In Transit: Bay Area Transportation News on Everything That Moves

If all goes to plan — and when it comes to big infrastructure projects, when does it ever? — a real, live bullet train will begin service in 2028 between Las Vegas and somewhere sort of close to Los Angeles.

A company called Brightline West is building the $12 billion project. The federal government is supporting the 218-mile line with a $3 billion grant announced last year.

That’s the same amount the feds approved for the much better-known and much more slowly progressing California High-Speed Rail project, which could begin carrying passengers on a 171-mile route between Merced and Bakersfield sometime between 2030 and 2033. That’s the first phase of a project voters approved in a 2008 bond issue. The measure envisioned a line connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles that would begin service in 2020.

Brightline West’s project is in the news right now because it held a symbolic groundbreaking Monday for its Las Vegas terminal, located just south of the Strip. Eleven dignitaries, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, grabbed mini-sledgehammers to pound in ceremonial spikes on a mockup of a rail line.

“It’s really happening this time,” Buttigieg says.

One key difference between Brightline West’s project and California High Speed Rail’s slow-moving efforts in the Central Valley is that much of Brightline’s route will run down the center median of Interstate 15.

That choice dramatically simplifies acquiring property for the project, in contrast with CAHSR, which has spent years purchasing the roughly 2,300 individual properties it needs to complete the Merced-Bakersfield line. As of last December, it still needed to buy 37 parcels to complete its acquisitions for that phase of the project.

Brightline West’s southern terminus will be in the San Bernardino County town of Rancho Cucamonga, about 40 miles from Los Angeles. Passengers could connect there via Metrolink trains for the 80-minute ride to Union Station in downtown L.A.

Brightline plans one intermediate stop, in Victorville, and says its trains will make the trip between Las Vegas and the L.A. exurbs in a little more than two hours. The southbound trip from Las Vegas can be more than twice as long, especially on weekends.

The company projects 11 million one-way passengers per year. Company founder and chairman Wes Edens says round-trip ticket prices will be about $400 — equivalent to round-trip airfare — but could fluctuate with seasonal demand.

Transit advocates have generally gotten behind a bill unveiled earlier this week that would authorize a 2026 vote on a tax measure to support Bay Area transit and other transportation needs. 

But a progressive transportation group declined to participate in the bill announcement in San Francisco to express concern that money raised by the proposed tax could be used to widen highways.

Oakland-based TransForm said after SB 1031 was announced Monday that using revenue from the proposed tax to enhance highways — including by building new toll lanes — would encourage more driving in the future and thus perpetuate the environmental damage wrought by motor-vehicle traffic.  

Zack Deutsch-Gross, TransForm’s policy director, said in an interview that the planned measure, which has been under development for years and is the subject of continuing negotiations, needs to focus on major improvements in the Bay Area’s fractured transit network and on making existing streets and roads safer for all users.  

“We need to be laser-focused on what aspects of the measure will truly meet our transportation goals, advance economic prosperity in the region, as well as climate and equity. The reality is that highway expansion is not one of those goals and undermines all of them,” Deutsch-Gross said. 

SB 1031, introduced by Democratic state Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Aisha Wahab of Hayward, would guarantee at least $750 million a year to help deficit-plagued Bay Area transit agencies pay for day-to-day operations.

That funding would also go to improve coordination among the region’s 27 transit operators, possibly helping subsidize initiatives like flat-rate monthly and weekly passes and eliminating payments when transferring from one agency’s buses to another’s trains. 

But the bill is just one of many steps in the process of drafting the ballot measure and doesn’t include key details about what exactly Bay Area voters will eventually be asked to approve. Those details include:

On the question of how money will be spent, there’s general agreement that repairing existing roads in the region and projects that improve safety for people walking and biking will be eligible.

 But, as indicated by TransForm’s stance on SB 1031, there’s a debate on how much, if any, revenue should go to support projects like toll lanes, interchange improvements or ambitious projects like rebuilding the North Bay’s Highway 37 in response to congestion and rising sea levels. 

During an MTC discussion of the proposed tax measure in January, commission vice chair Nick Josefowitz argued spending on highway expansions should be ruled out. 

“I think we just need to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘For this measure, we are not going to be funding projects that make climate change worse. We’re not going to be funding highway-widening projects,'” Josefowitz said. 

That drew a heated response from Jim Spering, who represents Solano County on the commission. He said the measure should also respond to drivers’ needs. 

“I find it amusing, all these groups saying no highway expansion — you know, the same ones who are advocating for equity and fairness, you know, ‘Help our disadvantaged, low-income communities,'” Spering said. “And (they) just blatantly say, ‘No highway expansions’? Many of the highway expansions are helping those very people.” 

Spering and others on the commission have suggested that meaningful road improvements will be necessary to get the maximum possible buy-in from voters around the region. A series of polls on a transportation tax have shown such a measure falling well short of two-thirds support. The

TransForm’s Deutsch-Gross said he believes a measure focusing on transit, road repairs and enhancing transportation options like cycling and walking can win without including freeway projects. 

“I feel very confident that voters from the South Bay to the North Bay will deeply care about transportation investments like safer streets, like repairing roads and potholes, like active transportation investment and public transit,” he said. “I think there’s something for everyone in this measure without highway expansion.”

The latest in a series of polls trying to gauge voter willingness to pass a major regional transportation tax measure in 2026 suggests widespread enthusiasm for a wide array of transit improvements — but shows overall support falling well below the threshold needed for approval. 

The poll was sponsored by Seamless Bay Area, a group that has been working since 2018 to transform the region’s hodgepodge of 27 transit agencies into an integrated, rider-friendly network. It was funded in part by the Beneficial State Foundation, a group that advocates for racial and economic justice. Seamless Bay Area has been at the forefront of groups promoting a future tax measure that could raise as much as $2 billion a year.

The survey of 600 likely voters (PDF) from all nine Bay Area counties asked respondents whether they’d support a 1% regional income tax on individuals earning more than $300,000 a year and households earning over $500,000 annually.

The answer: 57% said they were inclined to vote yes.

That’s 10 percentage points short of the two-thirds majority the measure would need to pass and roughly in line with a series of polls over the last year or so that show anywhere from 51% to 63% support for a big transportation revenue measure.

That 51% figure was recorded last October when a poll conducted for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission asked likely voters about support for a smaller income tax — one-sixth of 1% — but with no income limits on who would pay. The 63% level came a year ago when the MTC pollster asked voters about support for a 1/2-cent regional sales tax increase to support transportation.

Ian Griffiths, Seamless Bay Area’s policy director, said the new poll results show “a strong base of support. Well over a majority of Bay Area voters support the idea of a ballot measure.”

Griffiths noted that the poll found overwhelming support for initiatives like coordinating schedules among all local transit operators and integrating and simplifying fares — steps that are crucial to creating a seamless regional public transportation network. He said improving the performance of existing services scored higher in the poll than measures like simply offering more buses, trains and ferries.

“The improvements that we asked about focused more on increasing service and providing faster, more frequent service and a network of lines that come every 10 minutes,” Griffiths said. “That was very popular, but not nearly as popular as coordination of the existing system. … There’s a very strong consciousness among the public of the poor level of coordination right now and the inconvenience of the existing system.”

The poll also found strong support for repairing the region’s roads and freeways and beefing up public safety measures on buses and trains by adding more security personnel, cameras and lighting. Respondents also said they want to see annual audits of how the tax revenue will be spent and to have online access to detailed accounting of agency spending.

Although advocates of the 2026 measure have been pointing to the dire state of public transit finances as the principal argument for a new tax, the Seamless poll ranked that as the least persuasive argument for the proposal.

Griffiths said that while that argument was “reasonably effective” in convincing the Legislature to come up with an emergency aid package for transit last year, it “is not especially effective at convincing the public in the context of a potential tax increase. People are not excited about the idea of paying more for the same as what they used to have before the pandemic.“

Under a provision of the transit aid package the Legislature passed last year, operators will be required to show they’re making progress in responding to persistent complaints related to issues like public safety and cleanliness.

The aid package makes the Metropolitan Transportation Commission responsible for monitoring compliance with benchmarks that vary from agency to agency. BART, for instance, has promised to install new, hard-to-evade fare gates at all 50 of its stations by the end of next year — a key piece of the agency’s “Safe and Clean Plan” to win back riders in the wake of the pandemic. If BART fails to deliver the fare-gate project on time, the MTC could, in theory, withhold some of the state emergency funds BART is in line for.

Griffiths says another finding in Seamless Bay Area’s poll — that a majority of voters don’t trust the government to spend transportation funds efficiently — highlights the need for transit agencies to deliver on their promises. He argues that visible progress in making transit easier to use will draw people back on board.

“As soon as people are riding more, this poll indicates they’re more likely to support the measure,” he said. “So, I absolutely think we have the opportunity in the next two years to build on that 57% support and get closer, to get it higher. And that’s going to depend upon us delivering on a lot of these promises that we’ve been talking about for years and years and years. And fortunately, there’s finally some progress underway.”

A South Bay lawmaker said the state’s decision to allow Waymo to expand its autonomous taxi service over the protests of local officials shows the need to give cities and counties more say in future approvals. 

The California Public Utilities Commission announced Friday it had given Waymo the go-ahead to expand paid operations immediately on the Peninsula and across much of Los Angeles County. Until now, the company’s service was limited to San Francisco.

The decision from the commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division came after officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Mateo County had filed objections to Waymo’s enlarged service area. 

Among other concerns, the official protests argued that Waymo was seeking fast-track approval without allowing cities and counties to weigh in on the process and without being required to disclose detailed safety data to local governments. 

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation urged the commission to hold off on approving Waymo’s expansion until the Legislature acts on a bill from state Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose). 

Cortese’s SB 915 would give city and county governments the power to grant or deny local operating permits to autonomous vehicle services after they’ve secured approvals from the Department of Motor Vehicles and the CPUC. 

In an interview Friday, Cortese said the CPUC’s rapid approval of Waymo’s expansion “punctuates the need for a much better and more comprehensive and more thorough system of oversight and enforcement and control of the motor vehicles that are going to be on the street as (autonomous vehicle technology) continues to advance. “

Cortese said local control over autonomous vehicle services is an extension of local governments’ authority over how public streets are managed.

“There’s always been the ability for local governments to establish and control and enforce motor vehicles on their streets, whether it’s through speed limits, whether it’s establishing bike lanes, safe pedestrian crossings, safe routes to schools — those are all local jurisdictional matters,” Cortese said. “And right now, these autonomous vehicles are exempt from that, primarily because they weren’t contemplated when California law was established around motor vehicles.”

Cortese said his bill would also push autonomous vehicle operators — besides Waymo, more than three dozen have received DMV approval for some level of testing in the state — to cooperate more fully with the communities they want to operate in. He argues that the process of gaining local approvals will be no more burdensome than it is for any other kind of business.

