San Francisco

Measure RTM in the Bay Area: Why Vote Yes, and Why It Matters Nationwide

Posted on October 31, 2026 in Advocacy, San Francisco 9

There are lots of reasons to be worried or excited about the upcoming US midterms, but as a transit advocate, I’m most worried about the San Francisco Bay Area’s Measure RTM, which would raise the sales tax by half a cent (a full cent in San Francisco) for 14 years to prevent catastrophic cuts to the Bay Area’s busiest transit services.

This measure will have consequences nationwide. Its failure, which polls suggest is possible, would intimidate any other US metro area that is thinking of seeking transit funding at the ballot box. All over the country, people will say, “if the most liberal metro area in the country won’t vote for transit, what hope do we have?” So the likely outcome of RTM’s failure is more of what we’re seeing now across the US: Massive, ruinous cuts in transit service, done in many cities without even asking the voters if this is what they want.

Contents

Why Transit is in Trouble Across the US
How Bad Would the Cuts Be?
But Would These Cuts Really Happen?
But there’s all this other money!
Is the NO Campaign Being Straight With Us?
Coda: Aren’t You Consultants Just Feathering Your Nests?

Why Transit is in Trouble Across the US

US public transit agencies are in financial trouble almost everywhere, and for the same reasons:

Large urban agencies were very dependent on fare revenue before Covid, especially from rush hour commuters. Covid and working from home have eliminated much of this revenue source. Competent agencies have redesigned their service to match the all-day, all-direction markets that people still value, but it is unreasonable to expect a return to 2019 ridership and revenue anytime soon.
Running a bus or train has become more expensive, mostly because of the rising cost of labor. It’s fun to blame unions for this, but the real culprit is the free market for labor. The explosion of delivery services has created a huge supply of jobs for people who like driving, so transit agencies are having to pay more for these skills. Ask your transit agency if they have had trouble hiring and retaining drivers and mechanics. If they have, that means wages aren’t too high for the market.
Security has become an all-consuming concern since Covid. This issue is both a real concern and cynically amplified in the right-wing media. Many urban agencies have dramatically increased what they spend on security. Now, although crime on transit is way down (BART crime went down 41% from 2024 to 2025), few agencies feel they can dial back this spending.
Some agencies have other issues. For example, a great deal of rail transit was built in the 1970s through 1990s, and much of this infrastructure needs refurbishment.

How Bad Would the Cuts Be?

Very, very bad.

BART, the transit backbone of the central Bay Area, would cut frequencies to every 30 minutes even on some of its busiest segments, such as the one through Berkeley, as well as on almost all of its suburban network. This drop will cause a dramatic ridership loss, because BART will cease to be a service that is coming whenever you need it, and instead become a service that you must plan your life around. All over the industry, ridership data shows us that 30-minute service is much more than twice as bad as 15-minute service, although it costs only half as much.
Next summer, BART would shut down its lowest ridership segments, probably including the Dublin, Antioch, and Oakland Airport links, and close lower-ridership stations throughout the system.

The details of these service cuts have not been adopted by the BART Board, but this is the amount of service cut that would be needed if RTM fails. If they don’t close these stations, they will probably have to close others.

Caltrain would fall back from 30-minute frequency to 60, end service at 9 pm, cut weekend service, and close 10 of its 31 stations. This line serves a long string of walkable downtowns between San Francisco and San Jose, and should be running every 15 minutes. Running every hour, it will be the service that people remember from before it was electrified: Fast when it comes, but probably not coming when you need it. Elimination of weekend service will drive away anyone who commutes on both weekdays and weekend days, a significant share of the transit-amenable population.
Bus networks throughout the five affected counties would also have to make major cuts in both frequency and coverage.

Will this increase traffic? Definitely, but it will do much worse things:

It will undermine efforts to develop denser housing around major transit stations, to address the housing affordability crisis.
It will devastate the lives of many people living without cars. Some of them will buy cars, while many others will just lose jobs, educational opportunities, and so on.

But Would These Cuts Really Happen?

Sometimes, transit agencies promise they will have to cut if a measure fails, and then the measure fails and they don’t.

This happens because the actual failure of the measure causes a sudden increase in focus on the part of elected officials. The Bay Area has a few inspired leaders who care deeply about transit, but there are also a lot of passive or uninterested leaders, and it’s not unusual for those to be roused only when things are truly on the edge of disaster and everyone is calling them demanding solutions. This relentless apathy of the powerful, which has been worse since Covid, is one of the main reasons that US transit so often seems to be in crisis. Transit has crises because only a crisis makes apathetic leaders care.

In the Bay Area’s case, however, there just may not be time to enact another solution, because BART reports being very close to the cliff. Their catastrophic service cuts are scheduled for January and July of 2027. Could some politicians come up with a one-time fix that will push that back a year to give them time to work? It has happened. Even so, things would remain in a state of emergency, with constant news stories about imminent apocalypse, through the 2028 election, which is likely the next time a funding package could be presented to the voters. Is that what we want?

But there’s all this other money!

No, there are other pots of money tied to infrastructure projects, but reallocating that money to plug holes in the operating budget is both legally hard and requires politicians to act against the interest of their own constituents. Also, these infrastructure projects have lots of supporters!

The three biggest pots of money that the measure opponents like to point to are these:

The BART extension through downtown San Jose. It’s crucial to remember that VTA, the Santa Clara County transit agency, is paying for this project with its own sales tax money (about $4.6 billion of the $12.7 billion cost), plus state grants and a roughly $5.1 billion federal grant. Why should their politicians agree to send any of their money north to the central Bay Area, where the most immediate crisis is? Even if the BART extension were cancelled, Santa Clara County politicians would want to keep their money at home.
The California High Speed Rail Project. The NO campaign wants to redirect the roughly $1 billion a year of state cap-and-invest money now committed to it. This is money collected from all over the state! Why should legislators from the rest of the state, whose own transit agencies also want that money, agree to send it to the Bay Area? And while there are Central Valley Republicans who want to kill the whole thing, they have no motive to help out the Bay Area. A statewide consensus to shift a lot of money out of this project to save Bay Area transit seems fanciful on the surface and certainly would not happen quickly.
The downtown San Francisco extension of Caltrain, also needed for the eventual high-speed rail that RTM opponents want to kill. The entire Peninsula is the big loser if this project dies. Why should its politicians support shifting the resources to BART, which only serves a small fragment of this long, busy corridor?

