CA Transit Task Force: Fare and service coordination, transit priority, and safety key to transformation

Expediting transit priority projects, improving inter-agency service and fare coordination, and safety policies were the focus of the Statewide Transit Transformation Task Force’s (TTTF) fourth meeting in San Francisco on June 17th. 

The TTTF, a major effort to transform transit in California, is focused on developing benchmarks for service levels, funding recommendations, governance reforms, and other changes needed to grow transit ridership across the state. The slides from the meeting and the video recording can be found here. You can also read our live tweet thread of the meeting here and the recap of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd meetings. 

The Task Force discussion contained the seeds of potentially powerful strategies to make transit more appealing and convenient for riders, leading to increased ridership and better performance on climate and other goals. Advocates will need to pay attention to ensure that there are strong recommendations and organize advocacy efforts to get the recommendations implemented when the Task Force is over.

AC Transit, BART, and Muni ride-along kicks off meeting

Bay Area advocacy groups – including Seamless Bay Area, Public Advocates, San Francisco Transit Riders, and Senior and Disability Action – organized an optional ‘ride-along’ with Task Force members to their San Francisco meeting with the goal of centering the needs of riders within the Task Force. Agency staff from AC Transit, BART, and MTC participated and highlighted various initiatives underway to improve the rider experience, including the Bay Area’s Transit Transformation Action Plan. 

The ride attracted approximately 20 participants, including 7 task force members who met up in Downtown Oakland near the 19th St. BART Station, and led to important coverage by CBS News about the Task Force and the needs of riders.

Transit Prioritization 

Staff from SFMTA led the Task Force’s discussion about transit priority, sharing recent local successes. Between 2002 and 2019, the average bus speed in California had fallen from 12.5 to 11.7 mph. Transit priority infrastructure upgrades help deliver faster, more reliable, more cost-effective service by reducing the time transit vehicles spend on congested streets, stuck at traffic lights, or pulling in and out of travel lanes. These improvements range from transit lanes, transit signal priority, transit bulbs and islands, updated stop spacing, pedestrian bulbs, and road diets. 

Various transit priority projects in San Francisco.

Transit priority projects enable transit agencies to provide a higher level of service for the same amount of investment. For example, the Task Force presentation showed that a transit agency would need 6 buses to provide 10-minute frequencies on a 60-minute end-to-end route. Reducing the end-to-end travel time to 30 minutes would mean only needing 3 buses to provide 10-minute frequencies. 

Providing the same level of frequency on a bus route becomes more expensive when buses move slower and travel times increase.

SFMTA’s Julie Kirschbaum presented to the Task Force that 80% of Muni trips happen on surface level streets without transit prioritization. As a result, congestion heavily impacts service quality and cost. The most recent Muni ridership data from May 2024 shows systemwide ridership recovery at 76% of pre-pandemic levels – but several lines with transit priority improvements are exceeding pre-pandemic ridership. Based on the most recent data, Muni’s 49-Van Ness has attracted 138% of pre-pandemic ridership and the 22/55 on 16th St. is at 117%.

The expansion of San Francisco’s transit lanes from 2006 to 2023. For context, some 80% of Muni trips happen on surface streets without transit prioritization.

Kirschbaum said her agency learned many lessons from the 49 Van Ness BRT project, which took nearly 20 years to complete due to a complex approval process that required approval from multiple agencies and a time-intensive community input process. Lessons included pursuing less capital-intensive transit priority projects for most corridors, adopting an interactive and incremental approach, and when possible, joining existing utility projects instead of serving as a project lead. 

The Task Force discussed several potential policy changes to make transit prioritization projects easier to implement, more cost effective, and quicker. 

  • Revaluate permitting regulations, with some entity having the power to say “yes”. Kate Miller of Napa Vine Transit, Rashidi Barnes of Tri Delta Transit, and Alix Bockelman of MTC discussed the difficulties their agencies face implementing transit priority projects because cities, Counties and CalTrans control road infrastructure. They all called for help from the state to help deliver projects, either incentivizing or mandating cities work more cooperatively to implement transit priority projects. Michael Pimental of the CA Transit Association noted that CEQA exemptions for bus rapid, light rail, pedestrian, and bike projects under SB 922 (Wiener, 2022) has helped speed up project delivery, but will need to be reauthorized before it expires in 2030.

  • Create standardized BRT guides to lower costs and streamline implementation. Eli Lipman of Move LA said that cities need state-level planning and engineering resources. Small cities often don’t have the staff or resources to do this work and a state-level team can provide incentives for cities to implement transit priority projects. 