“I see no reason why politically they can’t deal with cities and counties as pretty much everybody else who needs a permit does in this world,” Cortese said. “Whether it’s eBay trying to build a new campus or Apple trying to build a new campus or a guy trying to open up an ice cream shop on the corner. Everybody, every franchise. You know, it’s worked for everybody else. It’s worked for McDonald’s.”

Waymo said in a statement issued after the CPUC’s approval it welcomed the commission’s “vote of confidence in our operations.”

San Francisco Chronicle: Police chases are killing more and more Americans. With lax rules, it’s no accident. An investigation by Chronicle reporters found “at least 3,336 people were killed as a result of police pursuits throughout the U.S. from 2017 through 2022. At least 15 of them were officers. More than 52,600 people were injured from 2017 through 2021, according to government estimates.”

San Francisco Standard: Fewer chases, but more crashes. SFPD collision rates are highest among California’s big cities. “The Standard found that 41%—or 47 of the 115 pursuits initiated by the San Francisco Police Department in a four-year period—resulted in a collision. That was nearly twice the statewide average of 22% of pursuits resulting in collisions, and significantly higher than the collision rate for neighboring police departments in Oakland (26%) and San Jose (33%).”

KQED: Remembering the East Bay native who made ‘the first motorized trip’ across the United States. Chances are you’ve never heard of George Adams Wyman. In May 1903, he and his gasoline-powered bicycle set out from Lotta’s Fountain on Market Street in San Francisco on a 3,800-mile journey that earned him a brief moment of fame.

Bay Area News Group: Drivers who survived San Jose hijackings honored for courage. “District Attorney’s Office recognizes VTA bus driver who kept machete-wielding man at bay and UPS driver who famously thwarted gun-toting couple.”

Oaklandside: Oakland has fallen way behind schedule in paving roads. “In 2021, the Oakland City Council passed a $300 million, five-year plan to fix about 400 miles of roads between 2022 and 2027. Only 36 miles from that plan have been paved. The city is behind schedule because of a ‘slowdown in contract processing as well as some equipment challenges impacting in-house crews,’ according to the city’s Department of Transportation.”

San Francisco Examiner: SFMTA credits a series of improvements for increased ridership. The city’s transportation agency says Muni ridership “rose 25% in 2023 to its highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, which officials credited to improved ridership experiences on buses and subways while adapting to new travel patterns.”

Los Angeles Times: New high-speed train from Vegas to SoCal will be a model for the nation — if it succeeds. “When Simon Akinwolere, a 27-year-old cruise director, needed to commute from Orlando to Miami, he sorted through his travel options. He could drive the 235 miles, spending four hours dealing with traffic. Flying would be faster, but he’d endure security lines and baggage hassles. He settled on a new option: Buy a train ticket that promised a 3½-hour ride, access to a conference room and a free buffet with self-serve beer and wine taps.”

Vox: Driving at ridiculous speeds should be physically impossible. “Speeding plays a role in over 12,000 US car fatalities per year, around a third of the national total. But an emergent technology could dramatically reduce that death toll, if not eliminate it entirely.”

Gothamist: The lasting toll of violence on New York’s subway. “… Gun violence on mass transit exacts a lasting toll that can’t be fully captured in statistics. Just ask Fitim Gjeloshi, who helped save dozens of passengers on a northbound Brooklyn N train on April 12, 2022, when Frank James set off a smoke bomb and fired 32 shots from his Glock 17 during morning rush hour.”

Stateline: No fare! Free bus rides raise questions of fairness and viability. Just 23 cities nationwide had ridership in 2023 equal to or higher than in 2019, and 14 of those had free rides at least part of the year, according to the Stateline analysis of federal data.

Near the beginning of a trip to the Great Plains in August 2017 to see that summer’s total solar eclipse, my traveling companion and I pulled off Interstate 80 in the Sierra at a spot called Nyack. There’s a gas station and convenience store there, and on the wall of the latter was a sign that got my attention: “Waypoint: George A. Wyman, First Across America.”

I snapped a picture and then forgot about it. Stumbling across the image several years later, I looked up George A. Wyman and what the whole “1st Across America” thing is about.

In short, Wyman was a Hayward native, born in 1877, who at the age of 26 made what is said to have been the first trip across the United States via motorized vehicle — in his case, a motorized bicycle produced by a company in San Francisco.

Wyman’s journey began May 16, 1903, at Lotta’s Fountain, on the little triangle where Kearney and Geary streets meet Market. That’s a spot that became famous as a meeting place for survivors of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, a bit of history commemorated with a pre-dawn ceremony every April 18, the quake anniversary. 

Naturally, having heard this much, you’ll want to read more about George A. Wyman and his machine.

If I’m right about that, you’ll want to check out the George A. Wyman Memorial Project, which has published the adventurer’s own day-by-day account of his cross-country journey. The site includes a pretty good tale, too, about how the late publisher of the Los Angeles Times found and restored a 1902 vintage motor bicycle that he believed to be the one Wyman rode.

The daily journal of the trip is drawn from Wyman’s dispatches to a long-extinct publication called Motorcycle Magazine, which sponsored the trip. The story that unfolds in those reports shows Wyman to have been unflinching in the face of both frequently hostile conditions along his route and the repeated breakdowns of his 90-pound, 1.25-horsepower machine.

This was no modern road trip because, in many places, highways were non-existent. Wyman wrote that he often preferred the bone-rattling ride along railroad ties to struggling through the deep sand or intractable mud along what passed for roads. When the trip was over, he estimated he’d ridden 1,500 miles on the cross-ties; on several occasions, he had close calls with trains that overtook him when he was on the tracks.

Mostly, Wyman was good-humored and matter-of-fact about most of his difficulties. Here he is in June 1903, somewhere in western Nebraska, remarking on a broken piece of equipment:

For me, Wyman’s story is most compelling as a snapshot of the time just before the kind of cross-country trip he was attempting would be commonplace. While Americans had always been fascinated with the idea of picking up and traveling long distances — that’s how California and the rest of the United States happened, after all — taking a cross-country trip just to do it was an experience reserved for the well-to-do and usually happened on rail. Wyman was riding into a future in which all the terrible roads would be improved, and inexpensive vehicles and gasoline would transform both the travel experience and expectations about what that experience would (and should) be. The ability to take a trip like the one I and millions of others made in 2017 to see a celestial spectacle has long since been taken for granted.

Wyman frequently commented on the reception he got along the way. When he limped into Cheyenne, Wyoming, after a day battling rain and mud so deep and thick that he had to get help from a friendly rancher to pull his motorbike free, he was met with suspicion from one innkeeper after another. Wyman eventually figured out why.

“With my coat torn in several places and one sleeve of it hanging by a thread, my leggings hanging in shreds, no waistcoat on, dripping wet and splashed with mud all over,” he didn’t present the picture of a guest any hotel would welcome.

“‘All full’ was the word I got at the first hotel, and at the next it was the same,” he wrote. “After I had tried three and been refused, I was satisfied that it was my appearance that was the reason. To make the matter worse, I discovered that my big ‘.38’ revolver had worn a hole in my pocket and was sticking through so that it showed plainly between the torn part of my coat. I must have looked like a ‘bad man’ from the wilds.”

Finally realizing the impression he was making, he took pains to explain that he was on a cross-country trip. “I finally found a woman who kept furnished rooms, who eyed me suspiciously and said she had no room, but would fix me up a cot,” he said. “She listened to my story and finally fixed me up a nice room, and I stayed there two nights.”

Elsewhere, he encountered amazement at both the length of his journey and the technology he was using. On June 24, he stopped for the night in Ligonier, Indiana, a town about halfway between Chicago and Toledo, Ohio:

“I thought that when I got east of Chicago folks would know what a motor bicycle is, but it was not so. In every place through which I passed, I left behind a gaping lot of natives, who ran out into the street to stare after me. When I reached Ligonier I rode through the main street, and by mistake went past the hotel where I wanted to stop. When I turned and rode back the streets looked as though there was a circus in town. All the shopkeepers were out on the sidewalks to see the motor bicycle, and small boys were as thick as flies in a country restaurant. When I dismounted in front of the hotel the crowd became so big and the curiosity so great that I deemed it best to take the bicycle inside. The boys manifested a desire to pull it apart to see how it was made.“

Wyman’s motor bicycle was a sort of hybrid, consisting of what looked like a conventional bicycle frame fitted with a small gas tank and motor. A leather drive belt — which broke and required mending constantly — ran between the motor’s crank shaft and a pulley on the rear wheel. The motor and transmission apparatus finally quit for good as Wyman neared the end of his journey in New York City. Luckily, he could simply pedal the bike, and pedal he did, riding the last 150 miles from Albany to New York City without stopping overnight to sleep:

“I made frequent stops to rest and I attracted more than a little attention but I was too tired to care. I can smile now as I recall the sight I was with my overalls on, my face and hands black as a mulatto’s, my coat torn and dirty, a big piece of wood tied on with rope where my handlebars should be, and the belt hanging loose from the crankshaft. I was told that I was ‘picturesque’ by a country reporter named ‘Josh,’ who captured me for an interview a little way up the Hudson, and who kept me talking while the photographer worked his camera, but to my ideal, I was too dirty to be picturesque. At any rate, I was too tired then to care. All I wanted was a hot bath and a bed.”

Wyman’s arrival in New York after his 50-day epic attracted little attention. A few papers across the country carried a brief Associated Press story that hailed him as “the first man to cross the American continent on a power-propelled road vehicle.” Motorcycle Magazine suggested one reason the feat may not have gained wider attention: Wyman himself didn’t boast about it.

“Now that the narrative has been completed and a review of the whole trip can be taken, it stands out in its entirety as a supreme triumph for the motor bicycle,” the magazine said in November 1903. “It was not only the most notable long distance record by a motorcycle, but also it was the greatest long trip made in this country by any sort of a motor vehicle. This is a fact to which attention was not called by Wyman in his story and it is one that should be emphasized. In fact, Wyman’s story was altogether too modest throughout.”

•KQED Bay Curious: Is the SMART Train Easing Highway 101 Traffic in Marin and Sonoma? The North Bay’s rail agency has come a long way since launching in 2017. And it’s the only public transportation system in the entire nine-county Bay Area that carries more passengers than before the Death Star, aka COVID-19, zapped transit services everywhere. But a Bay Curious listener wants to know whether SMART is making a dent in traffic congestion along U.S. 101.

•KQED In Transit: BART Workers Demand Improved Security After Robbery Outside Agency HQ. Members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 appeared at this week’s BART board meeting in what amounted to a protest of a Feb. 14 incident in which an employee was robbed at gunpoint just outside agency headquarters.

