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

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.