Finally, the NO campaign loves to talk about salaries of transit executives and about overtime pay for frontline staff. A lot of overtime is happening mostly because hiring is difficult, and the difficulties of hiring are proof enough that despite the powerful unions, frontline transit staff are not massively overpaid. Executive compensation is sometimes higher than I might like (and far more than I’ve ever earned as a consultant!) but these are very hard jobs and we need highly skilled people to do them. In any case, these are minuscule numbers compared to the volumes of money needed to maintain the transit system for a major urban region.

Is the NO Campaign Being Straight With Us?

No, they are contradicting themselves on the most basic question of their intentions. They claim that other money will come to the rescue to prevent the cuts that the transit agencies promise if RTM fails. They want people to vote no believing that this will make transit more efficient. But at the same time they say things like this on their website:

This is the most important signal of all: While assuring transit advocates that they are on our side, the No on RTM campaign is signaling to anti-transit zealots in the tech industry that they are aiming to destroy public transit so that emerging technologies have less competition.

This paragraph throws so much stuff at the wall at once that I need to take it apart:

“Driverless trains and buses.” Driverless trains have been transporting passengers for more than 40 years in Vancouver, Canada, and yes, the technology could conceivably apply to the grade-separated BART system, though not without a lot of expense. Driverless operation of at-grade systems such as Caltrain, and of buses, is further away. As long as safety and security remain a concern, removing the last paid employee on a transit vehicle seems like a difficult proposition from the standpoint of customer acceptance.
“Remote and hybrid work.” Elite projection alert! Many, many people have jobs that can’t be done remotely. They tend to have lower incomes and be more open to transit use, but they are not “dependent”; they will buy cars and add to congestion if we force them to. Also, transit is no longer just about the journey to work. All kinds of other trip purposes contribute to transit ridership.
“Waymo.” Here’s the real winner of the “No on RTM” campaign. Like all businesses, Waymo would benefit from less competition. Waymo as we know it cannot scale to serve either (a) local travel within the region’s dense core or (b) long trips across the region where freeway space is limited. A triumph of driverless cars over public transit would be a traffic apocalypse. Voters need to decide if they really want to have so few choices.

As usual with transit funding measures, the NO campaign has the easier job. Being against taxes is easy. Even in the Bay Area, that gives you 35% of the vote before you even start campaigning. The YES campaign, on the other hand, must explain and justify the need. The NO campaign can just throw all kinds of accusations at the measure, with no obligation to be consistent. Only the YES campaign is judged on consistency. A NO campaign can profit from confusion, while a YES campaign profits only from understanding.

That’s why my advice from my more general piece on tax measures applies here. “If you’re still confused, remember: All the confused people are voting NO, so vote YES.”

Coda: Aren’t You Consultants Just Feathering Your Nests?

People who understand transit well tend to have jobs related to it. So the NO campaign can attack all these people as self-interested. Surely, the transit experts are all supporting transit because there’s money in it for them!

Notice the echo of MAGA here. Telling people to be suspicious of all experts is a key step in making them vulnerable to scams.

The funders of the YES campaign certainly include companies that will profit from it, notably big consulting and engineering firms who would lose work if major projects are cancelled. But almost every proposal, no matter how virtuous, has self-interested people supporting it. This is normal and boring and should not affect your vote. After all, the NO campaign is also based on self-interest: some people want lower taxes and think they won’t be the ones who suffer from transit’s collapse.

As I’ve commented on this measure on social media, I have personally received lots of social media attacks suspecting me of being interested only in profit. So let me end by reminding the good people of the NO campaign of some inconvenient facts.

Not all consultants are greedy monsters. We, for example, are a 20-person firm that is owned entirely by its senior employees. Compared to the money needed for transit operations and infrastructure, our compensation is a rounding error. We mostly help agencies think about service planning, and right now, several agencies across the US have hired us to help them plan devastating service cuts while doing as little damage as possible. So if RTM fails, we will be fine. We have no financial interest either way.
Some people believe in their work. All the professionals at our firm are talented enough to be doing something much more profitable. They do what they’re doing because they really believe in transit and have a passionate commitment to it that is worth making some sacrifices for. Transit agency staffs also include many people like that. The NO campaign’s accusations suggest a complete inability to imagine that such people exist, and that there are goals in life other than greed. Well, I’m sorry, but there are.

So the NO campaign’s effort to brand us all as greedy elites is nonsensical. The real reason for these slanders is that many of us are good explainers, and a clear explanation of the Bay Area transit crisis is the last thing the NO campaign wants you to hear.

San Francisco Bay Area: A Consistent Regional Mapping Standard?

Posted on September 30, 2024 in General, Maps, San Francisco

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the regional transportation planning body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), has launched a major effort to improve the coordination between the region’s 27 transit agencies. One element of this, just unveiled, is a regional standard for transit network maps. The goal is to have all of the region’s maps evolve toward the same style, so that it’s easier to explore the entire region’s network.

MTC has now released the first sketches of the design standard, which you can find starting on the 20th slide of this document. I’m generally delighted. The recommendations look very much like what I’ve been promoting for years: reds to denote high frequency (15 minutes or better) and less prominent colors for lesser frequencies. They 0bserve that three major transit agencies in the region already do this.

We’re flattered! We drew AC Transit’s map, and probably influenced the other two, as we helped San Francisco MTA (SFMTA) with service branding and also led the redesign of the VTA network, both in the mid 2010s. Our study mapping for our VTA network redesign was all in this style.

Here are the proposed colors of the regional standard:

In our maps we use those reds with those meanings, but I’m puzzled by the two blues. To me, that darker blue is more prominent and eye catching than the light blue, so shouldn’t it represent the higher frequency? In all of our firm’s maps, we use pale blue to represent a lower frequency than dark blue, but I’m curious if others disagree. Here is our public-facing map of San Antonio, for example.

Finally, whenever you use color to show frequency, you have the problem of what happens when the frequency changes along a line, often because of branching. The draft MTC standard shows this example for where a red line, representing the combined frequency from two overlapping routes, separates into two blue lines:

We’ve learned from long experience that most people need more help understanding that the route continues even as the color changes, mostly because people have seen many other maps where colors distinguish the routes from each other. So we always show a fade from one color to the other, as in this San Antonio example where Route 28 separates and rejoins:

We also make sure there’s a legend item clarifying this:

So anyway, that’s what we know about transit mapping. We hope MTC thinks further about these details before imposing a regional standard.

So if you’re in the Bay Area, and you want to share your own comments with MTC, this page has an email address to write to. Click “Public Engagement and Staff Contact” partway down the page. But this is a great initiative!

Santa Cruz County: A Growing Transit Agency in a Beautiful Place

Posted on September 28, 2023 in San Francisco, Silicon Valley

While you’ve heard plenty about big US agencies facing a “fiscal cliff,” some agencies are doing well and expanding their offerings as their staffing permits. That includes Portland and Dallas, where we’ve been working, but here’s a similar story from a smaller agency in an outrageously beautiful place.

Santa Cruz County, just south of the San Francisco Bay Area, is known for its beautiful beaches, towering redwoods, college-town ambience, and expensive housing, but the county also contains Watsonville, on the edge of the agricultural Salinas Valley, which has cheaper housing and is over 80% Hispanic or Latino/a. The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) generates huge demand to its hilltop campus at the west end of the region, but Watsonville generates strong demand for travel both locally and to jobs in Santa Cruz. Meanwhile, the City of Santa Cruz is trying to encourage denser housing along frequent transit corridors in order to address their problems of housing affordability.

Like many US agencies, Santa Cruz Metro had to make cuts during the pandemic to match the service to their shortage of bus drivers. In the last year, though, the pace of hiring has picked up, and the agency can do its first substantial expansion. They asked us to analyze the network and develop some concepts for improvement. We drafted a couple of alternatives, and had a public conversation about them. Finally, last Friday, the agency’s Board adopted a Phase 1 restructuring plan. By then, it turned out, hiring had gone even better than expected and some hard choices that we had feared would have to be made turned out not to be necessary.

Phase 1, now scheduled for implementation this December, will change the network completely. It currently looks like this. (As always, click maps to enlarge and sharpen.)

Starting in December it will look like this.

Look at the legend! As always, colors on these maps represent frequency, and that’s fundamental to understanding how this network is better than the old one.

The existing system has no service running better than every 30 minutes, but it also has no timed connections, so waits are long, not just for your initial bus but also for the bus you may be connecting to. The redesign increases frequencies, improves the timing of connections, and streamlines and simplifies the network.

It’s an especially big change in Watsonville, whose confusing tangle of overlapping hourly routes was especially useless for most trips. There, service is restructured to put a majority of the population and jobs near half-hourly service, mostly on lines that run through to the other cities to the west.

In Santa Cruz, the big change is the restoration of 15-minute frequency on the main lines that connect the University of California (“UC Santa Cruz” on the map) with the westside and downtown. This is important not just for the university, but also to support the City’s goals for denser residential developments in the existing neighborhoods south of the campus.

The spine of the network linking Watsonville and Santa Cruz is a braid of four hourly routes currently called 69A, 69W, and 71. In the new network the same resources go into simpler routes 1 and 2, and they’re more precisely scheduled to provide a 15-minute frequency on their westernmost segment where they run together. Halfway between Santa Cruz and Watsonville, these two routes combine again to serve Cabrillo College, the only community college in the county. We have shown the frequency there as every 20 rather than every 15 because if Routes 1 and 2 leave downtown Santa Cruz spaced evening every 15 minutes, they won’t be as evenly spaced at Cabrillo College, since Route 2 will have taken a longer path. Still, this is a significant frequency improvement for the county’s biggest transit destination outside the University.

Santa Cruz Metro is rolling out this change very fast, aiming to have the new service on the street in December. Meanwhile, this is just the first phase of a more ambitious expansion that will be discussed with the public soon in hopes of further frequency expansions in 2024. That next phase would extend high-frequency local-stop service to Watsonville, while also adding an all-day Santa Cruz-Watsonville Express. It will also look at new continuous service from the University to the east side of Santa Cruz. We look forward to a robust public discussion of that next phase.

At our firm, we are ready to help any transit agency work with its financial situation, whatever it is. But it’s especially exciting to see a transit agency that’s able to grow its services to match the values and ambitions of the communities it serves.

San Francisco: Go Forward by Going Back?

Posted on July 15, 2021 in General, Network Redesign, San Francisco

We’re currently working with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which manages the city’s transit network called Muni, on options for how to develop their network as the pandemic wanes. This piece is cross-posted with the SFMTA Blog.

Source: Wikipedia user Pi.1415926535

When a transit agency comes back from the COVID-19 crisis, should it aim to put service back the way it was, or try to put back something better? That’s the question that the SFMTA will be asking the public later this summer.

Muni started out as a service that took people downtown, and even today, most of the service is oriented that way. Meanwhile the pandemic accelerated ongoing trends that have shifted travel patterns away from a single focus on downtown and towards many locations across the city. So are we sure we want the network to be exactly as it was?

Later this summer, the SFMTA will be sharing three alternatives for how service might be restored in winter and inviting the public to provide feedback on those alternatives. The input received from the public will help the SFMTA Board determine the pattern of Muni service to be implemented in early 2022. The three scenarios the SFMTA will be laying out for the public to consider are:

Return the Familiar Network
Build a High-Access Network
Develop a Hybrid Network, balancing the best features of the first two.

The Familiar Network alternative would put back the routes people are used to from prior to the pandemic. But the service that people are used to isn’t always the service that helps the most people get where they need to go.

The High-Access approach would shift some patterns of service to expand people’s ability to get to more destinations sooner. (See here for a full explanation of how access works.)

When we plan for high access, we aren’t just thinking about trips people are making, or the trips they made before the pandemic. We’re also thinking about all the trips they could make. Better access can mean more opportunities in your life. Right now, many people’s lives are changing as they find new jobs, get their kids started at new schools and explore new types of recreation. A high-access network tries to give people as many options as possible.

What does a high-access alternative mean in practice? Here’s an example from the Richmond District: Once Line 31 Balboa comes back in August, the Richmond district will have frequent east-west lines spaced every quarter mile. But Muni’s 2 Clement runs just one-eighth mile (a long Richmond block) from the frequent lines on California and Geary.

Pre-pandemic map of San Francisco’s Richmond district transit services. Note the consistent spacing of east-west routes every 1/4 mile, but the exception is Line 2-Clement in the upper right. Source: SFMTA

Closer look at Line 2 Clement, and the more frequent lines 1/8 mile away on either side.

To measure the total access for people in a particular place, we look at all the trips to all the places they might be going, and calculate how long those trips take on the network. This travel time includes walking time, waiting time and riding time. In other words, we measure travel time starting from when you want to go, not when the bus comes.

When we calculate access from points along Clement, we find that the 2 Clement doesn’t add much, because the nearby service on Geary is so much faster and frequent. Even if you walk (or roll) slowly at 2 miles per hour, it would take you 8 minutes to get from Clement to Geary. But your wait would be 5 minutes shorter, on average, because the 38 Geary is so frequent. You may save even more time if you get a 38R Geary Rapid, which is faster. At most, the 2 Clement service only saves riders a minute or two. And if you walk at a more average pace, 3 miles per hour, it’s almost always faster to walk to Geary than wait for the bus on Clement.

Such close spacing of parallel routes is not something the SFMTA provides in most parts of the city, so does it make sense to dedicate Muni’s scarce resources to provide it here? Should those resources go where they can measurably expand access to opportunity, such as by moving toward five-minute frequency on many lines?

I’ve talked at length about this high-access approach because it’s less familiar and therefore requires more explanation, but that doesn’t mean the SFMTA has already decided to do it. The choices between familiar and high-access approaches is a genuine question, and we’ll want to know what you think.

Finally, all of these choices are harder because the SFMTA faces severe resource constraints. It still faces a labor shortage and has lost much of its income from fares and parking revenues, not to mention the structural deficit that existed even before the pandemic. So the agency can’t afford to restore all of the service it ran before the pandemic. Even if the labor shortage were resolved (and the SFMTA is working on it), restoring 100% of the previously scheduled service would run the risk that just a year or two later, when one-time federal funding runs out, drastic service cuts would be needed that could leave us with even less service than we have now.

Instead, it makes sense to offer only a level of Muni service that the SFMTA is sure they can sustain, at least until they find new resources to replace funds that have eroded over the last decade and fallen dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Next, we and the SFMTA will lay out exact plans for each alternative, showing the exact routes and frequencies that each alternative would provide. We’ll then analyze how each alternative affects access to opportunity. We’ll look at this for the whole population, but we’ll also calculate the benefits and impacts for specific neighborhoods, for people of color, for low-income people, and for people who walk or roll relatively slowly.

The SFMTA will bring this information to the community, so that everyone can think about the choices and express their view. This will help the SFMTA Board reach a decision that reflects the values of San Francisco.

San Francisco: A Forbidden Fantasy Comes True

Posted on June 21, 2020 in Rail Transit, San Francisco

Around 1989, when I lived in San Francisco, I spent too much time in little rooms with transit advocates (and some transit professionals who could not be named) complaining about Muni Metro, the combined surface-subway light rail system. It looked like this and still does, except that the T line was added more recently. Note the r0ute letter names in the lower left.

The segment with 3-5 lines on it, from Embarcadero to West Portal, is the underground segment, which carries the heaviest loads through the densest part of the city.

It had always been wildly unreliable. The five lines that ran through it (J, K, L, M, and N) always came in sequences of pure arithmetic randomness: N, J, M, K, J, N, N, K, K, M, N, J, L. (Finally, my “L”! But of course, after such a long gap, it’s crush-loaded and I can’t get on.)

Four decades after the subway opened, lots of things have been fixed: longer and better trains, better signaling, an extension downtown that helped trains turn back more efficiently. But none of this touched the true problem: The core Metro subway carries five lines, all of which deserve to be very frequent. But they can’t all be frequent enough because they all have to squeeze into one two-track subway. The other part of the problem is that they all have surface segments at the outer end, where they encounter more sources of delay, causing them to enter the subway at unpredictable times, and in an unpredictable order.

In those small rooms in the 1980s, we all knew that there was only one mathematically coherent solution. Some us drew the map of this solution on napkins, but we really didn’t need to. The map was burned into our minds from our relentless, powerless mental fondling of it. Of course it was politically impossible, so impossible that if you valued your career you would wad up that napkin at once, burn it probably, and certainly not mention it outside your most trusted circle.

At most you might let out the pressure as a joke: “You know, we *could* turn the J, K, and L into feeders, and just run the M and N downtown. And then we’d have room for a line that just stayed in the subway, so it was never affected by surface delays.” Everyone would titter at hearing this actually said, as though in some alternate universe such a change could be possible.

Now, the impossible is happening. Without fear or shame, I can finally share the content of that forbidden napkin, because it looks like San Francisco is actually going to do it.

The two busiest western lines (M, N) will still go downtown, the others (J, K, L) will terminate when they reach a station but you have to transfer to continue downtown. M trains will flow through as T. Finally, a shuttle (S) will provide additional frequency in the subway, immune to surface delays. As always, asking people to transfer makes possible a simpler, more frequent, and more reliable system.

You may detect, at San Francisco’s tiny scale, a case of the universal “edge vs core” problem. Like many, many US rail transit systems, Muni Metro had been designed to take care of the edge, people who lived on one of the branch lines, rather than the core, people traveling along the subway in the dense inner city. The new system finally fixes the core. But the edge folks benefit from a reliable subway too. What’s more, in the future it may be possible to run the surface segments of J, K, and L more frequently, because their capacity will no longer be capped by the need to fit down the subway with four other lines.

All that in return for having to transfer to go downtown if you’re on the J, K, or L.

Let me not make this sound easy. These transfer points, West Portal and Duboce Portal, are a little awkward, because they were never designed for this purpose. You have to walk from one platform to another, crossing at least one street. There are valid concerns from people with mobility limitations, which will have to be addressed with better street and intersection design. Plenty of people won’t like it.

But the transit backbone of a major city will finally function. And for those of us who’ve known San Francisco for decades, that’s a forbidden fantasy come true.

Fare Policy vs Ticketing Technology: San Francisco Edition

Posted on September 6, 2017 in Fares, San Francisco

Many, many times, I’ve asked a transit agency’s leaders about their fare policy, and been told instead about their ticketing technology. “Are you thinking about fare structure?” I ask. “Yes, we’re on it!” they say. “We’re working on this fabulous smartcard!” Don’t trust a fare expert who can’t distinguish the policy decisions that set fares and the technologies that implement them.

Arielle Fleisher of SPUR has a good piece on fare policy in the Bay Area, which will be useful to anyone in multi-agency regions in North America.[1] Describing Clipper, the smartcard shared by almost all of the region’s 27 transit agencies, Fleisher writes:

There is no denying that the Clipper card is a magical piece of plastic. Since its debut in 2010, Clipper has made it much easier for people to switch between different transit systems and travel throughout the region. But if you look under Clipper’s hood, it quickly becomes apparent that the card’s magic masks a complex web of transit fares, passes and policies that ultimately limit its effectiveness. Put simply, a close look reveals that the Bay Area has a fare policy problem.

Back in the 80s and 90s, when I worked in the Bay Area, there was no “hood” to look under or “mask” to hide behind. The mess was in everyone’s faces. The many transit agencies required their own paper tickets or passes, and your only hope of moving freely across agency boundaries was to carry numerous rolls of quarters.

As the Bay Area considers the next generation of Clipper, Fleisher rightly warns of the risk that the region’s leaders will focus on making the technology cool rather than making the fares logical. She enumerates five problems a multi-agency fare policy should solve:

Disparate fares make using transit confusing.
Separate fares for different agencies are a problem when one agency substitutes its service for another’s, as happens during disruptions.
There isn’t a single pass that employers can purchase for their staffs.
The system penalizes trips that happen to require multiple operating agencies. (And note that some agencies still charge for connecting between services of the same agency!)
The system makes it hard to do coherent discounting for low-income persons.

To which I can only say, yes! And yes, we were yelling about all this 30 years ago. The smartcard “solved” this problem only for relatively fortunate people. If you don’t have to think about what you’re spending, you can just buy a Clipper card and wave it everywhere. So there’s a risk of elite projection, in that many decision makers, who tend to have above average incomes, no longer experience the problem in their daily lives, the way everyone did back in the pre-Clipper days.

Still, the fare problem in a multi-agency region is genuinely hard. If it weren’t, we’d have solved it long ago, because technology was never the real barrier. Consolidating all the agencies into one isn’t the answer. The point is to have clear boundaries and clear relationships across those boundaries. But as long as there are multiple agencies, each agency has its own budget to balance. Introducing new inter-agency fares costs money for each agency, as more fares have to be shared with other agencies that were part of each person’s trip. Unless there is some new funding, the money has to come from raising the base fare, which is one of the most unpopular things a transit agency can do. Integrated fares, when they happen, will be a cost item. They always are.

And as I can’t emphasize too strongly, every time you tell a transit agency to use its limited funds to do something other than run service, you’re telling them to cut service.

Even if you don’t live in the Bay Area, Fleisher’s article is a good read. Chapter 11 of my book Human Transit also explores fare issues. And if you’re interested in the dynamics of how a big North American metro deals with having 27 transit agencies, and why that might not be a bad thing, there’s my article on seamlessness, itself a response to an excellent SPUR paper on the subject. (And again: if you want to see how influential, respected, and popular a local policy institute can be, you should learn about SPUR!)

[1] The transit agency structure that I describe here is mostly a North American concept. Elsewhere, the problems described here arise between operating companies (publicly or privately owned) that have the right to set fares and keep fare revenue while also getting subsidy from a government transport authority — a so-called “net cost” contract.” The new best practice is “gross cost” contracts, where the government keeps the fare revenue. This lets the government authority control the fare policy decision, because only its own revenue is at stake. (It also lets the government design a coherent network.)

Basics: Public Transit “Integration” or “Seamlessness”

Posted on August 3, 2015 in 3-newbasic, Access, Basics, Fares, Legibility, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Urban Structure

[Updated Oct 2026]

When you hear the word integration or seamlessness in conversations about transit, it usually means making it easy to make trips that involve multiple public transit agencies or operating companies. (In the US we are generally talking about entangled government agencies, but in countries where private operators control patches of the network, the issue is the same.)

The San Francisco Bay Area has long been one of North America’s most difficult integration challenges, so it’s a good laboratory for exploring the issue. If you can get transit integration right in the Bay Area, you can probably do it anywhere. The Bay Area’s particular challenge is that it has no recognized central city. Instead, it’s named after an obstacle, the Bay, and its geography of bays and hills provides natural psychological divides. Wherever you live in the Bay Area, most of the Bay Area is “across the water” or “over the hills” from you, and this matters enormously to how people perceive issues as local or regional. (Los Angeles, mostly a city of vast continuous basins, could not be more opposite.)

The San Francisco Bay Area, with county lines

Map of Bay Area transit agencies (SPUR, “Seamless Transit” 2015)

The key types of seam are:

Fare barriers, where a trip involving two agencies requires paying both agencies’ fares, and sometimes also keeping track of two kinds of ticket or pass.
Information barriers, such as the lack of a clear map. (In many regions, the only regionwide map, if it exists, is more like a diagram of turf. It’s designed to clarify what agency controls what rather than help people understand their travel options.) Other information barriers include information systems that don’t describe how to use other agencies’ networks to complete common trips.
Service Design Barriers, where a route ends at an agency boundary even though almost everyone on the bus is trying to go further.

A typical old regional transit diagram, showing areas of turf but no sense of what service might be useful (no indication of frequency, for example). (MTC)

For decades, it’s been easy to propose that some grand merger of agencies would solve problems of integration, but the obvious problem was you would have to merge the whole Bay Area into one transit authority serving almost 8 million people, in a region around 100 miles long. That population would mean little citizen access to the leadership, while the huge area would mean that people planning your bus routes may be working in an office 50 miles away. It just doesn’t work when the sense of citizenship is as understandably decentralized as it is in the Bay Area.