•San Francisco Examiner: BART Survey Says Rider Satisfaction Highest in a Decade

•San Francisco Chronicle: Robotaxis Are Causing Less Mayhem on SF Streets. City Officials Explain Why

•TechCrunch: State Regulators Pause Waymo’s Application to Expand Robotaxi Operations

•San Francisco Standard: Hornblower’s SOS Call: Sunk by the Pandemic, Alcatraz Cruise Operator Files for Bankruptcy

•Los Angeles Times: Driver Found Guilty of Murder in Collision That Killed Two Young Brothers

•Gothamist: Why Riders Can Easily Trip Emergency Brakes on NYC’s Subway Trains

•Via YouTube: It took 45 days, but he rode every one of London’s 544 bus routes

In the aftermath of an early-morning armed robbery of a BART employee outside the agency’s downtown Oakland headquarters, one of the agency’s unions is demanding swift action to improve security for workers. 

The robbery at 3 a.m. on Feb. 14 was disclosed during the agency’s board of directors meeting on Thursday. 

“This was an armed robbery, several people with guns chasing our employee up and down the street as he struggled to get into the building for safety,” said Jesse Hunt, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, which represents BART’s train operators, station agents and other operations employees. 

Hunt and several Local 1555 members appeared at the meeting to call on the agency to address safety concerns. 

Hunt said workers face “challenges that compromise their safety on a daily basis, from verbal abuse, being spit on, physical assaults and having their personal vehicles broken into. … It is unacceptable to continue to hear about the incidents of assaults and armed robberies our members endure while simply reporting to their jobs and working in the field to service the public.”

Rachel Miranda, a senior operations foreworker, told the board that employees have been dealing with crime in the area around the agency’s headquarters at 21st and Webster streets for more than two years. 

Miranda said that when her coworker “was strong-armed, with multiple guns pointed at him in front of the building, and feared for his life, we, the frontline workers, say that’s enough. No one should be afraid to come into work.” 

The board also heard a plea from another senior operations foreworker, Olivia Spicer, who said staff at headquarters were shaken by news of the robbery and security camera video of the incident. 

“Please, please help us,” Spicer said, near tears. “Please. Because I still want to come here. I still want to work here. I still love working for BART.” 

BART executives at the meeting acknowledged what they described as “challenges” in the headquarters area, including the safety of employees walking to and from parking lots in the neighborhood late at night and early in the morning. 

Michael Jones, BART’s deputy general manager, said the agency has increased the police presence around the headquarters building. A BART officer has been stationed there during the overnight hours and officers are making drive-by patrols around the clock. 

Jones said the district is also working to start a shuttle service to take workers to and from parking lots near the Paramount Theatre and the Kaiser Center. 

“It’s unfortunate we have to do that, but traversing from here to the Paramount Theatre at 3 o’clock in the morning to park or from here to 19th Street late at night or early in the morning has become challenging,” Jones said. 

“We’re just trying to make sure that we can do what we can right now to make sure that our employees know that we value their safety, and we’re going to do what we can do to keep them safe,” he said. 

But Local 1555’s Hunt made it clear that he and his members are looking for what he called “decisive action” to improve worker safety. 

He outlined several steps he wants the agency to take, including: 

“We need the BART board to end what appears to our members to be simply lip service intended to minimize BART’s liability when it comes to safety instead of actually making us safer,” Hunt said.

At the request of BART board president Bevan Dufty, agency management will make a formal presentation on employee safety at the board’s next meeting on March 14. 

Back in 2014, the Golden Gate Bridge district was looking for ways to close its perennial budget deficit and considering a long list of measures to help close the fiscal gap. 

One idea on the list was imposing a toll on people who came to the bridge to walk or ride their bikes across it. The proposal wasn’t popular, and Assemblymember Phil Ting of San Francisco headed it off with a bill that prohibited bridge tolls on pedestrians. 

The bill, passed and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015, expired in 2021. 

Fast forward to this week. The bridge district, facing a five-year deficit estimated at $220 million, opened its formal public presentation of a proposal to raise tolls for motor vehicles. The fee would rise between 35 and 50 cents a year for the next five years. Fastrak users would pay between $10.50 and $11.25 by the fifth year of increases in 2028. Those who use other payment methods would be charged more. 

This time around, the bridge district is not discussing charging people to walk or ride bikes across the bridge. 

But Ting and his allies in the cycling and pedestrian community want to make sure that option is taken off the table for good. 

Using the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop Thursday, Ting announced AB 2669, a bill that will permanently ban tolls on people walking, biking or scootering across any bridge in the state. 

“At a time when we’re dealing with climate change, and we’re trying to encourage more people to walk, more people to bike, I can’t think of a greater disincentive than actually charging a toll for pedestrians and cyclists to cross one of the most famous bridges in our world,” Ting said at a Crissy Field press conference.

“These are modes of transportation that every level of government should be encouraging and incentivizing everyone to use,” said Christopher White, interim executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “But the norm is that driving and cars are subsidized while using sustainable active modes suffers from lack of investment. This bill flips that script.”

For Karen Rhodes, the president of the board of directors of Walk SF, maintaining spaces accessible to everyone is an equity issue. 

“People in community, outdoors with each other, young, old, local, visitors from all over the world — tens of thousands of people making use of our bridges in this way every day,” Rhodes said. “We’re all walking, rolling, using mobility aids to get outside and enjoy the restorative benefits of being outdoors.” 

Ting said that the worst thing the state can do is to penalize active modes of transportation. He said that there is an active coalition of support for his proposition all over the state.

The bill will get its first hearing in March. 

And a historical note: For the first 33 and a half years after the bridge opened in May 1937, the bridge actually did charge pedestrians to stroll across the span. The initial charge was a nickel — deposited in a turnstile — and was raised to a dime in 1938. 

The reported rationale for levying a pedestrian fee was that the district was legally obligated to charge all bridge users while it was paying off the voter-approved bonds that paid for the bridge’s construction. 

The bridge district repealed the pedestrian toll in 1970, which was also the year cyclists were first allowed to use the bridge.

 From the vantage point of 2023, the fee doesn’t look like it was a big moneymaker. In November 1970, the district reported it had collected $132 from pedestrians and $58 from cyclists.

Here are two things that anyone who crosses the Golden Gate Bridge can count on: You’ll get a close-up view of one of the most iconic structures anywhere on the planet, and pretty soon, you’ll pay more to do it.

The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, the agency that owns and operates the span and the associated ferry and bus systems, will this week take the next step in a process that, if history is any guide, will raise bridge tolls for the next five years. The goal is to help close the total estimated deficit over that time frame of $220 million.

The cost for most passenger vehicles to cross the span now ranges from $8.75 if you use FasTrak to $9.75 for those who pay by invoice.  

The bridge district is considering five different toll scenarios that would raise tolls anywhere from 35 to 50 cents per year for the next five years. Under the most expensive scenario, which would raise about $139 million, FasTrak tolls would rise to $9.25 on July 1 and reach $11.25 on July 1, 2028. The charge for drivers paying by invoice would rise to $10.25 in July and hit $12.25 in 2028.

The smallest increase the district has floated would raise the FasTrak toll to $10.50 by 2028. Tolls-by-invoice would go up to $11.50. The agency would raise about $101 million in new revenue under that scenario.

The bridge district is holding a series of public outreach sessions on the proposed tolls. Those will include two one-hour Zoom webinars — on Wednesday, Feb. 14, at noon and Thursday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m. — and a formal public hearing on Thursday, Feb. 22.

You can also submit a public comment by email at publiccomment@goldengate.org or via an online comment form.

The district’s board of directors is expected to make a final decision on the toll proposal next month.

On the eve of another Golden Gate Bridge toll increase some time ago, I was moved to delve a little into the district’s toll history. Here’s a slightly updated version of what I found:

“If you take the really long view, even the pricey-looking tolls now being proposed look like a bargain.

“Today, only southbound drivers pay a toll. In 1937, the year the bridge opened, drivers paid 50 cents to cross — each way. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, that $1 round-trip charge is the equivalent of $21.42 in 2024 dollars.

“The picture changes if you look at more of the toll history. Bridge directors actually reduced tolls three times — to 40 cents each way in July 1950; to 30 cents in February 1955; and to 25 cents in October 1955. A 40-trip book of commute tickets was priced at $7 after that final reduction.

“Those 1955 cuts were made in response to pressure from local politicians — notably state Sen. Jack McCarthy, a Republican representing parts of Marin and San Francisco — who argued that the district’s revenue from bridge tolls was far more than it needed to make ends meet.

“After the district voted in August 1955 to reduce the toll to a quarter, board member William Hadeler foresaw a future that could be toll-free if only cash weren’t needed to keep the bridge in good repair.

“‘We are not going to be content with a 25-cent toll,’ Hadeler said, according to what was then called the Daily Independent Journal (today’s Marin IJ). ‘As soon as conditions permit, I — and I am sure all of the directors — would like to see the toll reduced to 20 cents, to 15 cents, to 10 cents; and someday, if possible, no toll at all. But free tolls are something for the distant future. The Golden Gate Bridge is here for all time. It has to be operated and maintained so that it will always be here. And someone must pay the cost of those expenditures. That is why we have tolls.'”

Until now, the only place in California where a paying customer might hail an autonomous taxi and ride — sample journey: get a ride home from the bar after a night out — has been San Francisco. But under an application now pending before state regulators, that could change dramatically this year.

Earlier this month, the state Department of Motor Vehicles permitted Waymo to expand its “operational design domain” to parts of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — virtually all of the Peninsula south of San Francisco and east of Interstate 280.

(As defined by the DMV, an operational design domain includes the geographic territory, type of roadway, permissible speed, weather conditions and other conditions “in which an automated function or system is designed to properly operate.”)

Getting the DMV’s approval was the necessary first step for Waymo to apply to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates for-hire transportation services, for permission to expand its robot taxi service beyond the borders of San Francisco.

The company’s application, filed last week, asks the CPUC to approve expansion to all or part of 22 cities: Atherton, Belmont, Brisbane, Burlingame, Colma, East Palo Alto, Foster City, Hillsborough, Los Altos, Los Alto Hills, Menlo Park, Millbrae, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Carlos, San Mateo, South San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Woodside.

Waymo is also seeking to start commercial operations throughout the city of Los Angeles and 25 adjoining LA County cities, including Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Culver City, Compton and Long Beach.

Exactly when Waymo might roll out service in its proposed new territories is unknown. The CPUC is taking public comment on the company’s application through Feb. 8, and as a Waymo spokesperson said in an email response to a question last week, after that, the commission “will review our request on its own timeline.”

One indication of how long that timeline could be comes from the commission’s deliberations on the December 2022 applications from Waymo and its robotaxi rival Cruise to offer around-the-clock service throughout San Francisco. The CPUC approved the applications last August, about eight months later.

(The DMV and CPUC suspended Cruise’s operating permits in October after one of the company’s autonomous vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian. Both state agencies have alleged that the company withheld video that showed the full extent of the crash — an accusation the company continues to deny. Cruise faces a hearing before the commission next week on its motion to settle allegations arising from the incident.)

The CPUC approved the robotaxi applications in August despite protests from San Francisco city officials, who pointed to numerous incidents in which Waymo and Cruise vehicles blocked traffic, blundered into emergency response scenes, and interfered with police and fire vehicles. The city has also complained that both autonomous vehicle operators and firms like Uber and Lyft have not been forthcoming enough with information government agencies need to understand the effect the services have on congestion and traffic safety.

In November, the CPUC rejected San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu’s request to reconsider its approval for Waymo’s expanded service. Chiu’s office is now challenging the commission’s approval in state appellate courts, with one claim on public safety issues before the 1st District Court of Appeal and another concerning the state’s environmental law filed with the California Supreme Court.

Last month, the Oakland City Council approved a $6.5 million settlement in a case that involved a bicycle rider who was critically injured in April 2020 on MacArthur Boulevard.

The cyclist, Bruno VanSchoote, descended a section of MacArthur just east of the Grand Lake neighborhood when he hit a seam that had developed in the pavement. He was thrown from his bike and suffered severe head and spinal injuries.

At the time, news site Oaklandside reported the settlement was perhaps the largest the city had ever made related to people injured due to dangerous street conditions in the city.

But just five weeks later — in a development first reported by the Oakland Observer news site — the city has approved a settlement for an identical amount to a cyclist who was seriously injured when she crashed on a city-maintained road in the East Bay hills. In agreeing to settle, the city admitted no wrongdoing or liability.

The crash victim, Lynne McDonald of Berkeley, was on a morning bike ride with her husband, David Barr, and a group of friends on May 12, 2018, when she hit a pothole on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. She suffered what one document in her long-running legal case describes as “catastrophic” spinal and head injuries.

McDonald and her husband sued, alleging that the city had overlooked deteriorating pavement on the designated bike route. Evidence introduced by McDonald and Barr estimated repairs to the crumbling section of the roadway, which had been paved in 2013, would have cost about $5 a square foot.

McDonald and Barr filed suit in December 2018. In July 2020, Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Reilly agreed with attorneys for the city that McDonald had failed to present evidence that the city knew and should have known, that the stretch of Grizzly Peak where she crashed was dangerous. He granted the city’s motion for summary judgment, essentially throwing out the case.

But McDonald appealed, and last year, a state appellate court reinstated the lawsuit, setting the stage for this week’s $6.5 settlement. The city will pay $3 million of that amount, with the remainder to be covered by insurance.

Based on reporting last month from Oaklandside, the McDonald-Barr settlement brings the city’s settlement total in lawsuits involving dangerous street conditions to more than $40 million over the last decade.

With its prototype fare gates installed at West Oakland station — and reportedly working as intended to deter those who want to ride trains without paying — BART announced where customers could expect to see the new gates next.

The stations include several of the busiest in the BART system, including three of the four stops in downtown San Francisco: 24th Street/Mission, Antioch, Civic Center, Fruitvale, Montgomery, Powell, Richmond and SFO.

From that list, the gates will be installed first at Civic Center, with work beginning in May or June.

Sylvia Lamb, BART’s assistant general manager for infrastructure delivery, told the agency’s board of directors at its Thursday meeting that the exact date depends on how quickly engineers can iron out any issues that arise with the prototype gates at West Oakland. She said one hiccup has emerged so far.

“Some folks have noticed there is a touch of a lag when you tap your (Clipper) card and before the gates open,” Lamb said. She said that lag time is estimated to be about 1.2 or 1.3 seconds — long enough that people entering or exiting the gates must pause a beat before proceeding.

“We’re trying to reduce that time to make it quicker,” she said, adding that BART General Manager Bob Power had told her that “when he taps and he walks, then he has to wait” before the gate opens.

Lamb said the stations prioritized for the next round of installations were chosen after a process that involved outside consultants and check-ins with several different departments at the agency, including BART police, about where the next improved fare gates should go. The process also considered factors like equity and the complexity of installing gates at each station.

“There’s probably seven or eight different scenarios we ran with consultants and other folks,” Lamb said, and the same eight stations kept showing up at the top of the list. “In every scenario we ran, in every model, these kept popping up.

BART has promised legislators and regional transportation officials that it will have the next-generation fare gates installed at all 50 of its stations by the end of next year.

San Francisco transportation officials say a recently released draft report showing a sharp drop in cyclists, drivers and pedestrians along Valencia Street since the installation of a controversial bike lane last summer doesn’t accurately represent the current state of traffic on the street. 

The draft report from the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency, released via a public records request on Wednesday, was the first snapshot of data showing how the Mid-Valencia Pilot has changed use of the corridor. The pilot installed a center-running bike lane and changed driving and parking restrictions on the street. 

The data in the draft report measures vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian traffic at certain intersections on the corridor for a single month last September and compares it to conditions nearly a year earlier, in October 2022. 

The report shows that bike traffic along Valencia Street declined by as much as 53% in September compared to the previous October. It also shows a significant drop in daily motor vehicle volume, as much as a 42% decline, especially in the northern portion of the corridor. Peak pedestrian volumes also declined as much as 42% in some locations, with an overall 18% decline.

In a press release Thursday, SFMTA says the draft report “only accounts for a small portion of our evaluation period during which cyclists were returning to Valencia Street after the pilot construction period.”

The agency says it is finalizing a three-month evaluation report and added that it estimates average daily bike volume is about 3% higher than before the pilot began. The agency says the September drop in drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians seen in the draft report was due to cyclists slowly returning to the street after the bike lane was completed. Construction began in mid-April, but the center-running bikeway didn’t open until Aug. 1. 

When the draft report was first released Wednesday, opponents of the Mid-Valencia Pilot say the decline in bike traffic shows the pilot is failing to achieve its goals.

The data was reportedly obtained through an anonymous public records request and released by Luke Bornheimer, an independent safe streets advocate and a leading critic of the bike lane. 

“This unprecedented decrease in people biking on Valencia Street should be a wake-up call to Mayor Breed and the SFMTA Board of Directors,” Bornheimer says in a press release.

Improving traffic safety was also a major priority of the pilot. Valencia Street is on the city’s high-injury network. Three pedestrians have been struck and killed on Valencia Street since 2020. One, 80-year-old Jian Huang of San Francisco, was struck and killed last September by a driver who was turning left onto Valencia. 

Some aspects of the draft report show the pilot was achieving some of the SFMTA’s goals. 

The report shows a steep decrease in vehicles double-parking and loading in the bike lane, one of the project’s major goals. Before the pilot, people working for ride-hailing apps and app-based delivery services would often double-park in the existing bike lane, forcing cyclists to make a dangerous merge into the vehicle lane. In instituting the pilot, SFMTA says it’s tried to walk a line between improving traffic safety and preserving business access.

But a growing chorus of business owners on Valencia Street have complained that the pilot has led to a steep drop in sales. 

The live music venue Amado’s, which had been in operation for eight years at 21st and Valencia, closed in November and blamed the pilot for an 80% drop in revenue. As part of the pilot, SFMTA eliminated 71 metered parking spots and converted them into loading zones.

“It became completely untenable for artists, staff trying to find parking, and mainly, any kind of customer that would like to come and enjoy our venue,” says Amado’s owner, David Quinby, in an interview. 

Since the start of the pilot, SFMTA says it has responded to complaints like these from businesses by converting seven loading zone spaces per block back to general parking. 

The agency says it is exploring an alternative design to the center-running bikeway pilot that would relocate the bike lane to the side of the street, between the sidewalk and parked cars. 

But to business owners like Quinby — the small slice of data in the draft report proves that the current street configuration is a failed experiment. 

“The public is actively avoiding Valencia Street, which is killing our community,” Quinby says.

BART ridership was down in December, with average daily patronage (weekdays, weekends and holidays) sinking from 134,186 to 117,876, a decline of 9.2%.

Here’s why that’s not as bad as it sounds: The decline reflects the lowest low of a seasonal downturn that appears to affect most Bay Area transit agencies and reflects factors like the onset of colder, wetter weather and the fact people aren’t taking as many trips on transit during the height of the holiday season.

Year-over-year numbers are more important in judging overall ridership recovery, and December continued BART’s recent trend of slow but steady ridership growth compared to 2022 levels. Last month’s patronage, both overall and on weekdays, was up 9% over November 2022.

Actual numbers versus BART’s forecast: BART forecasted growth of about 9% in ridership in the fiscal year from July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024. Actual ridership for the first six months of the fiscal year has grown at almost exactly that pace.

Here’s a quick look at some key December ridership numbers:

Overall December ridership: 3,654,243, or 39.5% of December’s pre-pandemic baseline of 9.2 million.

Total weekday ridership: 2,881,148 (20 days, excluding Christmas Day, Dec. 25), down from 3,233,822 in November (20 days, excluding Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving).

Average weekday ridership: 144,057 (36.9% of baseline). That’s down from 161,691 in October (39.6%).

December ’23 vs. December ’22: This year’s ridership of 3,654,243 is 9.1% higher than the ridership for the same month a year ago, 3,319,297. Weekday average ridership of 144,057 is up 9% from the 129,872 recorded in December 2022.

Weekday average ridership, fiscal year to date: 161,951, or 39.1% of baseline. (BART’s fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30 each year.) The overall weekday average for FY 2023 was 147,620, or 35.6% of the baseline.

Source for all of the above: BART’s daily ridership reports, accessed here, and KQED’s ongoing tracking of the numbers (a big Google sheet, with chart), here.

Perhaps the most daring thing a modern traveler can do in this unpredictable world of unregulated airlines and frequently fouled-up schedules is to book an airline trip that includes a connecting flight. Who can possibly tell where you and your luggage will wind up and when?

But if you happen to be that adventurous traveler, and you have a layover of a few hours, and if that layover happens to be at San Francisco International Airport, and if you’re the type of person who would like to see a little bit of the world beyond SFO: Well, then, KQED can suggest a quick trip that will give you an idea of what San Francisco is all about.

Nisa Khan of our audience news team produced a guide — Layover at SFO? How to See (a Little) of San Francisco in a Few Hours — that features four quick itineraries for trips from the airport to the city’s Mission District and downtown neighborhoods via BART. The suggestions include many eateries and stops ranging from Dolores Park to the Asian Art Museum to City Hall to the Ferry Building. It’s a pretty amazing list of attractions, all accessible for less than $25 round trip.

