Many Bay Area voters want better public transportation and roadways — if wealthy residents and companies pay for them, according to a new poll. But a proposed bill, linked to the survey and intended to improve transit and roads, has already raised hackles at the Valley Transportation Agency, which services Santa Clara County.
Nearly six out of 10 poll respondents said they would support holding a future Bay Area-wide ballot measure that would hike income tax on high earners to pay for an affordable, coordinated network of bus, rail and ferry lines, and improved roads and pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.
“Voters are very much dissatisfied with the state of transportation in the Bay Area,” said Matt Hogan, a partner at Impact Research, which conducted the poll on behalf of nonprofits Seamless Bay Area, which advocates for a unified Bay Area transit system, and Beneficial State Foundation, which works to advance financial justice in banking. “That goes both for public transit and for roads and highways.”
The push to improve public transportation comes as the region’s transit agencies struggle to recover from huge ridership declines wrought by the COVID pandemic and the widespread shift to remote work.
The poll of 600 likely voters indicated 57% of respondents would support a ballot measure as soon as 2026 to raise revenue for integrating the region’s myriad transit agencies and improving public transportation services, roads and infrastructure, as long as strong auditing and oversight were in place and the funding came from a 1% tax on people earning more than $300,000 a year, or households earning more than $500,000.
Respondents also showed significant support for funding projects by boosting payroll taxes on employers with more than $4 million in annual revenue, excluding companies with fewer than 50 workers, Hogan said in a presentation last week on the poll conducted in January.
However, the poll results also revealed substantial divisions. “We do see fairly strong opposition among Republicans,” Hogan said. And nearly half of all respondents wanted local officials to focus on improving roads and highways, while just under 40% wanted a focus on better transit.
The poll was intended to help guide a ballot measure that would go to voters in the Bay Area’s nine counties. Legislation introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, in January represents the first step in the process. SB 925 seeks permission for the Bay Area’s umbrella transportation agency — the Metropolitan Transportation Commission — to seek funding for transit and road improvements via a regional ballot measure.
Proponents of a funding measure want to connect services among the Bay Area’s 27 transit agencies, to make travel throughout the region as fast and smooth as possible, boost use, reduce vehicle emissions — and cut traffic. As the UC Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies noted in August on the state of the region’s roads post-pandemic, “freeways are congested again.”
“Bay Area residents, businesses and visitors demand a world-class transportation system with safe, frequent, reliable and seamless transit service, smooth streets without dangerous potholes, and safe access for those walking and biking,” Wiener said in a news release.
Wiener’s bill contains no details on how money would be raised, what improvements it would pay for, how a streamlined transit system would be managed, or how spending would be overseen.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission voted to support the bill and has presented a wish list for the ballot initiative. The agency would like to see the funding measure raise $1 billion to $2 billion annually through methods that could include a sales tax, an income tax, a payroll tax, a parcel tax, a vehicle registration surcharge or a regional vehicle-miles traveled charge.
Voters surveyed strongly rejected increasing sales or property taxes, Hogan said.
The MTC also wants the funding measure to give it the power to set policy for all 27 Bay Area transit agencies, and to let it withhold funding from transit operators that fail to meet standards on fare payment, inter-service integration and schedule coordination.
Erik Mebust, a spokesman for Wiener, said Friday that the senator would reveal an amended version of his bill with details of his plan March 18. The VTA’s external relations chief Jim Lawson this week said Wiener’s staff has said the senator is “thinking of following” the MTC’s proposals.
The MTC is already receiving pushback from the VTA board and San Jose politicians.
“I have major trepidation about empowering MTC further,” San Jose City Council member and VTA board member Dev Davis said at the VTA’s board meeting Thursday. “Giving them more power over our local transit network sounds to me like we will have less local service, not more local service.”
Lawson said Bay Area-wide transportation coordination “provides little advantage to VTA,” in part because 70% of all trips in Santa Clara County, by transit and other means, stay within the county. Lawson and Davis also raised concerns that the county would shoulder an inordinate funding burden.
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But MTC spokesman John Goodwin said a strong and efficient transit network helps everyone, including those who never take a train, bus or ferry.
“The more people for whom transit is a viable, attractive and competitive option to driving means fewer people competing for scarce roadway space,” Goodwin said.
Goodwin noted that nearly every trip, whether by car, transit, bike or other means, starts and finishes on a local street, but he added that it has not been determined how the share of money raised by such a measure would be divided among transit, road improvements, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure.
Seamless Bay Area policy and advocacy leader Adina Levin noted in a webinar Wednesday that collaboration among transit agencies in the region is optional, and her group wants to make cooperation a legal requirement, to overcome “transit fragmentation” that hampers ease of movement around the Bay Area.
A funding measure would provide a vital boost to public transportation suffering not only from pandemic fallout but from “decades of underinvestment,” Levin said.
The poll had a margin of error of +/- 4.0 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence.