Senate Select Committee on Bay Area Public Transit

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The Senate Select Committee on Bay Area public transit will come to order. Welcome, everyone. Scott Wiener I have the honor of chairing the Committee I'm joined today by my colleagues Senator Becker and Senator Laird. We anticipate a few additional Senators will be arriving shortly. The Senate continues, as always, to welcome the public to all of our hearings. Members of the public who would like to provide public comment later in the hearing will need to do so in person. This hearing is being live streamed.

However, we are not taking remote public comment today. To watch it live streamed, you can go to the Senate event webpage and the live stream link is there. We will be hearing from our panels, and then after all the panels are done, we will take public comments. First of all, I want to thank my colleagues for joining us today and for the continued deep engagement of our entire Bay Area legislative caucus.

Our caucus is very, very focused on public transportation, and I want to thank particular Senator Becker for his leadership in our caucus. I also want to thank the various panelists who will be testifying today in today's oversight hearing. We're going to hear from public transportation agencies, experts, stakeholders about current fiscal projections and ongoing funding needs for Bay Area public transportation systems. We'll also be discussing how to improve public confidence in public transportation through reform and accountability measures that improve customer focus, safety, cleanliness and reliability.

Public transportation in the Bay Area, similar to other major metropolitan areas like New York City and Washington DC is at a crossroads. Even before the pandemic, our transit systems all too often had some financial challenges. With inadequate public financial support, which is systemic throughout this country, as well as a number of major systems that were overly reliant on fair revenue, the pandemic brought these systems to their knees with early pandemic ridership down 95%.

Had Congress not stepped in with multiple rescue packages during the pandemic, our transit systems around the country largely would have collapsed. We're all very grateful for Congress's decision to stabilize our transit systems. These systems are now recovering from the pandemic. For example, muni and AC transit are at approximately 70% of pre pandemic ridership, which is similar to New York City's ridership recovery. And BART is closing in on 50%.

But changes in work and transportation patterns have led to the recovery being slow and gradual as federal pandemic relief for our transit systems runs out. And I do want to just stress that our Bay Area transit systems have done, I think, a remarkable job stretching out that funding. They didn't just spend it all upfront, they held onto it and have really stretched it out.

But as these funds are running out and so we see a fiscal cliff where ridership hasn't fully recovered and there are not other sources of revenue to compensate for that continued loss. So recovery from the pandemic has also led to concerns around safety, cleanliness, and fair evasions in our transit systems. The public is frustrated by these challenges, and a lot of work is happening to address them. As you will hear today, the public also is demanding better and more seamless public transportation service.

And this transition period that we're in, as difficult as it is, provides a great opportunity to make much needed reforms to the way our systems operate and interact with one another. Ultimately, public transportation riders really don't care who is managing the bus or the train that they're riding. All they care is that that bus or train is safe and clean, and that if they have to switch modes, switch from one bus or train to another, that it happens seamlessly and without too much aggravation.

And so we need to take this opportunity to look at how we structure public transportation in the Bay Area. To address the very real possibility that Bay Area transit systems would have to start cutting service soon. And that's the last thing we need service cuts. We worked extremely hard in the budget this year and were able to obtain $400 million for Bay Area transit systems operational support to help stabilize these systems budgets.

Getting the state to step up in a time of need for transit agencies was a major win. And I really want to thank the coalition of legislators, including my colleagues here today, our leadership in the Senate and the Assembly and the Governor and all the stakeholders who work to make it possible.

In addition, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and I really want to thank the MTC for hosting us today was able to reallocate approximately $300 million in existing regional funds to support transit operations and avoid service cuts. So this combined, approximately $700 million, will, as far as we can tell, prevent major Bay Area transit service cuts through the middle of 2026. Despite this major funding achievement, we need to be clear that this is a multi year stabilization. It is not permanent.

Starting in 2026, absent additional funding, we will begin to see significant shortfalls and service cuts. We need to be thinking about this problem now. It's that we should not be waiting until six months before the cliff to act. We need to be planning now. Let's not kick the can down the road. So we have a lot more work to do short term and long term. And we need to acknowledge that public transportation is not optional.