My favorite stop: The Ferry Building. It’s home to lots of shops and restaurants if that’s your thing. For me, the view is the thing — of the Bay Bridge to the south, Yerba Buena and Treasure Island and the hills rising up beyond Oakland and Berkeley to the east, and the vast expanse of the bay and waterfront to the north. It’s also, not surprisingly, where you can catch ferries to more than half a dozen destinations across the water.

Of course, the danger if you’re on a layover is that you might be having such a good time exploring or sailing off on an East Bay ferry that you might not get back to the airport in time for that connecting flight.

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague in the KQED newsroom asked me what BART was doing about people who jump over fare gates. She said that it looked like more people were jumping over the gates at her usual stop, San Francisco’s 16th and Mission station, than were taking the trouble to swipe their Clipper cards.

My KQED friend touched on one of the three or four (or is it five or six or seven?) most common customer complaints about BART. That list would include the presence of unhoused people and those experiencing mental health crises on trains and in stations; concerns about crime and harassment; the lack of a visible police presence; and trains and station areas that can be appallingly dirty.

BART is trying to address each of those topics, deploying social workers to aid those in crisis, reassigning police officers and other uniformed personnel to increase their visibility on the system, and focusing resources on keeping stations and rolling stock clean.

But to answer my fellow journalist’s question about fare evasion, I pointed to another project BART has undertaken after years of planning and a good degree of prodding from customers and critics: a program to replace all of its old fare gates, a total of more than 700, at all 50 of its stations. The agency has set aside $90 million for the project. Added pressure has come from state lawmakers who have made it clear they want to see BART improve all aspects of its service in return for emergency state aid the system is getting.

The prototype fare gates are being installed now at the West Oakland station and are plainly visible from one of the stairways descending from the San Francisco-bound platform to the concourse level. The new gates differ radically from the E-Z Leap electronic gates that have been in place since the system opened in 1972 (and from BART’s earlier home-brew attempts to discourage gate-jumping). There doesn’t seem to be any way to climb over them or scoot under them. Our guess is that when the inevitable attempts to defeat them occur, it will be by people simply trying to force their way through the pneumatically controlled doors. Will there be TikTok videos of those attempts? Just wait, although I admit I am rooting for the gates.

BART said in answer to an email on Tuesday that the new gates at the West Oakland station will be operational by the end of the month. That’s in keeping with promises the agency has made to show rapid progress on the project, which it says it plans to complete by the end of 2025.

In the latest fallout from an October incident in which a Cruise robotaxi ran over and dragged a pedestrian in downtown San Francisco, the company has dismissed nine top executives and laid off a quarter of its workforce.

The GM-owned company announced the reduction in force in an early-morning email that informed employees that 900 of them were about to be laid off effective immediately.

An announcement on the company’s site included a letter by Cruise President and Chief Technology Officer Mo Elshenawy expressing gratitude to the laid-off employees. Twice, he noted the workers are departing “through no fault of their own.”

Elshenawy’s message also alluded to the company’s move on Wednesday to “part ways” with nine of its top executives. According to TechCrunch, those dismissals were shared inside the company via Slack message and came after the Cruise board of directors completed an “internal initial analysis” of the Oct. 2 crash in downtown San Francisco and the company’s response to the incident.

The collision involved a woman who was crossing against a traffic signal at Fifth and Market streets when a hit-and-run driver struck her. The woman was thrown in front of a Cruise autonomous taxi — the company’s statement on the incident took pains to mention the vehicle’s name was Panini — which ran over her. The vehicle initially stopped but then attempted to pull over to the curb, dragging the victim about 20 feet.

The Department of Motor Vehicles and California Public Utilities Commission suspended the company’s operating permits on Oct. 24. The company now faces at least $1.5 million in CPUC penalties for allegedly withholding key evidence about the incident and making misleading public statements about it later.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt resigned in November along with his co-founder, Dan Kan. The company leaders dismissed Wednesday included the company’s chief operating officer, chief legal officer and its recently hired head of government relations.

The internal company announcement of the dismissals said Cruise is “focused on rebuilding trust and operating with the highest standards when it comes to safety, integrity, and accountability and believe that new leadership is necessary to achieve these goals.”

Thursday’s layoff announcement said laid-off workers will remain on the Cruise payroll for another two months and that they’ll be eligible for at least an additional eight weeks of severance pay. The company said it will allow visa holders to remain on the payroll through late March to allow them time “to manage their immigration status.”

Elshenawy’s letter said most layoffs would fall outside the company’s engineering departments, reflecting the company’s decision to focus on providing service in just one market — presumably San Francisco — instead of proceeding with a planned expansion to Phoenix, Austin, Houston and Miami.

He said Cruise will suspend work on a new autonomous vehicle — one featuring a passenger-only cabin without traditional driver controls — that was to become the mainstay of its future fleet. Instead, the company will concentrate on its current vehicle fleet, consisting of GM-made Chevy Bolt compacts.

“We are simplifying and focusing our efforts to return with an exceptional service in one city to start with and focusing on the Bolt platform for this first step before we scale,” Elshenawy wrote.

Regulators will be watching closely. The DMV said in October that the agency would not reinstate the operating permit for Cruise vehicles until the company “has demonstrated to the department that the manufacturer has taken appropriate action to correct the deficiencies that caused the suspension.”

Cruise faces a deadline later this week to respond to the CPUC’s allegations that it withheld evidence and made misleading statements about the October pedestrian collision. The agency has scheduled a February hearing on the incident.

First, the news: BART fares will go up 5.5% on New Year’s Day.

The imminent fare increase is the 19th since BART opened its gates in September 1972, and a 20th is coming on Jan. 1, 2025. Here’s why:

The upcoming hike is actually just half of an 11% increase that the agency adopted in June as part of its longtime practice of raising fares every two years to meet inflation. The 11% figure reflects the rapid rise in prices during the first years of the pandemic. BART decided to spread that increase over two years to soften the blow for riders and minimize the impact on ridership, which was 41% of its pre-pandemic level in November.

Since BART’s fare system is distance-based, how much more you’ll pay depends on how far you ride.

The one-way fare for the shortest trips — for example, those beginning and ending in San Francisco and most trips within Oakland — will rise from $2.15 to $2.30. The one-way cost for the longest trip on the system, from Antioch to San Jose’s Berryessa station, will increase from $10.30 to $10.85.

And for more typical commute trips? If your trip is from Downtown Berkeley station to any of San Francisco’s four downtown stations, the one-way fare will rise from $4.50 to $4.75. For a longer trip — say Concord to the downtown San Francisco stops — the one-way fare increases from $6.50 to $6.85.

Those are BART’s full one-way adult fares before any discounts you may be eligible for, such as the agency’s “high-value” program, which gives riders who auto-load their Clipper cards with $48 or $64 worth of BART credit a 6.25% discount. Other discounts include those for youth aged 5 to 18 (50% off), seniors (62.5% off) and people with disabilities (62.5% off).

BART is also making a major change to another discount program, ClipperSTART, a regionwide effort to make transit more affordable to lower-income residents. Beginning Jan. 1, BART is increasing its ClipperSTART discount from 20% to 50%. The program, a pilot sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is open to people aged 19 to 64 earning under 200% of the federal poverty level. More details here.

Here’s a summary of BART’s fare increases over the past half-century:

New research to be presented this week is the latest to find that San Francisco International Airport is sinking fast — in fact, faster than any other coastal airport in the United States. 

The findings are from two Virginia Tech researchers who will present at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco later this week. 

The scientists, Oluwaseyi Dasho and Manoochehr Shirzaei, used radar data from a European Space Agency satellite to measure the rate of land subsidence at 15 coastal airports across the country.

Many airports around the world are, like SFO, built on wetlands or waterfronts, often on landfill. That makes them vulnerable to sinking.

Perhaps the most famous case in point is Kansai International Airport, which serves Japan’s third-largest city, Osaka. The facility was built offshore on a pair of artificial islands that engineers expected to take half a century to settle to a level comfortably above rising sea levels. Instead, the islands have sunk far more rapidly than predicted, and the facility has required heroic measures to slow the subsidence rate. 

The situation is not nearly as dramatic at SFO. 

Shirzaei co-authored research published in 2018 that, like the new study, used satellite-based radar to estimate parts of SFO are sinking at a rate close to 10 mm a year. At that rate, and with the prospect of rising sea levels, researchers said some SFO runways and taxiways would experience inundations by the end of this century. 

The new Dasho-Shirzaei study had a narrower focus than the 2018 work, zeroing in on conditions along runways at the 15 airports. The radar data allowed the researchers to measure minute changes in the surface elevation of the airports’ runways. Those changes, in turn, point to areas most at risk of developing problems like cracks or bulges that could pose a danger to airliners when taking off or landing.

The new study confirmed SFO’s relatively rapid rate of subsidence. It also found that 98.3% of the airport’s 180 acres of runways are at low risk, while 0.7% were rated medium risk and 0.5% high risk. Dasho said in an email those numbers might be a little misleading.

“The high-risk area, though of relatively small percentage, if left unattended can render the whole runway unsafe and significantly increasing cost of maintenance,” he said.

He added the research could have much broader importance in assessing infrastructure health. 

“The work demonstrates the application for satellite technology for monitoring the health of transport infrastructure in the face of climate change — bearing in mind that many transport infrastructure were built without a climate change resiliency plan,” he said. 

At SFO, work has begun to prepare the airport for the effects of subsidence and sea-level rise. The airport has begun work on a nearly $600 million shoreline protection project that will involve building a 42-inch sea wall designed to be sufficient to hold back water levels forecast for the year 2018. 

The project is currently under environmental review. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2025 and finish by 2035.

The Bay Area has eight major toll bridges, listed below. Rank them in order of date of completion, from earliest to latest.

Just to be clear, rank them in order of the oldest sections of the bridges still in use. As an example, the most recent major span completed in the region is the eastern section of the Bay Bridge, which opened in 2013. But for purposes of this question, the date of completion is the oldest part of the bridge still in use (in the case of the Bay Bridge, that’s the western suspension span).

Here are the bridges to rank: Antioch, Benicia, Carquinez, Dumbarton, Golden Gate, Richmond, San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and San Mateo.

Bonus question: As mentioned above, the current bridges may be replacements for all or part of earlier structures. With that in mind, what was the first bridge to carry motor vehicles across San Francisco Bay?

Bonus bonus question: Seven of the bridges permit bicycle access. Which does not?

Yet another bonus question: Of the seven bridges that permit bicycle access, which is the second-busiest in terms of monthly crossings? (We’re asking for second-busiest because the Golden Gate Bridge is by far the most popular and arguably most accessible span for cyclists. In fact, the Golden Gate sees more cyclists riding across on a busy weekend day than most of the other bridges see in a month.)