What’s more, if you value transit-intensive core cities, places like San Francisco and Oakland, or if you want your city to be more like those places, you have an especially strong reason to want local control. These places need more transit than the whole region wants on average, so they will struggle to get adequate service from a regional transit agency, whose decisions will tend to converge on the average regional opinion.

Many North American regions are seeing conflict around this issue, and are evolving a fascinating range of solutions. Many of these solutions involve additional funding from the cities that want more transit than the regional average.

Some core cities are proud to have their own city-controlled transit systems separate from what regional agencies do (San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago). Some pay their regional transit agency for a higher level of service in the core city (Seattle, Salt Lake City). Some run their own transit systems overlaid, often messily and confusingly, on the regional one (Washington DC). Many more core cities are going to face this issue soon, especially if regional politics continue to polarize on urban-exurban lines.

Apart from the issue of urban-exurban differences in the need for transit, there are also real challenges when a single transit agency becomes enormous, especially if it provides local service over a vast geographic area. Los Angeles is a great example. As an undergraduate in the 1980s, living in the region, I marveled at what I assumed to be the stupid chaos of provincialism. The region had a big transit agency, which has evolved into what we now call LA Metro, but many cities within the region ran their own transit systems, which were tangled up in each other, and with the regional agency, in complex ways. As an undergraduate, I assumed that progress would mean merging all this into one giant agency that could provide the same product everywhere.

And yet: in those days, everyone hated the regional agency, but loved their city ones. And there were good reasons for that that weren’t anyone’s fault, and still aren’t today. You could get your city’s transit manager on the phone, but not the regional one. Small city governments can fix a bus route and put up a new bus shelter in the time it would take the regional agency to organize the right series of meetings. Again, nobody’s at fault there; these are natural consequences of smallness and bigness — in corporations as well as in governments.

Which is why, even in Los Angeles, the trend is not toward mergers. Today, many city systems in the county are doing excellent work at their local scale. LA Metro has improved massively as well, of course, but its costs are still high; more important, it’s still very big and therefore inevitably feels distant to many people — again, not the fault of the folks working there.

Meanwhile, a clearer negotiated boundary between regional and city functions is slowly starting to emerge. One idea, for example, is that a key role of city systems is to run services that don’t meet regional standards for ridership, but that the locals feel to be important. The division of labor among agencies is not what anyone would design from scratch. But great work has been done over the years to build clearer relationships, or what I will call, later in this post, “good fences.”

City-operated transit is growing more popular in North American for another excellent reason: Most of transit’s ability to succeed is already controlled by city government: specifically the functions of land use planning and street design. If a city government feels in control of its transit, it is more likely to exercise those other functions in ways that support transit rather than undermine it. San Francisco’s recent decision to combine traffic and parking functions with transit under one city agency shows a new way of thinking about the need to get this right, but it would be impossible if San Francisco relied on a big regional agency for its transit service. Whenever someone proposes to turn a city transit system over to a consolidated regional agency, I have to point out that integrating in one dimension (between geographically adjacent services) means disintegrating in another (between key functions of city government.)

So there’s no simple answer. City control creates a nasty patchwork of geographic integration problems across adjacent cities in a region. The big regional agency has a different integration problem, which is with the land use and street design functions of municipal governments that don’t control their transit and therefore have trouble caring about it. Whichever thing you integrate, you’re disintegrating the other.

What’s the answer? It’s for each region to feel its way through the inevitable tensions to its own solution. But I’d propose we start old fashioned idea made famous by a Robert Frost poem:

Good fences make good neighbors.

Neighbors have an easier time being friendly if they have a very clear agreement about where their boundary is. Collaborating with your neighbor to mark the boundary, and fence it if need be, is a peacemaking gesture. This is as true of neighboring landowners as it is of nations. And it’s certainly true of transit agencies.

What does it mean to have a clear sense of boundary?

It’s not just that both sides agree where the boundary is. It’s also that it’s easy for both sides to live with the boundary, and work across it as need be. For nations, it’s much easier to manage a boundary that runs across a natural barrier, so that the natural boundary reinforces the agreed boundary — the Rio Grande River between the US and Mexico, say, or the Great Lakes along the US-Canada border. The worst possible national boundary is something like the 49th parallel, the US-Canada border in western North America, an arbitrary line that runs perpendicular to most mountains and valleys. Only the extreme friendship and cultural affinity between the two countries makes this boundary workable.

All that is true of transit agencies as well. Let’s talk first about local networks, and then, separately, about the relationship between networks of different scales.

Boundaries between Adjacent Local Transit Agencies

Regional transit map, with boundary between Alameda and Contra Costa Counties highlighted red. Note that AC Transit extends across boundary next to the bay (SPUR report)

A bank of hills or a water body means that there are limited points of access across the boundary, called chokepoints, and this in turn means people are used to going out of their way to cross that point. That means, in turn, that a well-placed transit connection point adjacent to the bridge or pass is an easy place for transit agencies on the two sides to converge.

On the other hand, a boundary that runs across a flat expanse of urban area, so that many people are literally across the street from the other side, is a problematic transit boundary. In this case there is decentralized demand in all directions crossing the boundary at many points. This makes it harder to bring both agencies to a shared focal point for connections between the agencies. It also means there are lots of relatively short trips flowing over the border, and these benefit from a continuous network of service rather than an interrupted one. As in many US states, California transit agency boundaries tend to default to county lines, and where these create that problem, it’s a mess for transit.

Some of this wisdom is already encoded in the boundaries of the East Bay agency AC Transit. Near the Bay, the border between Alameda and Contra Costa counties cuts across dense urban fabric, so it would be an awful place for a transit network to end from the point of view of either side.
Recognizing this, AC Transit was constructed to unite the two sides of the county line where the urban fabric was continuous, while dividing from other agencies along natural hill and water boundaries, even where the latter are not county lines. This is an important example for many US regions where counties are the default planning units, and arbitrary boundaries drawn in the 19th century (or before) risk turning into walls that sever transit access.

