At last week’s BART board budget workshop addressing the agency’s financial challenges, a number of BART board members encouraged exploring consolidation with other agencies.
Board Chair Janice Li suggested that BART explore expanding the BART district to incorporate San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties into the BART district.
Li also encouraged exploring consolidations, especially focusing on rail agencies, and/or functions. Li said that it would be worth studying whether there might be potential efficiencies or improvements in capital or operations. Other BART board members including Foley, Raburn and Dufty supported expanding the district, and exploring potential efficiencies from consolidations of agencies or functions.
Voters in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties have not been represented on the BART board since the counties opposed joining the BART system when it was approved in the 1960s, even though the system later expanded in San Mateo County in the 90s including the airport extension, and to Santa Clara County (funded in 2000, first station opened in 2017).
In a recent op-ed from former state legislator Jerry Hill and former Caltrain board member Charles Stone, the former leaders disagree with expanding the regional rail district, expressing concern about San Mateo County residents putting more funding into BART, given BART’s financial challenges in the wake of Covid, as its ridership and revenue recovers gradually.
However, Caltrain’s ridership and revenue recovery is lagging behind BART, with 40% ridership recovery compared to BART’s 50%. Additional operating funding is likely to be needed – even with the launch of Caltrain electrification next fall.
The region’s transit agencies are currently working together with MTC on laying the groundwork for a regional funding measure for 2026 to sustain, improve, and coordinate public transportation across the region. It is hard to believe that having competing separate ballot measures for BART, Caltrain, SFMTA and AC Transit would do better than regional funding that included resources for highly popular initiatives to coordinate transit.
The op-ed expresses high confidence that current regional collaboration and Caltrain’s staff sharing with SamTrans are already resulting in a well-coordinated, efficient transit system. .
Several recent events show there are clear opportunities for better coordination and efficiency. BART’s recent schedule change degraded the Caltrain connection at Millbrae. Recently published rider surveys from both BART and Caltrain, which were funded and conducted separately, showed extremely similar results, suggesting opportunities to consolidate this sort of project.
Also, BART and Caltrain are planning to study standardizing their fares – a recommendation from the region’s adopted Fare Policy Vision that was projected to increase ridership at the scale of another Caltrain. But BART and Caltrain aren’t planning to get started until after the rollout of the next-generation Clipper in 2024, more than three years after the recommendation was adopted.
What do you think? Are their benefits to making Caltrain and BART act more like a single integrated system for riders? Should there be study of opportunities for consolidations of functions? Of agencies?
Please share your thoughts in comments.
MTC is asking residents to fill out a survey that never asks if people want to pay more taxes; instead, the higher tax is a given. Instead, it asks how people want to spend the money. There are five possible answers: transit, transit, bike lanes, transit, and transit. This “mega-measure” nonsense is quite annoying. Vote NO.
Over the last several elections, voters in Santa Clara County have passed multiple tax and fee increases including gas taxes, the Caltrain Measure RR tax, two bridge toll increases, three VTA sales taxes, Santa Clara County’s Measure A 1/8 cent sales tax, the state prop 30 ¼ cent sales tax and the 2010 Measure B Vehicle Registration Fee of $10. Additionally, we’re on the hook to pay back numerous state bond issues including high speed rail, the Proposition 1 water bond and the infrastructure bonds of 2006.
All this nickel and diming contributes into making the Bay Area a horribly expensive place to live; especially for people of modest means, who must pay the greatest percentage of their income in these regressive taxes and fees. Each increase by itself does not amount to much, but the cumulative effect is to add to the unaffordability of the region.
Before increasing taxes YET AGAIN, waste needs to be removed from transportation projects. For example, we need to eliminate the redundant and BART extension between the San Jose and Santa Clara Caltrain stations. The BART segment from these stations would duplicate both the existing Caltrain line and VTA’s 22 and 522 buses to a station that has approximately 1000 riders each weekday.
These agencies and networks definitely need to be merged, integrated and consolidated to make things more efficient and better connected. It’s all one region, we shouldn’t have so many separate transit systems that don’t talk to each other. Even MUNI vs BART being different things was very confusing to me when I first move to the city.
Merging BART and Caltrain might be a good idea for the future, (like when BART is extended to Santa Clara) This is just not the time. I love BART, but is just to big and may in fact not focus on the Caltrain portion of the total system.
Better to wait until you can do it right.
But when it is done, it might be a good idea to include MUNI and Santa Clara VTA rail.