Action alert: More funding needed to rescue transit
Without additional funding from Congress, Bay Area transit agencies will once again face imminent financial disaster. (Photo by Christopher Michel)
Across the country, the COVID-19 crisis has battered transit agency budgets. Here in the Bay Area, mobility data show that transit ridership has fallen by 80 percent, stripping transit operators of the fare revenues they rely on to maintain service. While car trips are slowly returning, transit ridership remains at historic lows.
Funding appropriated by Congress in the CARES Act - including $25 billion to fund transit and $1.3 billion for Bay Area transit agencies - has staved off an imminent funding crisis for transit operators. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has now allocated $780 million to Bay Area transit agencies and established a commission to allocate the remaining $507 million.
While this money has been vital to balancing agency financials in the short-term, it will not provide the security our region and nation need over the coming months and years. The transportation advocacy group Transit Center estimates that funding from the federal CARES Act will last only 5 to 8 months in the Bay Area.
And while the HEROES Act - the relief bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 15 - includes $16 billion funding for transit, Senate Republicans have publicly stated that they won’t support the legislation.
Without additional funding from Congress, transit agencies in the Bay Area will once again be facing imminent financial disaster. To support transit operators and maintain vital transit service as the nation recovers from the COVID crisis, Transportation for America (T4A) is now organizing advocates across the nation to call on Congress to appropriate an additional $32 billion in transit funding in the next federal COVID relief bill.
Transit supporters can use T4A’s easy-to-use online tool to identify their Congressional representatives and generate a customizable message about why transit agencies are in urgent need of additional relief.
More funding, targeted more effectively
T4A supports targeting new stimulus funding at the transit agencies that have experienced the greatest financial impact due to the COVID crisis. This funding would help everyone by:
Restoring full transit service for those who need it most: agencies must be able to run as many buses and trains as needed to eliminate unsafe crowding
Preventing cars from flooding our highways: reduced transit ridership could lead to a traffic nightmare, doubling commute times in the Bay Area
Providing economic stimulus: research on the 2009 financial crisis found that operational funding for transit had the largest economic impact of any stimulus spending
Our federal, state, and local governments must work together to support transit over the long term, and to ensure that our recovery doesn’t simply rebuild the unsustainable transportation system of yesterday.
Risks for transit agencies as during the recovery
Caltrain is in an especially precarious financial position among Bay Area transit agencies. (Photo by Claire Griffiths)
While many communities across the country have succeeded in flattening the curve on coronavirus, it has not been eliminated. Travel and spending will remain depressed for the foreseeable future. Transit agencies are not expecting a quick or complete rebound of transit ridership and revenue. And there is a real risk of a second peak in infections later in the year that could force a return to the most stringent shelter-in-place orders put in place in the early weeks of the crisis.
As a result, a our economy slowly reopens, transit agencies will need to maintain a high level of service on key routes to prevent unsafe crowding and to encourage riders to return to the system. The possibility of ridership remaining low is particularly dangerous for agencies like BART, which rely primarily on farebox revenue to support their service. Agencies that rely on sales taxes will also be facing financial difficulties, as these taxes have declined substantially due to widespread business shutdowns.
Caltrain is perhaps in the most precarious financial condition of all Bay Area agencies. Along with a high farebox recovery ratio, Caltrain relies on funding from VTA, SamTrans, and SFMTA rather than a dedicated revenue source. As a result, the agency announced in May that it risks a full system shutdown in the absence of additional relief funding. In that scenario, the four highway lanes’ worth of traffic that Caltrain carries would be dumped onto the region’s roads, and the multi-billion-dollar new electric fleet and infrastructure - designed to modernize the system - would go unused.
Without additional relief funding for transit agencies in the Bay Area and beyond, in the coming months we will return to a world even more dominated by cars than before. Instead, we must act together to advocate for funding that supports transit agencies - and the communities that depend on them - in this time of crisis.