For AC Transit, the “good fences” solution was to put the border in a place that worked well for both sides — worked well for transit customers, that is, not for anyone’s desire for turf or empire. That tends to mean looking for the natural chokepoint and putting the boundary there.

This observation also helps to clarify the city transit option. Even in big urban areas, some cities have a geography that makes it easy for much of the transit to be city-controlled, typically because of natural chokepoints along the edges that help isolate the city-scale network from the regional one. On the other hand, if the city boundary is logically pierced by long, straight local transit corridors that logically function both within the city and beyond it, a municipal network is less viable.

Burbank, CA: City limits and street grid

Burbank, California is a good example of a city where most main streets are parts of much longer logical lines running deep into adjacent cities, so its city limits would make especially poor transit boundaries. Burbank therefore profits from its reliance on LA Metro, which runs long, continuous lines across city boundaries many of them converging on Burbank’s downtown. The regional network is also, logically, the local one.

Pasadena, CA: City limits and street grid

Nearby Pasadena (considered together with Altadena) has good geography for a larger city role. It has hill barriers on three sides — only the east edge is really continuous with other dense urban fabric — so fewer of its internal corridors necessarily flow into other cities. (Areas whose density is so low that they might as well be wilderness as far as transit is concerned — San Marino in this case — count as natural barriers to some degree.) Another important feature is that Pasadena has a frequent regional rapid transit line running through, so its local lines don’t need to extend far out of the city to make regional connections.

So Pasadena could run most of its local transit system if it wanted to, because a logical network would consist mostly of internal routes. Burbank could not, because most of its local service is logically provided by routes that continue beyond the city limits.

Do not quote me saying that Pasadena’s transit should be more local. I am not saying anything about what the regional-local balance should be in these cases, but merely observing how the geography makes the opportunities larger or smaller. One value of Pasadena being served by the regional agency, for example, is that it can eventually be part of a larger high-frequency grid, with all the liberty that brings.

Local – Regional Transit Boundaries

All that is about what happens between local networks. But another “good fence” can be a clear division of labor between local and regional services. Regional services that are designed as rapid transit (widely spaced stations for fast operation between them, relying on local transit connections to get closer to most destinations) do not need to be the same agency as the local service meeting them; in fact, this can be a very clean “fence.” Obviously you have to work on the specific problems of integration: information, fares, etc., just as adjacent local agencies do. But there’s little need to merge or change boundaries in these situations.

There will always be seams in a transit journey, just as there will always be the need to make connections. The conversation should not be about how to get rid of seams but how to put them in the right places, so that they work for both sides, and how to manage them so that travelers can flow through them easily.

Another way of thinking about the geographic issues I’ve been laying out here is that if you require a connection to continue your trip, there should be a rich payoff in terms of destinations you can reach. The same is true for any hassles created by seams. It’s like planes: it’s a drag to change planes, and especially to change between airlines, but it’s kind of cool, while you are changing planes, to look at the departure board and think about all the other places you could also get to via this connection. What’s more, all those connections are crucial to making your flights viable for the airline, even if you don’t use them.

The logic of connections is the logic of good seams in general. They happen in places where it already makes sense for transit services to be discontinuous — either because of a natural boundary or because of a clear division of labor between regional and local service. Those “good fences”, once found, can make for happy neighboring transit authorities, which will find it easy to work together for the sake of the customer’s liberty.

Sure, let’s regionalize the right things: fare media, information systems. (An often-neglected one is service change dates, so that timed connections between agencies don’t get broken because the agencies change their schedules at different times.) Some mergers may make sense, such as between BART and Caltrain to create a regional rapid transit agency.

Big transit agencies and little ones are both excellent things. The trick is to get the fence right.

UPDATE: For a book-length academic analysis reaching a similar view, see Donald Chisholm: Coordination without Hierarchy. 1992, UC Press. H/t David King.

San Francisco: A world-class transit map unveiled

Posted on April 13, 2015 in Legibility, Maps, San Francisco

A few years ago we assisted San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in rethinking how they talk about the various services they operate. Our key idea was to classify services by tiers of frequency, while also distinguishing, at the highest frequency only, between faster and slower services. In extensive workshops with staff, we helped the agency think through these categories and the names to be used for them.

It's great to see the result coming out on the street. The old-fashioned term "limited," for example, been replaced by "Rapid," a new brand that emphasizes speed and reliability improvements as well as frequency and widely spaced stops.

But the biggest news is that a new network map, by Jay Primus and David Wiggins, is about to debut. Don't open it yet!! Before you do, look at it in a fuzzy small image:

Notice how much information you can get just from this fuzzy picture. Most transit maps are total nonsense at this resolution, but in this one, even though you can't even see the legend, you can see the structure. All you need to know is that bigger, brigher lines are more useful lines, because they tend to be faster or more frequent. In other words, this works just like any coherent street or map (paper or online) in which the faster roads are more visually prominent. Any good map is legible at multiple levels of attention, including very zoomed out like this, and in loving detail of every right and left, which you'll also admire if you zoom into the massive PDF.

Why has it taken so long for transit maps to get this clear? Well, first of all, you have to figure out that frequency, not speed, is the primary equivalent of speed in a highway map. Highways and streets can all be ranked by their design speed, but in transit, frequency trumps speed in determining most kinds of utility, and speed distinctions matter most where frequency is already high.

(The exception, high speed but low frequency service, tends to be commuter rail and commuter express bus service. That service is so intrinsically specialized and complex that it makes a complete mess if you put it on the map with the all-day frequent routes. These ephemeral routes must be faded out; on this new map they are the weakest lines of all. The previous map was chaotic precisely because it used the strongest color — red — for these most specialized and ephemeral services, concealing the structure of interdependent service that is running all the time and that vastly more people will use.)

What are the other barriers to maps of this clarity? Well, you have to decide whether your goal is information (helping people understand their options) or marketing (which at its worst means deliberately confusing people so that they do you want them to do). I have always argued that in transit, clear and beautiful information is the best marketing, but many professional marketers disagree.

