Mega-measure: $100 billion traffic-busting tax plan for the Bay Area taking shape

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Bigger than anything the Bay Area has seen before, a nine-county-wide plan to raise $100 billion in taxes over several decades to redefine the region’s transportation network could be ready for public input in the next several months, transportation officials said.

The plan now even has a name: Faster Bay Area.

The idea is to create a truly regional transit system that would more seamlessly connect the Bay Area’s extensive network of rails, buses and ferries, said Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a business advocacy organization that is partnering with the Bay Area Council and the urban planning think-tank SPUR to put the tax on the ballot.

Inspired by the success of two 2016 ballot measures in Seattle and Los Angeles that will raise, respectively, $54 billion and $120 billion over 20 and 40 years, leaders of the three organizations got to thinking: Why not here? They began meeting in January 2017 to craft a plan, seeking input from transportation professionals, transit agency heads and others for what such a regional system might entail. They are still skittish about releasing precise details, saying there’s more work to be done to gather feedback from city leaders, congestion management agencies, transit agencies and commuters.

But any plan likely would include significant improvements to BART and Caltrain service, including a second cross-bay tube or bridge for BART, providing relief for the trains that bottleneck in West Oakland. There could be a vast network of toll lanes that ring the bay and radiate to the north, east and south, sharing lanes with buses, and a more robust expansion of the Bay Area’s ferry network. Details of what the plan would include will be hammered out in the next several months, Guardino said, with the aim of having a final draft by the year’s end.

The goal, he said, is “to build a seamlessly integrated world-class transit system that serves the transit-dependent and lures the non-transit dependent out of their vehicles.”

The problem with traffic in the Bay Area, said Alicia John-Baptiste, president and CEO of SPUR, is that the entire transportation network was designed for cars. BART and Caltrain were crafted as commuter trains, not urban rail systems, which run frequent, all-day service, though BART now functions as one, and Caltrain has indicated it aspires to be one. More than two dozen bus agencies, all operating within distinct fiefdoms, have trouble serving sprawling suburbs that weren’t built with frequent service in mind.

Meanwhile, traffic congestion, measured as the time people spend slogging along freeways at speeds of 35 mph or less, grew 80 percent from 2010 to 2016, and then held steady in 2017, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the region’s transportation planning agency. And there’s not enough space to keep building new freeways, which only get clogged with more cars as the population grows, she said.

“We designed a system 50 to 60 years ago around the concept that everyone would be able to get into their car and get from Point A to Point B,” John-Baptiste said. “As we’ve grown as a region, that’s simply not how it functions today.”

In Seattle, voters in 2016 approved a mix of property, vehicle and sales taxes to raise $54 billion over 20 years to fund 62 miles of new light rail tracks across three counties and a network of buses separated from traffic. The same year, Angelenos approved a county-wide, half-cent sales tax to raise $120 billion over 40 years for a dramatic expansion of the county’s rail, rapid bus and bicycle network.

But just how the Bay Area aims to raise $100 billion or more is still to be determined, said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council. The organizations are beginning to conduct polls to test funding concepts that might include sales, business, property and other taxes. Earlier this year, this news organization partnered with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group on a poll that asked registered voters, among other questions, whether they would support a 1-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects in the Bay Area. Seventy-one percent of respondents answered, “Yes.”

Already though, there appears to be disagreement about what qualifies as “transformational.” At the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s Board of Directors meeting Thursday evening, staff proposed a series of infrastructure improvements on interstates 880 and 280 and highways 101 and 85. But board member John McAllister shot back, arguing for a more regional vision that focused on corridors, not one-off projects.

“We’ve got a lot of projects,” he said, “but they don’t help the region unless we really work to reduce greenhouse gases, reduce congestion, and what’s our tag line? Get people moving.”

In order for the measure to appear on the ballot in all nine counties, the legislature would have to pass a bill allowing the vote, similar to the bill that placed Regional Measure 3 on the ballot, which voters approved last year. The $3 bridge toll increase, spread out over six years, will raise $4.45 billion over the next decade to partially fund some three dozen transportation projects across the Bay Area. Wunderman likened it to a test run for the $100 billion proposed “mega-measure.”

Sure to be contested is whether some of the money from the measure would fund the development of affordable housing, as some public officials and advocacy organizations have suggested. As real estate prices have risen in the nine-county Bay Area, people are increasingly moving farther away in search of affordable homes, Wunderman said, often spending three or more hours each day in their cars getting to and from work.

“The farther people travel, the more demand there is for bigger solutions,” he said. “There is no question this region has to address housing, but how we do that, that is still to be discussed.”

Regional voters regularly list affordable housing and homelessness as the top issue in the Bay Area, Guardino said, with traffic and congestion taking the No. 2 slot. But while there is considerable consensus on how to improve the region’s transportation network, there’s far less agreement on the best way to get the region out of the housing crisis.

“We’re also not closed to including housing,” Guardino said. “But at the end of the day, voters have to be willing to pass something.”

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