Answers after the photo below.

Answers:

Bridge completion dates: San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (1936), Golden Gate Bridge (1937), Richmond-San Rafael Bridge (1956), Carquinez Bridge (1958), Benicia Bridge (1962), San Mateo Bridge (1967), Antioch Bridge (1978), Dumbarton Bridge (1982).

First vehicular crossing: The Dumbarton Bridge, which opened to traffic in January 1927. The next span to cross the bay, the San Mateo Bridge, opened in March 1929.

Bikeless span: The San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.

Second busiest bike bridge: It’s the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, with an average of about 6,448 cyclist crossings per month since the span’s bike-pedestrian path opened in November 2019. That’s based on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s count of a total of 309,842 bike trips as of Dec. 6. The next-busiest bridge bike path is on the Bay Bridge eastern span, with an average of 6,192 bikes tallied per month (563,462 in all) since counting began in April 2016. See the MTC’s bike count page for more data.

Questions? Corrections? Comments? Story ideas? Send them: dbrekke@kqed.org.

The California Public Utilities Commission has released further details of Cruise LLC’s alleged failure to share key information about an October crash in which one of its autonomous taxis ran over and dragged a pedestrian in downtown San Francisco — an incident that led to the suspension of the company’s operating permits and the resignation of its founder and CEO.

The new details were included in a CPUC ruling that ordered the company to respond by Dec. 18 to allegations it withheld legally required information from regulators and then issued “misleading” public comments about what it had shared. The ruling sets a February hearing date to address the allegations, which could result in more than $1.5 million in penalties.

The ruling, from CPUC administrative law judge Robert Mason, lays out a 15-day timeline during which he said Cruise failed to alert the commission to crucial details of the Oct. 2 collision.

The crash occurred at 5th and Market streets when a hit-and-run driver struck a woman crossing the street against a traffic signal. The woman fell in front of the Cruise vehicle, which ran over her and immediately stopped. But the vehicle didn’t detect the victim trapped beneath it and started up again in an attempt to pull to the curb. The woman was dragged 20 feet and suffered serious injuries.

But the CPUC, which regulates paid passenger services like Cruise and Waymo, said that when a Cruise employee contacted the commission on Oct. 3 to inform it of the crash, as required by law, he said nothing about the car restarting and dragging the victim. On Oct. 5, the commission issued a formal request for incident data, including video of the collision. But it wasn’t until Oct. 19 that the company delivered the full video of the crash, which disclosed that its vehicle had dragged the pedestrian victim.

The CPUC’s account of Cruise’s incomplete and tardy disclosure mirrors one released earlier by the Department of Motor Vehicles. In its Oct. 24 announcement that it was suspending Cruise’s permits to operate autonomous vehicles, the DMV said it had joined California Highway Patrol representatives in a meeting with the company the day after the collision.

“During the meeting, the department was shown video footage of the accident captured by the AV’s onboard cameras,” the DMV wrote, referring to the Cruise autonomous vehicle. “The video footage presented to the department ended with the AV’s initial stop following the hard-braking maneuver. Footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the department, and Cruise did not disclose that any additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop of the vehicle. The department only learned of the AV’s subsequent movement via discussion with another government agency.”

Cruise responded to the DMV’s permit suspension with a blog post — removed from its site last Friday but archived elsewhere — in which it insisted it had kept regulators fully informed.

“Shortly after the incident, our team proactively shared information with the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), including the full video, and have stayed in close contact with regulators to answer their questions,” the post said.

“That statement is misleading in two respects,” the CPUC order said. “First Cruise claims to have
‘proactively shared information’ when, in fact, it withheld information from the Commission for 15 days, thus misleading the Commission. Second, by withholding information about the extent of the Cruise AV interaction with the pedestrian, Cruise misled the DMV and, in turn, the Commission into thinking that the original video shown and commented on accurately memorialized the full extent of the incident.”

The order cites possible violations of 10 state laws and regulations that could carry a penalty of as much as $100,000 for each day Cruise failed to disclose the facts of the Oct. 2 crash, in addition to other fines and possible revocation of its CPUC authorization to carry passengers.

The October permit suspensions led Cruise to first shut down all its driverless operations across the country. It then pulled its fleet of several hundred Chevy Bolts, which it had been testing with human safety drivers aboard.

Cruise is owned by General Motors, which has invested billions in helping develop the company’s technology. In an interview with CNBC last week, GM CEO Mary Barra blamed Cruise’s problems on “a lack of transparency” with the DMV, CPUC and other agencies.

“Clearly, a better job has to be done in building relationships and being transparent with the regulators at the state, the local and the federal level,” she said.

There were several big developments over the past week in the world of Bay Area ferries — a pair of which will make the local passenger fleet cleaner and greener than ever and one that promises dramatic improvements to those who use the Sausalito ferry. 

Last week, the Water Emergency Transportation Authority, or WETA, the clunkily-named agency that runs the boats branded as San Francisco Bay Ferry, announced a partnership with Finnish marine technology firm Wärtsilä to develop five high-speed electric ferries. 

Three of the vessels will carry 150 passengers each and are designed for the ferry system’s planned short-haul service between Treasure Island and Mission Bay to the Ferry Building. The other two boats will accommodate 300 passengers each and operate on the system’s longer routes. 

According to last week’s announcement, the first of the new electric boats could begin carrying passengers as early as 2025. 

Later in the week, the Federal Transit Administration announced a $16 million grant to WETA to pay for new electrical infrastructure at ferry landings in downtown San Francisco and Alameda. The grant will allow the agency to buy and install banks of batteries and new charging equipment for future electric vessels and pay for new connections to the electrical grid. 

During the grant announcement at the Ferry Building, Seamus Murphy, WETA’s executive director, said that when he joined the agency’s staff in 2020, the prospect of electrifying the agency’s ferry fleet was a distant one. 

“The technology just wouldn’t allow it,” Murphy said. “… There was just no vessel operating anywhere in the world that would move fast enough because of how heavy these batteries are that we would need to have on board.”

But news from Scandinavia showed that the technology was already changing. 

“I was pretty surprised when the staff sent me an article about a vessel in Norway that had just launched, and it would operate at the exact speeds that we would need it to, to be able to serve our transbay routes here in San Francisco,” Murphy said. “And that was our cue to get moving. If they can do it in Norway, we can certainly do it here.”

With last week’s grant, WETA has raised $117 million for its Rapid Electric Emission-Free Ferry project, which aims to create the nation’s first high-speed, high-capacity, zero-emission ferry service. The program envisions half of the agency’s vessels running on zero-emission technology by 2035. 

The FTA also announced that it was granting $6 million to Golden Gate Ferries to allow the Marin County-based system to rehabilitate its popular Sausalito terminal. 

The $22.5 million Sausalito project, which also includes funding from Golden Gate Bridge tolls and other federal funds, will feature a wider loading facility with gentler slopes on the gangway and floating platform for easier access for all passengers, including bicyclists and disabled users. Golden Gate Ferries expects the project to be finished by 2027.

BART has made its daily ridership statistics publicly available since the start of the pandemic. And equipped with that data, along with some other useful ridership information the agency posts each month, you can slice and dice the numbers to get a pretty good idea of just how quickly it’s progressing in its mission to win back ridership.

Before we throw a slew of numbers at you, here is a little summary of the data: BART ridership was down in November, with average daily ridership (weekdays, weekends and holidays) sinking from 144,627 to 134,186, or 7.2%.

The decline reflects a seasonal downturn in ridership that appears to affect most Bay Area transit agencies and reflects factors like the onset of wet weather and the beginning of the end-of-year holiday season. Where BART can find better news is in its year-over-year numbers, which continue on a slow upward trajectory. Last month’s patronage, both overall and on weekdays, was up 11% to 12% over November 2022.

Here’s a quick look at some key ridership numbers:

Overall November ridership: 4,025,582, or 41% of November’s pre-pandemic baseline of 9.82 million. That’s down from 4,483,445 in October, or 42.5% of the month’s pre-pandemic baseline of 10.5 million.

Total weekday ridership: 3,233,822 (20 days, excluding the Veteran’s Day holiday, Nov. 10, and Thanksgiving Day), down from 3,596,814 in September (21 days, excluding Indigenous Peoples Day).

Average weekday ridership: 161,691 (39.4% of baseline). That’s down from 171,277 in October (40.2%) and also below the weekday ridership levels recorded in August, September and October.

November ’23 vs. November ’22: This year’s ridership of 4,025,582 is 11.1% higher than the ridership for the same month a year ago, 3,623,335. Weekday average ridership of 161,691 is up 11.8% from the 144,808 recorded in November 2022.

Weekday average ridership, fiscal year to date: 165,391, or 39.5% of baseline. (BART’s fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30 each year.) The overall weekday average for FY 2023 was 147,620, or 35.6% of the baseline.

Source for all of the above: BART’s daily ridership reports, accessed here, and KQED’s ongoing tracking of the numbers (a big Google sheet, with chart), here.

Updated 11 p.m.

BART service between San Francisco and Oakland was shut down at the height of the evening commute Wednesday after a man walked into the Transbay Tube from downtown San Francisco.

Service through the tube was halted just before 5 p.m. and restored about an hour and a half later following a police search of the 3.6-mile tube that failed to locate the intruder. The closure stranded thousands of evening commuters.

Agency spokeswoman Alicia Trost said riders alerted BART police about a person entering the tunnel from San Francisco’s Embarcadero station and that door alarms inside the tube were activated.

She said BART surveillance cameras showed the intruder inside the tube.

“The surveillance team were able to see the individual exit the area and trackway and we resumed service,” Trost said in an email.

BART posted an image of the man it says was seen on surveillance video and asked for the public’s help in identifying him. “We are very sorry for the service disruption this individual caused and we are looking to hold them accountable,” the agency said.

During the approximately 80-minute closure, BART was advising passengers to find alternate transportation between Oakland and San Francisco. For public transit users, the main alternatives were AC Transit and San Francisco Bay Ferry, and crowds of East Bay-bound commuters gathered at both the Salesforce Transit Center and at nearby ferry docks.

Last week, we asked you, our legions of readers (where “legion” equals a whole integer greater than 1), to rank nine Bay Area transit agencies — AC Transit, BART, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, Muni, SamTrans, San Francisco Bay Ferry, SMART and VTA — in order of average weekday ridership. Here’s the correct ranking, along with average daily ridership for each agency in October 2023:

Thanks for playing. We’ll have more transportation trivia later this week.

Yosemite National Park announced last week that the Tioga Road across the park’s high country is closed for the winter. In fact, the route across Tioga Pass, 9,945 feet above sea level, had been closed since the evening of Nov. 15 as heavy snow began to fall across the Sierra’s higher elevations. The closure concludes one of the road’s shortest “open” seasons ever — just 116 days.