This map is glorious because it's 100% information. Services aren't highlighted because someone thinks that they serve "target markets" or "more important demographics", for example. Everything is mapped, and named, according to its potential usefulness to anyone. The more diverse the range of people who'll find a service useful, the brighter the line is.

Of course, it doesn't show everything, but that's also why it's clear. I'm sure I will be bombarded with comments pointing out that they don't show how San Francisco's network connects to the wider region's, and that they don't show how transit integrates with cycling, walking, private transit, Segways, and whatever else. Including too much non-transit information is also a great way to make transit maps confusing. This map is just what it is, a map of San Francisco's fixed route transit network. It's also, in my experience, one of the best in the world, something even the world's best transit systems could learn from.

silicon valley: bus rapid transit that’s faster than driving?

Posted on November 14, 2014 in Bus Rapid Transit, San Francisco

El Camino Real BRT Alignment

Silicon Valley is easily viewed as a car-oriented place, where tech giants rule from business parks that are so transit-unfriendly that they have had to run their own bus systems to bring employees from afar. But one interesting transit project is moving forward: the El Camino BRT, a proposed rapid transit line connecting Palo Alto and central San Jose.

El Camino Real ("the Royal Road") is a path defined by Spanish missionaries as they spread north through California. It lies close to the old railroad line now used by Caltrain, and the two facilities combined determined the locations of the pre-war transit-oriented downtowns that still form the most walkable nodes in the area.

Today El Camino is the spinal arterial of the San Francisco peninsula, passing through or near most of the downtowns. This spine continues across Silicon Valley, through Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and finally downtown San Jose. (The BRT will not extend the full length of the peninsula, because it is a Santa Clara County project and the county ends at Palo Alto. However, successful projects do get extended sometimes.) In Silicon Valley, too, the corridor is far enough from Caltrain that they are not competing. Caltrain will always be faster but probably less frequent than the BRT, optimized as it is for much longer trips including to San Francisco.

In land use terms, the project corridor is ideal territory for transit – lots of employment and commercial destinations, with strong anchoring institutions at each end. But while the path is historic, the modern street was designed with a singular focus on auto travel time, as a six-lane divided boulevard. Auto and transit travel times continue to increase substantially as more people come to live and work in the corridor, and even more population and employment growth is forecast for the coming decades.

Santa Clara VTA and the FTA released the Draft Environmental Impact Report for this project last week, detailing multiple alternatives relating to the extent of dedicated lanes and street configurations. The purpose and need statement tidily summarizes the rationale for this investment:

El Camino Real is an important arterial in Santa Clara County and on the San Francisco Peninsula. However, El Camino Real is predominantly auto-oriented, and streetscape amenities are limited. There are widespread concerns regarding congestion, appearance, and safety, and a general public perception exists that the corridor is not well planned. Exacerbating current conditions, Santa Clara County is expected to experience substantial growth in the next 30 years from 2010 to 2040. If no improvements are implemented, heavy demand will potentially be placed on the existing transportation infrastructure, which is planned to increase by only 5 to 6 percent.

This striking graph (which I couldn't locate in the report itself, but which is reproduced over at the TransForum blog), compares transit travel time among the four alternatives:

In the A4c alternative (the alternative with the greatest extent of exclusive lanes), a trip during the peak through the corridor would actually be faster on transit than driving, and dramatically faster than the same trip today.

The various alternatives' alignments are compared below:

As usual with arterial BRT in the US, there will be some mixed-traffic segments, and the line will only be as realiable as its least reliable point. Note that the alternatives seem to envision different responses to city limits, as though anticipating that as you get further west (which means wealthier, but also closer to big destinations like Palo Alto and Stanford University), support for exclusive lanes will decline. It will be interesting to see if this is true, in a very educated polity, when the benefits are understood.

replace stop signs with signals on major transit lines?

Posted on November 10, 2014 in Pedestrians, San Francisco

From Streetsblog's Aaron Blalick in San Francisco:

The latest of [San Francisco Municipal Transporation Authority]'’s efforts to speed up [major bus] lines to run into some neighborhood opposition involves its proposed replacement of stop signs with transit-priority traffic signals. Some Western Addition neighbors have protested a proposal to signalize five intersections on McAllister Street to speed up the 5-Fulton, one of the designated “Rapid” routes receiving upgrades under the Muni Forward program (also known as the Transit Effectiveness Project).
Initially, the complaints were driven by fears that signals would bring dangerous speeding to McAllister. Muni planners responded by holding more outreach meetings, and presented data showing that pedestrian injuries declined on similar streets after signals were added. They also say speeds won’t go up significantly, since signals will be synchronized for speeds below 20 mph. [emphasis added]

Aaron emailed to ask my opinion, which is emphatically: "Who could oppose something that's good for both pedestrian safety and transit speeds?"

Apparently, the remaining opposition is based on "feel":

Sean Kennedy, the SFMTA’s Muni Forward program manager, said the data seems to quelled some neighbors’ fears, but that the complaints have shifted. “What we hear is that there’s a lot of concern over the neighborhood feel,” he said. “And that’s something we can’t really dispute with facts. It’s an individual preference if people do or don’t like signals.”

So how much should we worsen transit, and maintain higher levels of pedestrian injury, for the sake of "feel"?

And how exactly does a signal change feel? We're talking about small streets here, mostly striped with a single wide travel lane each way. Will a signal make the street feel wider? Are people associating signals with more traffic and just assuming signals will have that outcome? Not if they're timed for transit rather than cars. Well-timed signalization can be very effective at discouraging car traffic on transit-intensive streets, when that's the objective.

I spent a decade of my life as a San Francisco pedestrian, in dark ages when pedestrian safetly mattered a lot less than it does now. Sure, it was nice to encounter a 4-way stop where stepping into the intersection was enough to stop traffic.

But among global pedestrians like me, San Francisco is famous for very fast signal cycles, and it's not a place where you'll be ticketed for crossing on red if there's obviously nothing coming. As a pedestrian, I find a few seconds of delay a small price to pay for a transit system that's actually respectful of its customers' valuable time, not to mention the high cost to the public of its drivers' time.

Remember: If you want frequency, you want less delay, because that makes frequency cheaper!

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