  • Evaluate opportunities for Caltrans to build BRT-specific elements (i.e. bus shelters) on its assets, and potentially act as a project manager for non-Caltrans roads. Pimentel noted SB 960 (Wiener, 2024) will strengthen a requirement that Caltrans develop a transit priority policy on key state-owned roads and improve pedestrian and cyclist safety on these corridors. Seamless Bay Area also supports SB 960. 

Fare coordination and integration 

Some trips require multiple transit agencies or making intra-transit agency transfers, but riders can be discouraged by multiple or higher fares. Price-sensitive riders often opt for longer, slower, and less direct routes to reduce travel expenses. This further exacerbates inequities in access to the necessities of life. 

Bill Bacon of MTC and Felix Fung of the Ontario Ministry of Transportation presented on the Ontario One Fare Program, which started in February, eliminating multiple charges for riders transferring between systems while allowing transit agencies to keep their existing fare structures. The greater Ontario region is similar to the Bay Area, with more than 20 different transit agencies that set their own fares and schedules. The elimination of transfer fares is anticipated to increase ridership by 8 million rides per year and can help save riders $1,600 in fares per year, based on 5 cross-boundary trips per week. 

The potential challenges to implementing fare integration in California are the need for funding to mitigate the financial risk to agencies and non-standardized fare payment technologies in some regions. 

The Task Force discussed the following potential strategies: 

  • The establishment of a “responsible entity” to ensure fare and revenue coordination in the short-term and standardization in the long-term. Seamless Bay Area’s Ian Griffiths spoke up strongly in favor of this recommendation, noting that in spite of its benefits, fare integration often doesn’t happen unless a regional authority is specifically tasked with promoting coordination. (Check out our Integrated Transit Fare Tool to see our vision for a unified, equitable Bay Area fare system.)

  • Ensuring the acceptance of open payments (credit/debit/mobile wallet). Carl Sedoryk, CEO of Monterey-Salinas Transit District, noted that his agency successfully implemented an open payment system with help from the California Integrated Travel Project, or Cal-ITP. Sedoryk said there need to be incentives so agencies across the state adopt open loop payment systems. Pimentel also supports more state-level technical and procurement support for implementation of standardized fare payment technologies.

  • Conditioning of funding on long-term participation in these goals. Griffiths noted that in Switzerland, funding is conditioned on participation in fare coordination efforts. He recommended that a new source of funding from the state should be tied to participation in regional fare-structure and development of open payment systems. Alix Bockelman of MTC said she wants to see if the state will play a bigger part in subsidizing potential lost revenue from free transfer programs. She notes that MTC does not have a lot of flexible operating dollars and transit agencies will not want to reduce their fare revenues given the anticipated $500+ million annual operating deficit across Bay Area transit agencies.

Coordinated scheduling, mapping, and wayfinding

Riders are often required to transfer due to service area boundaries and journey distance – but often face long transfer times due to uncoordinated schedules or issues with service reliability. An example, Miller noted that Napa Valley Transit faced a challenge when BART changed their schedules and broke a coordinated transfer between their agencies. 

CalSTA staff presented the experience of Switzerland in promoting greater ridership through nation-wide schedule coordination, consistent with prior research completed by Seamless Bay Area. Coordinated schedules are especially important between low-frequency routes, where missed transfers can impose significant wait time penalties for riders. Importantly, Switzerland plans its capital investments around expanding its integrated time-table, improving transit reliability and increasing transit speed. 

Policy reforms discussed by the Task Force included:

  1. Developing an organized process among transit agencies, the State of California, and other stakeholders to oversee joint timetable implementation, facilitate agency collaboration, and provide guidance/standards on balancing local and regional operations. 

  2. Developing common data collection, analysis, and publication standards for transit agencies to inform decisions and better support cross-agency collaboration. 

Griffiths added that a lead agency should recognize the most regionally significant routes/stations and work to prioritize necessary improvements. 

Safety and cleanliness 

In terms of workforce safety, the Technical Working Group proposed installing protective doors for bus operators. For rider safety, they proposed creating or expanding safety ambassador programs and physical infrastructure upgrades such as constructing emergency call boxes and increasing the quality/quantity of security cameras. 

Next Steps

The next Task Force meeting will be on August 29th in Los Angeles to discuss what a desired level of service implies for operations expenditures, workforce development, and employee engagement. 

Kaleo Mark