This isn't like a frill that we have in the Bay Area. Transit is part of the lifeblood of this region and particularly of the city, my city that we are in right now, San Francisco. And if we start seeing the unraveling of major transit systems, we will all pay the price in reduced mobility, increased traffic, working class and low income people being trapped and having no way to get around and completely tanking our climate goals.

So this year, as I think folks know, I had introduced a Bill, SB 532, to temporarily raise bridgeholds to deal with the fiscal cliff. I hit the pause button on that bill this past summer to provide an opportunity for our Bay Area Legislative Caucus and the MTC and the operators and everyone else to really put our heads together to figure out a plan for what we're going to do over the next few years.

I hope leading to a 2026 ballot measure to provide long term financial stability to public transportation. So, again, thank you, everyone, for participating today. Before we go to the first panel, I want to give my colleagues, Senator Becker, Senator Laird, an opportunity to make any comments they'd like to make.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks for having the hearing. Just make a very brief comment, and that is that I was chair of the Assembly Budget Committee for most of my run at the Assembly, at a time that we had budgets that were retrenched where we were cutting or running a deficit every year. And one of the dynamics that I observed is everybody was just fighting for what was there. And it was so hard to address an emerging need.

And this year we had an over $30 billion budget problem and we had two significant emerging needs. The transit one just outlined about which this hearing is, and hospitals going under. And we had to fight and fight and fight to get both those items into the budget. And I really salute the efforts of Senator Wiener because he made a fundamental difference in doing that.

And it's why it's important we're doing this hearing, because even if the date is 2026, we are not out of the woods and it is going to compete. And it looks like we might have another budget that is a little down in the year that's coming. So that makes this discussion and all your efforts to other legislators and in public forums very important. So people are aware of this in a way that there's some backing when we continue to fight for this.

So I appreciate the hearing to make a brief comment.

Thank you very much, Senator. Okay, great. So we will now go to our first panel, and that panel will be two leaders in Bay Area transportation policy. Andy Vermeer, who's the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Dan Tischler, a principal transportation modeler at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which I used to have the honor of chairing. So, gentlemen, you may proceed. And I think we're going to want do we want these? Is that for it's operated? Okay, great, great.

Well, good afternoon, Chair Wiener, and Members of the Committee. I'm Andrew Femir, Executive Director of MTC, and I'm honored to be testifying before you today and to be hosting you all in the Bay Area Metro Center. So welcome. In this presentation, I'm going to provide an update on the region's transit recovery, including how MTC is proposing to allocate funding that the Legislature approved last year.

Highlight some progress MTC and the region's operators are making on the Customer Focused Transit Transformation Action Plan, and then lastly, provide a preview of our thinking regarding a future regional transportation measure. As Senator Wiener mentioned, and since we last presented to the MTC on the ridership recovery, it has improved quite a bit, and it stands at about 66% overall of pre COVID levels, up about 10% from the last nine months. Increasingly, Bay Area employers are asking their workforce to come into the office, which is helping.

The challenge is getting more of those commuters to choose transit, as well as luring Bay Area residents to take transit for non commute trips, which actually comprise a majority of all travel. Pivoting to the financials this slide recaps the significant resources that you provided in last year's budget, and I especially want to recognize Chair Weiner's leadership in that effort.

The Bay Area received $770,000,000 in transit and inner city rail capital funds and about $400 million in new zero emission funding, both of which you allowed us to be used for both transit operating and capital. As you recall, MTC had been a strong champion for this General Fund infusion of Turcip funds two budget cycles ago. To help close the gap and the funding gaps for the BART to Silicon Valley phase Two and the BART Core Capacity projects.

The Commission is maintaining its commitment to the use of the Tursip funds for this purpose because it will leverage over $6 billion in federal matching funds. After taking care of these two regional priorities, there is some funding remaining in the Turcip category, which the Commission is reserving for operating needs that I'll cover shortly. MTC is approved using 100% of the new zero emission program to help sustain transit service over the next three years.

So how does this compare to the need? Over the next five years, operators continue to estimate cumulative deficits totaling about $2.7 billion, as shown in the bottom right of the chart, or $1.1 billion over the next three fiscal years. In SB 125, the Legislature entrusted MTC with the responsibility for distributing funds across the Bay Area's operators to help sustain transit service. To ensure that we did so equitably and in line with the priorities that you set, my staff developed a standardized need framework using common assumptions about inflation, vacancy rates, cost, Escalation and so on.