The announcement that the Tioga Road is shut down for the season is as close as anything we have to an official notice that winter has arrived in the mountains (skiers anxiously awaiting resorts to open each year are free to disagree). The highest trans-Sierra autoroute, the Tioga Pass route, is typically the last of California’s major mountain highways to open each spring or early summer and the quickest to close when the first flakes fly.

Some Tioga Road history was made earlier this year when the pass opened on July 22 — the latest opening by far since the road became a public route in 1915. The late opening was the direct result of last winter’s incredible snowfall, when the snowpack at Tuolumne Meadows was more than triple its long-term average on April 1. Not only were the thick layers of snow and ice much more challenging to remove than normal, but the snowfall also heavily damaged or destroyed about two-thirds of the structures along the route — staff housing, a visitors’ center, restrooms and maintenance buildings. Repair work was ongoing when the road shut down for the season.

The history of opening and closing dates: There are two major sources for information on the Tioga Road’s opening and closing dates each year, dating back to the 1930s. Yosemite National Park maintains one that dates back to 1980; the other comes from the Mono Basin Clearinghouse and dates back to 1933.

It’s always tempting to treat something summarized in a nice, neat table as gospel, but our spare-time investigation of the Mono Basin Clearinghouse dates suggests they’re not entirely reliable. For instance, the Mono Basin table listed the latest-ever Tioga Road opening before this year as July 8, 1933. Checking contemporary newspapers, we found numerous stories that showed the actual opening date that year was June 22.

Our research also shows major discrepancies between newspaper accounts of the Tioga Road’s annual closing and the dates shown on the Mono Basin list.

Looking for the last year in which the road was open for as few days as this year, 116, we scrolled back to 1948. That year, the Mono Basin list shows the road closed on Sept. 22 after just 89 days. Stories in various California papers, though, showed that travel continued well into October and that as late as mid-November, a state highway official was cautioning drivers who continue to venture up the highway that “travel on the Tioga Pass road is not advised.”

Several other years in the 1940s are reported to have had extraordinarily short open seasons — in several cases, fewer than 80 days. But in each of those years, newspapers reported travel continuing across the pass for as much as two months later than the date reported in the Mono Basin Clearinghouse list. So, bottom line, all we can say about the length of the opening this year is that it was one of the shortest on record.

BART makes a lot of ridership data available for the transit geek looking to understand the agency’s progress in recovering from public transit’s pandemic catastrophe. One of the most useful sources of data BART publishes is a monthly ridership report that shows trends over the previous 12 months and offers breakdowns of patronage during and in different parts of the system’s network.

The report also includes monthly figures on how actual BART ridership compares to budgeted ridership — agency planners estimate of how many people will ride each month over the fiscal year. The number of people paying to ride is an especially big deal for BART, which, before the pandemic, got about two-thirds of the cash it needed to run the trains every day from our fares. (Farebox recovery, as it’s called, is now below 25%).

If you stack them all together, the monthly reports — you can find links here and here — show that BART has finished each of the last three fiscal years well below its budget targets: 14.5% below budget in FY21 (the year between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021), 19.4% below in FY22 and 12.9% below in FY23, which ended last June 30.

Those budget misses reflect major overestimates of how quickly people would return to riding BART. For instance, BART’s FY22 budgeted ridership was 42.9 million, more than triple the previous fiscal year’s number, 13.8 million, recorded during the depths of the pandemic. In fact, BART ridership did rebound in FY22 to 34.5 million. That was a 150% year-over-year increase but 8.3 million riders short of the agency’s forecast.

Missing the forecast ridership by 8 million-plus riders meant that BART’s fare revenue was at least $30 million short of expectations. In ordinary times, missing a revenue target by that much would bring on a deficit migraine and send an agency’s budget team on an urgent hunt for remedies: spending cuts or new sources of cash. But these aren’t ordinary times, and BART has been able to use the $1.5 billion in federal pandemic relief the agency has received since 2020 to make up for revenue shortfalls.

In FY23, BART’s budget estimated about 52.9 million paying passengers would ride. That represented an anticipated ridership increase of 53% over the previous year. Once again, the actual number of riders — 45.9 million — fell far short of the forecast. Fare revenue again came in about $30 million short of expectations.

And that brings us to what BART expects this year — and what it’s actually seeing.

Last year, the agency went to a two-year budget cycle, meaning simply that each year it projects revenue and costs for the coming two fiscal years.

Last year’s first version of BART’s budget for the current fiscal year, FY 24, which began July 1 and runs through June 30, forecast 65.8 million riders. That would represent a nearly 30% increase over the previous budget year and a 50% jump over the number of people who actually rode BART.

In other words, despite its previous overestimates and all the evidence that the big weekday commutes that used to fill the agency’s coffers were a thing of the past, it continued to forecast a flood of returning riders instead of the relative trickle it was actually seeing.

But BART’s revised FY24 budget, adopted in June, is an entirely different story. The forecast scales back the anticipated ridership from 65.8 million to 51.3 million.

The good news is that this far more conservative forecast seems to be close to on the money so far. In the first three months of the fiscal year, ridership was just 1.3% below budget.

The takeaway, with seasonal factors like weather and the holidays about to cut into BART’s ridership numbers, passengers’ return continues to be much, much slower than the agency previously anticipated.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission just published its annual assessment of Bay Area pavement conditions: “Bay Area Pavement Marked by Mediocrity as Pothole Problems Persist.”

The MTC says a detailed study of streets and roads across the region resulted in a pavement conditions index of 67 — “or fair.” The commission also says the Bay Area seems to be stuck on that number: For the seventh year in a row, the local pavements (measured in 101 cities and towns and unincorporated areas of eight counties) have racked up the same score.

Only five cities regionwide were rated as having “very good” pavement conditions — with three-year moving averages of 80 to 89 points on a 100-point scale. (A newly built or freshly repaved street would merit a score of 100.)

Cities earning “very good” scores were Cupertino, Palo Alto, Brentwood and Dublin. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the MTC-rated pavement in St. Helena, Sebastopol, Vallejo, Petaluma and Pacifica between 43 and 49 points, or “poor.” The commission says that rating means the streets urgently need major work.  

The full MTC ratings are here: Pavement Conditions of Bay Area Jurisdictions 2022 (PDF).

It’s a familiar ritual: We’re in the midst of one of the busiest travel periods of the entire year. As people hit the road for the Thanksgiving holiday, AAA Northern California says it expects more than 7 million people to travel in the coming few days — a number that approaches pre-pandemic levels.

“We’re removed from the pandemic, people are anxious to get back and see family for Thanksgiving, and it’s cheaper than it was last year. That’s a recipe for record travel,” AAA spokesman John Treanor says.

Bay Area airports are seeing a surge, with Oakland International Airport predicting more than 360,000 passengers this week and San Francisco International expecting a total of 1.4 million travelers between last Friday and next Monday.

Intercity train travel is also booming. Amtrak says an estimated 750,000 people will be taking the train this holiday week — the highest ridership it has seen since before the arrival of COVID-19.

Amtrak spokesperson Olivia Irvin says Thanksgiving week always sees the highest ridership of the year.

“Part of that is just has to do with the fact that Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday where the days of the week are consistent every single year,” Irvin says. “Every year, it’s the Monday and Tuesday leading into Thanksgiving. And Sunday is by far the highest amount of travelers. We carried 115,000 customers the Sunday following Thanksgiving last year.”

Just when you think there’s no hope for the world, this happens: a really happy-looking dog on a flight that was likely full of sleepy people who are a little irritated dealing with early-morning airport stuff.

Of course, this sighting (by San Francisco Chronicle photographer Jessica Christian, by the way) is a distant second to the most amazing critter-in-the-cabin story we’ve ever seen. What takes the top spot? This story here from more than two decades ago. This is how it starts out:

“As Delta Flight 192 lifts off for Atlanta, a small chestnut horse lies stretched across the floor in a bulkhead row. Her name is Cuddles, and she carries a heavy responsibility on her 2-foot-high shoulders.”

Of course, “animals on a plane” always brings this to mind …

Without going to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever your search tool of choice happens to be (we’re on the honor system here, but go ahead and use ChatGPT — it’s your funeral), rank the following transit agencies in order of average weekday ridership: 

•Caltrain

•AC Transit

*San Francisco Bay Ferry

•BART

•SamTrans

•SMART

•Muni

•Golden Gate Transit

•VTA

Submit your answers to me, dbrekke@kqed.org. This week’s prize is extra special recognition from the editors or maybe some transit-oriented swag if we find enough change in the seats next time we ride BART.

Transit agencies everywhere are in the midst of an epic round of cajolery: They want you to know that public transportation is vital for all sorts of reasons — reducing pollution, unsnarling traffic congestion, meeting state and federal climate goals, serving equity goals — and they want to make sure you know they are trying hard to make your ride the best it can be — safe, clean, reliable, convenient, economical.

The best example of this transit marketing trend is All Aboard Bay Area Transit, a $180,000 campaign launched by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the region’s 27 transit agencies. The message is that transit will get you where you want to go today and that big improvements are on the way.

No single agency is doing more to tell the riding public how vital it is and how much it’s doing to meet riders’ needs than BART. The agency, battered in the past by bad publicity about crime, fare evasion, dirty stations, filthy trains and often unreliable service, has responded with an almost relentless stream of sunny-sounding press releases about what it’s doing to put all that unpleasantness behind it.

“New numbers show fewer BART trains impacted by unwanted behavior,” one recent release says. Two days later, the agency said, “Data shows continued positive trends on reliability improvements and police presence.”

BART and other agencies are putting out messages and focusing on improving “the customer experience” as a matter of necessity: Most operators are a long way from returning to pre-pandemic ridership, and they’re facing financial Armageddon over the next several years. They need your business to reduce losses. They need legislators to consider increasing support to keep transit running. And much of this persuasion campaign is aimed at winning support for a transit tax measure expected to go before voters in the Bay Area’s nine counties in 2026.

Modern transit marketing came to mind while perusing a 1920 issue of the long-gone Electric Railway Journal.

The streetcar industry was in a bad way amid the economic downturn immediately after World War I and the rapid adoption of private automobiles. The July 10, 1920, issue of the journal includes lots of weighty pondering of the future of street railroads. Assurances that cars would not push trains off the street alternated with calls for the public to do its duty and support local streetcar lines.

The ERJ included samples of some of the advertising various companies were using to win riders’ hearts and minds.

Pennsylvania’s Beaver Valley Traction Co., operating in communities along the Ohio River northwest of Pittsburgh, took a confrontational, “What have you done for us lately?” approach in addressing its riding public.

At one point, the company took out an ad to explain why it bought advertising, saying, in part, that its ads were meant “to help the public to appreciate the problems of our trainmen and to secure cooperation in solving those problems.”

