Bay Area transit systems put up life-or-death ballot measures
On Friday, the Bay Area’s largest commuter-rail network suffered an hours-long outage that left its trains stalled on the tracks as commuters across the region waited for a ride that would never come.
It was, as state senators Scott Wiener and Jesse Arreguín said in a statement, a peek “into what life in the Bay Area will be like without robust BART service.” Next year, voters across the region will decide whether they’re ready to see their transit systems go dark for good.
In 2026, a set of unrelated taxes are likely to appear on local ballots across California’s second-largest metropolitan area. Each would fund a different transit network whose leadership says a yes vote is necessary to keep the trains running. Together they add up to a real-time service update for one of the country’s most transit-reliant regions: how much do Bay Area voters believe in their public-transport systems after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted commuting patterns?
“Letting transit deteriorate is really not an option,” said Laura Tolkoff, the transportation policy director of SPUR, a Bay Area non-profit public policy organization. “The Bay Area runs on transit.”
In San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties, voters will likely be asked to approve a regional transit tax to fund the operation of BART, which will soon run out of money to operate at its current service level. In San Francisco, residents are likely to see yet another measure, its details still unclear, to address the MUNI system’s structural deficit. In the North Bay, the board of Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit is discussing when to put up the renewal of a quarter-cent sales tax in the two counties in 2026 after the same measure failed in 2020.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/12/bay-area-transit-systems-put-up-life-or-death-ballot-measures-00343171
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