This apples to apples analysis identified a three year gap of about $776,000,000, about 300 million less than the nonstandardized version. But there is still a major funding gap. The next slide shows how we propose to close it. On the top portion of the table, you will see the state funds total about $447,000,000, leaving a $320,000,000 gap shown in red.

To address this, the Commission approved directing an additional $300 million in future regional funds, including future federal highway and federal transit funds, as well as regional measure two bridge tolls plus $29 million in anticipated interest earnings on the Tersip funding. This action involves hard choices, but honors a commitment of our Commission leadership to partner with the state in stabilizing Bay Area transportation. So that's the money part. But what is MTC doing to help make sure operators are delivering on improvements for the customer?

MTC takes very seriously the trust the Legislature has put in us to manage these funds and to help steer transit through these turbulent times. You asked us to adopt accountability provisions to ensure agencies are prioritizing actions that will help bring back riders. I want to emphasize that the Bay Area's transit operators are themselves very eager to make these improvements, and indeed are already making progress on many of them. But the Commission has adopted specific conditions attached to these funds.

Some apply to all operators, some to individual agencies, and we plan to require demonstrated progress on them prior to allocating funds in future years. This is a good segue to the Bay Area Transit Transformation Action Plan. So this plan, which you've heard about before, was developed in the midst of the pandemic in partnership with our operators and key stakeholders, many of whom you will hear from today.

It was driven by robust research, including focus groups and polling of Bay Area residents to determine what they want to see in an improved transit system. The plan identified five priority areas to improve the transit customer experience and encourage more people to use transit fares and payments, customer information, transit networking, accessibility and funding. Today I'm just going to highlight two areas fare coordination and regional mapping and wayfinding.

The first slide highlights Clipper Bay Pass, which is an all agency transit pass that provides unlimited rides on bus, rail and ferry services in the Bay Area. MTC and the operators launched phase one of the pilot in 2022, with four universities in 12 housing developments. Project staff are now working on phase two, which includes employers, transportation management associations and property managers. We anticipate launching phase two early next year.

You.

The early results from phase one are very promising. Pass holders took 40% more transit trips compared to their peers, with just a single agency pass underscoring its strong potential to grow transit ridership regionally. A second high priority item of the transit information action plan is the regional mapping and wayfinding project, whose purpose is to retain and attract new riders by making transit journeys easier to understand.

The core goals are providing better information for riders that is dependable and familiar, and importantly, also making it easy for operators to follow new wayfinding standards. Throughout 2023 the project team has been working to develop these standards for wayfinding signage and other informational elements.

We anticipate having signed prototypes in the field at the Santa Rosa transit mall, the smart station, and El Cerrito Del Norte BART station next spring to gather real world feedback that will help us refine the standards and continue to develop good wayfinding tools. We are currently aiming to have the first version of the standards adopted next fall. Moving on to the final part of my presentation, I want to update you on our efforts to help bring about long term financial sustainability for our region's transit system.

As we made clear in our state budget advocacy last year, we believe a regional transportation measure is an essential piece of that puzzle, given the size of the need. Early results from phase one are promising. Sorry about that. The core goal of the vision, in the meantime, is a climate friendly transportation system that is safe, accessible and convenient for all, with focus areas highlighted in blue. We want to in bold. We want to protect and enhance the transit system.

We want to make transit safer, faster and easier to use and enhance mobility and access for all. Our staff has done both in person public engagement as well as polling. And what we are hearing from the voters is that improving local streets is a top priority, followed by transit transformation and transit operations. We've taken this feedback and developed some draft funding categories for the enabling legislation, and we anticipate sponsoring next year with the goal of placing a measure on the ballot in 2026.

We look forward to working with the entire Bay Area delegation on the Bill next year. In closing, I want to provide one encouraging data point from our most recent poll, and that is the strong belief among Bay Area voters that transit is important. This slide shows that both last march and last month, about 80% of the Bay Area voters say that transit is important, with about half considering it very important.

