Why the Clipper Executive Board isn’t a long-term solution for transit network management

As part of its work to help Bay Area transit operators navigate and emerge from the COVID crisis, the Blue Ribbon Transit Recovery Task Force has begun to discuss the goals and functions of a possible Network Manager entity to coordinate Bay Area transit. As these regional conversations begin, general managers and senior agency staff have been providing their boards with updates, including the boards of SamTrans, Caltrain, VTA, WETA, SFMTA, County Connection and others.

Even before the Blue Ribbon Task Force starts to set up and analyze options, the transit agency leaders have started presenting an option that they prefer: an enhanced version of the current Clipper Executive Board (CEB), an entity that currently consists consists of 8 transit agency General Managers and the Executive Director of MTC which was created to manage the Clipper fare payment card program.

Seamless does not believe that the Clipper Executive Board is a good model to govern transit network coordination, fundamentally because it is a body composed of executive staff who report to separate boards, rather than being a board of policymakers.

The problem that the Clipper Executive Board model is intended to solve is the preservation of local control while improving transit coordination.   The presentations to transit agency boards have emphasized the fact that transit agencies currently have the power and authority to set their own fares, schedules, and levels of service.

While the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been legally mandated to coordinate fares and schedules since the passage of legislation in the 1990s, these mandates conflict with the mandates and powers of individual transit agency boards. As we covered in a recent blog post, these conflicting mandates are an important reason why the MTC has not to date fulfilled the role of a network manager. 

In presentation to their boards, transit general managers have highlighted that achieving better customer experience for riders will entail a loss of local control by individual transit agencies  (see excerpt below)

The recommendation being brought forward to multiple transit boards based on discussions amongst agency GMs is to preserve each board’s local control by enhancing the Clipper Executive Board. 

With the onset of the pandemic, the transit agency general managers began meeting more frequently, and have engaged in unprecedented levels of coordination, taking steps like aligning schedule changes between BART and connecting buses, and allowing SamTrans and Golden Gate buses to pick up local passengers in San Francisco, providing service to relieve Muni buses too crowded for Covid distancing standards.

The agencies recommend making this federated interagency collaboration permanent and more extensive. It is valuable to have a set of agency professionals working together to improve coordination; continuing and enhancing interagency cooperation would be positive and welcome.

But, a set of transit agency general managers are not, and cannot be, a policymaking body in charge of and accountable for major and sustainable changes.

As these agency presentations highlight, transit agency boards currently have the authority to set fares, schedules and service levels.  If the Clipper Executive Board were to propose major changes that affect multiple agencies, those policy changes would need to go back to up to 27 different agency boards for separate review and approval in order to go into effect. 

For transit riders and institutional customers to advocate for customer-friendly policies, they would need to make the time to communicate to dozens of different boards around the region.  

And systems that require simultaneous approval by many boards risk being unstable, since any participant can back away from the agreement. This has frequently been the case through the years with interagency transfer agreements, which have come and gone as agencies consider and reconsider their finances and priorities.

Alternatively, the agency boards could in theory delegate to their GMs the power to work with other agency executives to make the major policy decisions about fares, schedules, and service standards.  That setup would raise major questions of accountability, because transit executives aren’t policymakers accountable to their constituents. For this reason it seems unlikely that Board members would grant such authority to their general managers, and voluntarily sustain such an arrangement.

As an example of such accountability, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission staff recently crafted a strategy for PlanBayArea that would have required 60% of workers at large employers to work from home, with the intent of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Numerous employees, employers, cities and transit agencies spoke and wrote to the MTC Commissioners raising serious concerns about how this proposal could have severe, negative impacts, and might have unintended consequences that would increase emissions.  The Commissioners responded to constituents’ concerns, and staff crafted a much better alternative that the board then approved. An important aspect of effective governance is this kind of accountability to constituents.

This is not an argument in favor of designating MTC in its current form to be the network manager - we have described in our recent post why we think it is not sufficient, and will be proposing some other options. However, it is a good example of a policy governing board serving as the focus of accountability.

The most recent iterations of the transit agency recommendation for a federated model - building off the Clipper Executive Board as the network manager - includes a proposal to add a policy advisory body.  This is good, but policy advisory bodies do not have decisionmaking authority, and therefore do not provide robust accountability to the public. Cities and agencies have many advisory bodies that provide helpful roles in advising policymakers. The City Councils and Boards themselves are the policymakers and the focus of accountability.

A clear example of the limits of a federated model can be seen in the options that are being analyzed in the region’s fare integration and coordination study. The staff report from a recent presentation to the fare integration study advisory body notes that If the region preserves local control for each agency,  there will continue to be fare variation from operator to operator, and constant consensus building will be needed to maintain consistency. The options that provide stable, consistent, easy-to-understand fares for customers require institutional change, and converting some local control to regional authority. 

In summary, a federated model building on the Clipper Executive Board may be a useful interim step to improve transit coordination. But it is not a model of a stable and  effective network manager, because transit executives are not policymakers.

The executives are accountable first and foremost to their own board, meaning that changes they achieve together are likely to be limited and fragile. Any regional solutions are likely to be “lowest common denominator solutions” that have the least local agency opposition, rather than solutions that provide the most net benefits to riders. If they propose substantive changes, those decisions need to go back for approval to many separate boards. If the boards delegate firmly to the executives, then there is a lack of accountability to constituents.   

In the coming months, the Blue Ribbon Task Force will be considering multiple options to provide network management for Bay Area transit. At Seamless Bay Area, we believe there are options that provide more powerful and nimble decision-making, and better accountability than the Clipper Executive Board model. Stay tuned for analysis of additional options.