My new (October 2026) article on this question is here! In it, I try to address the issues that come up over and over in campaigns. I hope it will be useful not just for this US election season, but for many in the future. Read it here.
My new (October 2026) article on this question is here! In it, I try to address the issues that come up over and over in campaigns. I hope it will be useful not just for this US election season, but for many in the future. Read it here.
This is a good article that hits many bases. Re: “Understand the consequences”,
1. Another reason to vote “yes”: External changes might leave no second chance.
Achieving agreement and raising revenue tends to get harder, not easier. Wherever you live, be aware of the different mechanisms for proposing new legislation and for extending, updating, or adding taxes, and of changes in the legal landscape.
Measure RTM, a transit sales tax in five San Francisco Bay Area counties, requires 50% majority approval. If state Proposition 43 passes, then all, not just some, single-purpose (“special”) taxes will require ⅔ supermajority approval. That’s almost impossible across dissimilar counties.
The original three-county San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District property tax bond passed only because the state legislature had made exceptions: reducing the supermajority requirement from ⅔ to 60% (authority since removed from the legislature) and allowing votes from urban San Francisco to be combined with votes from suburban Alameda and Contra Costa counties (same authority used in California Senate Bill 63 of 2025, the enabling legislation for the ostensibly citizen-sponsored Measure RTM).
Although the pre-audit and overall spending cap requirements of Proposition 41 apply to state special taxes, success with 41 could embolden anti-tax groups to throw up more roadblocks for local special taxes, later.
Meanwhile, San Francisco Proposition D will quadruple the number of signatures required to place a measure on the ballot in San Francisco.
2. A reason to keep applying pressure after you vote: Duplication is easier than cooperation.
Although the San Francisco Bay Area is an extreme example, what with its 20+ separate transit agencies, many places have separate city and suburban transit agencies, or separate agencies for different modes. When resources get scarce, cooperation preserves mobility, but that requires more effort from transit leaders, managers, and planners (and less ego).
The separate boards of BART, Caltrain, and AC Transit have approved, and the MTC has tacitly accepted, zero-cooperation contingency plans!
BART
BART funded and managed a high-quality express bus network before rail extensions began to open in the mid-1990s. BART’s plan in case Measure RTM fails does not mention the word “bus” at all! During the first phase, the agency will starve its busy core network to run half-hourly service even to the deep suburbs.
Weekday BART ridership is less than before the extensions opened, less than half the historic peak in 2016, and half what it was before the pandemic. (Weekend ridership is recovering faster, but that’s less significant than weekday ridership. Commuters still count.) No BART extension has ever come anywhere near meeting the ridership projections on which its environmental impact report was based. Closing extensions outside commute hours and reviving the BART Express Bus is entirely reasonable.
The beauty of the old service is that it was coordinated: same days and hours, premium bus subfleet, bus and train schedules in the same timetable, one customer service center to answer questions about both modes, and dispatch-level communication to hold buses for late trains. (You might still spot rotating orange beacons at some BART stations.)
Caltrain
samTrans funded and managed high-quality express bus service (Route 7X/KX) between San Mateo County, SFO, and San Francisco before the BART SFO extension and the Millbrae BART/Caltrain station opened. (There were other samTrans commuter express bus routes too, but I’ll focus on the airport as one essential Peninsula destination.) For most of its history, Caltrain was part of samTrans. The contingency service framework for Caltrain axes all night and weekend Caltrain service but makes no mention of the word “bus”.
AC Transit
AC Transit’s contingency plan prioritizes mode over mobility. The agency will cut its local bus network more deeply than necessary, for the sake of preserving full service on its most expensive route, the 1T Tempo bus rapid transit line. Tempo runs in the shadow of BART. Tempo isn’t busy because people like it. Tempo is busy because AC Transit local bus riders are poor and BART does not accept AC Transit day, weekly, or monthly passes, even for trips wholly within this short, urban Oakland to San Leandro corridor. (The MTC has spent over half a billion dollars on Clipper, one card that can be used to store and pay fares under 20+ separate fare ordinances passed by 20+ separate transit agency boards. The BART Plus Ticket, an add-on that worked as a flash pass on all the local bus agencies, was discontinued more than a decade ago. Transit agencies in the Bay Area cooperate LESS on fares than they used to!)
Whereas BART and Caltrain make no mention of bus service in their contingency documents, AC Transit mentions BART once, to apologize that some surviving bus routes will run every 40 minutes, a frequency choice incompatible with BART’s planned 30-minute headway. There’s no thought of negotiating a fare agreement so that BART can handle the Uptown Oakland-Downtown Oakland-Fruitvale-San Leandro backbone and AC Transit, the “last mile”, and money wasted on Tempo can instead be used to bolster the rest of the bus network.