election typically draws more voters.
Accounting measures can win over skeptics
We reached out to Ethan Elkind, an attorney who directs the climate program at UC Berkeley Law School and writes about transit policy, including the history of the Los Angeles subway rail system. He told The Oaklandside that concerns about the cost of living, coupled with concerns about operational problems and mismanagement of funds at transit agencies, are serious enough issues in the current voting climate that if the measure required a two-thirds majority, it would likely fail.
Some people will always vote against government spending, he said, and then “there’s sort of a centrist group of voters who feel that if agencies are being wasteful,” they might vote against it, too, he said. That’s why Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators added cost accounting, such as oversight committees and county oversight, as a requirement for the measure, as they did for previous emergency transit funds. “It could be the difference between 49% and 51% of the vote,” Elkind said.
Another surprise from the November election, Elkind said, is that people aren’t using public transportation as often as they did before the pandemic, leaving some feeling less connected to it. Although he noted that perhaps the same number of people are still using it, just less frequently due to work-from-home initiatives, including many people in Oakland who ride BART.
However, Elkind said initiatives to vote on transit funds have generally been successful. “BART is central to the economy and transit of the Bay Area as a whole,” he said.
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