Facing massive state deficits, advocates won $5.1 billion for Bay Area transit last year by framing transit as an issue of climate and housing, with Californians’ wellbeing at stake.
Against a shortfall estimated by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office to be $38 billion but projected by the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office to be as high as $73 billion, the grassroots campaign convinced lawmakers to carve a lifeline from the $310.8 billion budget to avert a transit “fiscal cliff,” by passing a bill under Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11).
At a San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) forum, leaders involved in the campaign, through a coalition organized by SPUR and Transform CA shared what it took to win.
Gaining traction
By December 2022, it was clear to local transit funding agencies SFMTA and MTC, which worked with the coalition, that California was nosediving into a deficit.
The Bay Area, while containing 20% of the state’s total population, contains nearly half of its transit riders.
That month, the groups had the California Transit Association “write a letter urging the legislature to take action,” said Rebecca Long, director of Legislation & Public Affairs at MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). In January 2023, the governor’s budget was released “with not only no help for transit operations, but setting us back” by $1 billion dollars, against $2 billion that was promised.
The coalition urged business, labor, climate and housing organizations statewide to write more letters. In response, in February the state held a joint Assembly and Senate Transportation Committee hearing about what transit needed as federal COVID relief funds waned amid financial strains caused by shifting travel patterns, remote work and inflated operating costs.
At the hearing, coalition members testified that “this is not just about funding public agencies. Transit is a climate remedy. It’s an equity issue,” said Long.
Escalating on the ground
“On the news, it seemed like public attention came out of nowhere, but there were months of really methodical preparation,” said Adina Levin, co-founder and policy director of Seamless Bay Area, a transit advocacy group that worked with other groups to mobilize thousands of people to contact representatives, attend demonstrations, distribute flyers and speak at hearings.
“Lightning activism really highlighted the diversity of our supporters,” she added. “When we were flyering, we wanted to use multiple languages, so Tenderloin Neighborhood Development really quickly generated Tagalog, the Bay Area Council generated Chinese, and so on. In those last few weeks, we generated over 10,000 calls and letters.”
“On the ground, the turning point was a May 12 town hall with Phil Ting in San Francisco,” said Cyrus Hall, a public transit advocate.
“We gathered 20 to 30 activists to get them to answer the question, as state Assembly budget chair, ‘Are you supportive of operational gap funding for transit agencies?’ We did not get an answer,” continued Hall, “and when we followed up after, we got a very direct answer that, at that moment, was, ’No.’ I think this signaled that the state was not about to step in and provide the funding necessary to make sure that our agencies didn’t collapse.”
In response, continued Hall, activists associated with “10 to 20 groups” like Safe Street Rebel, Telegraph for People and Kid Safe SF held a June 3 “transit funeral starting in Oakland, marching on BART under the Bay through the Transbay tunnel, coming out in Civic Center, and then marching down Market Street to San Francisco City Hall where we held a rally” with politicians including Wiener, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and City Supervisor Dean Preston.
“Some activists followed up a week later on June 8, blocking Octavia and Marquette in San Francisco — an intersection that also happens to be an off ramp,” he continued. “We got incredible media coverage from helicopters and people filming on the ground, and we made that footage viral.”
As a result, “more people got involved writing and phoning into Sacramento,” Hall added. “Talking to people directly on BART trains was also generating many letters and phone calls. Always being ready to escalate just a bit more was key to media covering the issue, so that more people were learning and speaking out … about why it’s so important that Sacramento find the operational funding necessary to give our agencies time to rebuild ridership and find new funding.”
The homestretch in Sacramento
While two more major Bay transit coalition letters by May had already pressured the governor’s budget update “to verbally acknowledge that transit is very important …there were no specifics in dollars,” Long said. “That’s when we stepped up the direct action: transit rallies on the ground, joint letters from Congress members … and from big city mayors, elected officials and City Councils, urging the legislature.”
Activists and officials had “two very strong justifications for why transit was the state’s responsibility,” said Monique Webster, SFMTA Regional Government Affairs Manager: “one, the transportation sector is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and so the centerpiece of the state’s decarbonization climate strategy.”
“Second,” she added, “public transit also expands access to opportunity — access to education, jobs, health care, for many vulnerable Californians — and the state simply cannot make progress on that goal if transit goes under.”
Key to convincing the state was “pointing to what other states were doing,” said Raayan Mohtashemi, legislative aide for Wiener. “New York and Minnesota, which were facing similar ridership and sustainability problems, had passed longer-term funding agreements to avert fiscal cliffs.”
In 2022, for instance, BART was able to cover only 70% of pre-pandemic operating expenses from rider revenue.
One year later, in June 2023, BART averaged only about 40% of weekday transit traffic during weekdays and 60% of weekend traffic compared to pre-pandemic numbers.
That June, Newsom’s office and the legislature finally struck a deal to set aside $1.1 billion in “flexible” funding for transit over four years, with transit agencies allowed to dip into a remaining $4 billion in state aid for operations as needed — diverting from infrastructure projects the money was originally set aside for, like the extension of BART to San Jose.
Though the money is enough to prevent shortfalls and service cuts through “roughly mid-2026,” said Mohtashemi, “there’s still a need for long-term sustainability.”
That’s why Sen. Wiener, having last year withdrawn SB-532 — a defunct proposal to raise Bay Area bridge tolls by $1.50 to fund transit, which was met with public opposition — is planning for legislation this year to allow a regional ballot measure on long-term transit funding.