One of the ads featured in the journal — the one above — vents to riders about what impatient, ungrateful customers they are.

“If you have to wait a few minutes on a street car, your temper is immediately ruffled, the system is rotten, and to your view, the world is coming to an end. Pay us a nickel—and ask for a transfer. We get no tip, we get kicked and yet give prompt and complete service.”

And so on.

Beaver Valley Traction ran its last streetcar on Aug. 10, 1937.

It seems like a really simple question: Has San Francisco’s transportation agency agreed to drop its politically risky effort to dramatically expand parking meter hours in the city, or has it not? 

Two members of the Board of Supervisors who led opposition to the expanded hours say yes. 

The Municipal Transportation Agency, which devised the plan earlier this year to raise revenue and free up parking space in popular commercial districts, says no. 

This dispute over what would seem like a pretty simple fact came to light as the result of a Board of Supervisors meeting Monday morning. 

The session was called to consider just one item: a proposed City Charter amendment that would give the mayor veto power over the SFMTA’s decisions on transit fares and parking meter hours and rates. Supervisors were to vote on whether to put the measure, authored by Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, on the city’s primary ballot next March.

Safaí and fellow board member Aaron Peskin have argued that increasing parking meter hours will hurt businesses still struggling to recover from pandemic losses. And he’s said his measure was intended to remedy a situation in which the SFMTA has exclusive power to set fares and parking rates; a seven-member majority of the Board of Supervisors can vote down the entire agency budget but has no authority to weed out parts of the spending plan members might oppose.

Safaí, who represents the Excelsior and Outer Mission on the board and is running for mayor next year against incumbent London Breed, said his charter amendment would guarantee that an elected official would be accountable for approving decisions on parking and fares. 

Transit advocates had opposed Safaí’s measure, fearing that it would make it more difficult for the SFMTA to raise revenue to run buses and trains.

But instead of a long, heated policy debate with hours of public comment — a lot of that had already happened during the months the proposal was being developed — Monday’s meeting was cut short by a surprise announcement from Safaí. 

“Upon further discussion with transit advocates and a commitment from the SFMTA that they would halt their original plan to extend parking meter hours and days of operation, I’m withdrawing the proposed charter amendment,” he told fellow supervisors. With a quick vote to table the measure, the meeting was over. 

But when asked to comment on Safaí’s move, the transportation agency said no such deal was in place. 

“No decisions or commitments have been made around the timeline for extended metering, but we’re looking forward to working with the Board of Supervisors and mayor on what works best for neighborhoods and constituents,” an agency statement said. 

Both Safaí and Peskin were emphatic after hearing the SFMTA statement that the agency explicitly stated it was backing away from extending meter hours.

Safaí said he and Peskin met last week with SFMTA head Jeffrey Tumlin, who told them the parking changes would be completely off the table at least through the November 2024 election. 

“So we got that commitment,” Safaí said. “We felt good enough to say, we’re going to continue working with you” by withdrawing the proposed charter amendment. 

Peskin said the SFMTA’s statement was “clearly not candid or truthful.”

“All I can tell you is that Jeff Tumlin has been very clear with me, in my capacity as president of the Board of Supervisors, that they have abandoned their plans to extend parking meter hours until 10 p.m. and that they have no intention of doing so in the foreseeable future,” he said. 

Why would the SFMTA not be more forthcoming about whether it’s agreed to shelve its meter plan? 

Safaí suggested it came down to who would get credit for blocking an unpopular revenue measure.  

“I think it was just a matter of who’s going to end up being the one to announce it,” Safaí said. “And, you know, myself and Supervisor Peskin went ahead and decided to make that call because it felt like it was the right thing for folks to understand where we are in these conversations.” 

Mayoral spokesman Jeff Cretan rejected the idea that Breed wanted credit for scuttling the parking hours extension. 

“People who are concerned about ‘taking credit’ are indicating what their motivation behind the (charter amendment) measure was all about,” he said. “It’s a silly argument. The mayor is focused on running the city.”

In May, the SFMTA announced it was moving ahead with a plan to roll out longer meter hours across the city by the end of next year. 

The SFMTA says the longer meter hours — drivers would have to pay through 10 p.m. from Monday through Saturday and from noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday — will generate revenue to help the agency deal with deficits that are expected to mount in coming years. Extending the hours would also help free up parking, the SFMTA says, and reduce congestion because drivers would not have to hunt for an open space as long. 

In July, faced with widespread complaints about the impact of longer parking hours on residents and small businesses, the agency put the plan on hold pending an economic impact report from the city controller’s office. Work on the report is still underway.

I’ll bet — low-stakes wager — that a pretty hefty majority of Bay Area residents, even the hardcore transit users, know little about Monterey-Salinas Transit, MST for short.

It’s a small agency and lies beyond the bounds of the nine counties generally considered to make up the Bay Area. But what MST lacks in size, it makes up for in geographic sprawl.

The agency’s routes stretch from Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties to the beach cities along Monterey Bay to Salinas and down the Salinas Valley to Paso Robles, in San Luis Obispo County. The MST route map is the kind that makes a transit fan dream of marathon rides. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

The reason Monterey-Salinas Transit is in the news right now is that it has just revived a direct link from Gilroy to Salinas that was suspended in 2020 after the start of the pandemic. 

The link has been revived thanks to state funding and a new partnership with Santa Clara County’s VTA.

The restored Line 59 offers four round-trips each weekday (PDF schedule and map) between the Intermodal Transit Center in Salinas and Gilroy’s transit hub, which also serves as Caltrain’s southern terminus.

Northbound riders can catch the 5:45 a.m. bus from Salinas to connect to Caltrain’s from Gilroy to downtown San Francisco. The final Caltrain run of the evening, which arrives in Gilroy at 6:40 p.m., connects with the last southbound 59 trip of the evening, which departs at 7 p.m. and arrives in Salinas at 7:42 p.m.

To be honest, the news about Line 59 caught my imagination because of a line in the MST press release about the agency’s connecting bus service to Paso Robles, about 200 miles south of the central Bay Area and a good 125 miles from Gilroy. That trip would mean traveling the length of the Salinas Valley, taking in some of the state’s most important (and picturesque) farming areas. If you were ambitious, maybe you could keep going, catching buses to San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Santa Barbara. …

And once you’ve gone that far, you’ve got to think you can make it to Los Angeles and San Diego, one local bus at a time.

So, indulge a fantasy, a transit jockey’s fantasy. I took the time to work out the beginning of the trip, anyway.

If you can get yourself to Gilroy for Line 59’s first southbound trip of the day at 6:55 (VTA’s Line 68, leaving downtown San Jose at 5:19 a.m., would work), here are the steps:

Definitely a work in progress. Two big problems — well, not problems, really, but inconveniences:

First, there’s really no way to take public transit to downtown from the “central Bay Area,” which I might define as Oakland or San Francisco, by anywhere close to 5:19 a.m., when the first bus in the chain leaves. So you either have to hitch a ride or maybe stay overnight in San Jose or Gilroy to start the trip.

Second, the connecting buses from Santa Maria to Santa Barbara leave at 5:27 and 6:27 in the morning. So your choices after getting there on local transit are to stay overnight or catch an Amtrak bus or train to Santa Barbara.

Maybe the best thing about this imagined trip would be the cost. The total fare from San Jose to Santa Maria, more than 200 miles, would come to $13 if all your transfers worked out.

We are not declaring that this is a “we hold these truths to be self-evident” moment. But a decent respect for the curiosity and opinions of our audiences suggests that maybe we should lay out the reasons for launching this blog. Here are a few of them:

•The future of public transportation and mobility choices in general is at a crossroads, with transit agencies facing existential financial threats — BART and Muni chief among them.

•The future holds a host of transportation developments that will change how we perceive and interact with our world. To name a few: autonomous vehicles, high-speed rail, redesign of our streets and highways, and new approaches to paying for infrastructure.

•There is no place in the United States that has a more active and dedicated community of transit and transportation activists than the Bay Area. When we say that, we’re thinking of transit rider groups in San Francisco, the East Bay and the South Bay. And visionary, run-on-a-shoestring operations like Seamless Bay Area, which aims to turn a chaotic (if not utterly irrational) collection of 27 transit agencies in our region into a coherent network that will be easy (and cheap enough) for absolutely anyone to use. And advocacy groups like TransForm, the bike and pedestrian coalitions in the North Bay, East Bay and San Francisco, and grassroots activists dedicated to taking action for street safety like Safe Street Rebel and Traffic Violence Rapid Response.

•Transportation choices of the past, especially freeway development and some rapid transit construction, destroyed or undermined many Black and minority neighborhoods. Undoing that destruction — by razing freeways and restoring communities — is important in conversations about reparations.

•The Bay Area is reaching a crisis point in delivering needed transportation improvements in a timely, cost-effective way. One of the chief examples is the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s Silicon Valley Phase II project, to run BART 6 miles from San Jose’s Berryessa neighborhood through downtown and on to Santa Clara. The project’s estimated cost has more than doubled over the past five years to more than $12 billion; its completion date is now 2036 instead of sometime late this decade as originally proposed. Other examples abound, including the so-called Portal, a project that has been discussed for decades that would extend Caltrain to the Salesforce Transit Center in downtown San Francisco, and the long-discussed plan for a second rail crossing of the bay to serve BART and maybe high-speed trains.

•A growing “active transportation” movement is challenging the long-held practice of designing and operating streets as spaces for cars and drivers first and everyone else — walkers, bike riders, people with mobility impairments — as an afterthought.

•Transportation is our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Addressing and cutting those emissions dramatically is crucial to California achieving its climate goals.

•The history of transit and transportation in the Bay Area and beyond can be a source of inspiration, entertainment and despair. It’s worth revisiting for potential insights into current challenges.

•Inexpensive, accessible, effective means of moving through our world — mobility, in short — is central to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — or at least crucial to people’s livelihoods, access to shared spaces. 

•To be honest with ourselves, and with you, there is way too much happening in the transportation and transit space to cover it as completely as we feel we should. So we’re attempting to get to more of the stories we think matter, will interest our audience or just provoke or tickle us in some way, in a shorter, quicker format.

•And finally — though we don’t expect we’ve come close to exhausting the list of reasons people are interested in transportation and transit — we’ve always had fun on and been fascinated with every mode of travel we’ve ever encountered, from the pedicab on San Francisco’s Embarcadero to the cable cars climbing the city’s hills to AC Transit and every single train or plane or road you can think of.

Bottom line is that sharing the story of transportation and transit is part mission, part adventure and part something that’s just fun to do. We’ll be working on ways to engage directly with all of you walkers, bike riders, scooter and hoverboard enthusiasts, transit riders and drivers to hear your stories.