Even 69% of the voters who rarely or never ride transit recognize this, and this gives me hope for the future regional measure. That concludes my testimony, and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you. We'll next go to Mr. Tischler. I want to acknowledge Senator Skinner and Senator Cortese are here. Thank you. And no you can ask questions whenever you'd like. So. Senator Skinner.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. You weren't asked to do this. And so perhaps it's not appropriate right at this hearing, but I would like to have an update on how the expenditures for RM three, the bridge toll that the voters already increased and it's been in court and such. But given that we have ridership down and given that that toll measure was primarily for expanding capital projects, which were in some cases were updates or repairs, but in general, it was expanding. capacity and expanding.

It just seems to me that there needs to be a relook at what was viewed as priority at the point that that was passed. And what is priority today, especially given that we've not done that much of the work yet since it was hung up in court. But we've been collecting that toll for some time. So I would very much like an update on that.

And also I've brought this up in numerous meetings with MTC why there seems to be such great resistance to putting the allocations of that back on the ballot, since it is a toll that the public's already paying and that the voters have already approved versus going to a new source of funds.

Thank you for that. And I can give you just sort of a brief out update. We believe we've allocated about $800 million already. A good portion of the early projects were funded by agencies that had some cash at the time, and so we've been filling their original investment. Many of the other projects are programs that we think are still important, and it was also defined in legislation how to proceed.

So at this point in time, I think we're still very comfortable with the investments in the RM Three program. There was also quite a bit of operating revenue that's in that that is designed to keep investing in the ferry facilities, in particular in their operations.

How much has been collected to date?

I don't have that answer off the top of my head.

Select Committee Chair I would like a full update on what has been expended and what is still planned and why. What this rationale for why this is still the absolute smartest way to use those funds, especially given that transit ridership is down and especially down in a variety of the services for which the money was prioritized, we'd be happy to do so.

Yeah, I think we already started that work, and we'll help put that together. My understanding or recollection of RM Three is it is largely capital. I don't think very much of it goes to, like, BART Muni, et cetera, operations. And it's one of the challenges we've had is because capital is always considered much more easy to sell to the public.

It's very tangible for people that we tend to have always earned on the side of more money for capital, which is really important and not so much for operations.

However, we're thinking about a measure now that would be for operations, right, given it was viewed to do it as capital previously for a variety of reasons, as you described. But it may not be the motivation now. And certainly if we're considering going back to voters with another, whether it's a bond and further increase in a toll or some other revenue, I noticed that you did not raise what revenues possibilities you are looking at. You skipped that in the presentation. So, anyway.

We are required to submit a report to the Legislature, and that should be heading to you shortly. So we're happy to provide a lot more information on the regional measure three work as you request.

Okay. Thank you, Senator. Okay, Mr. Tischler.

All right, thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Wiener. And good afternoon, Members of the Committee. All right, those are my slides, so hello, I'm Dan Tischler. I'm a travel modeler at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. At the Transportation Authority, we manage and maintain our activity based travel demand model called Sfchamp. It is the official travel demand model of the City of San Francisco, and we use it and apply it for analyzing policies and projects related to transportation and land use throughout the region.

Recently, we have been applying it to try to investigate some hypothetical scenarios around what could happen to the transportation landscape under a fiscal cliff scenario. We've also been applying it to see what would happen with a toll surcharge as proposed with SB 532. Now, we specifically looked at four scenarios that we modeled. One of them is a baseline, which pretty much represents 2023 conditions.

So it has current transit service, it has current prices and land use throughout the region, and then that is for the other policy scenarios to be compared against. We looked at also a toll surcharge scenario that, like what was outlined in SB 532, would add a 1.50 cent toll surcharge on the Bay Area Toll Authority toll crossings, so all the bridges except Golden Gate.

And then we also looked at fiscal cliff scenarios, and we approached this with two different scenarios, both of which are meant to be illustrative indicative scenarios that roughly capture the level of magnitude of service cuts that could be required of some of the key transit operators in a fiscal cliff scenario. So the assumptions that we used were from a couple of months ago, so they're not up to date with the exact current State of where we are in terms of the expected budget shortfalls.

But they're roughly a situation that we would likely encounter over the next several years if we do not find a way to increase transit funding and close the gap. These are also not meant to represent exactly what the transit operators would do. They're hypothetical scenarios that represent how transit service could be cut and what the kind of order of magnitude of impact would likely be. So we looked at two different scenarios that are kind of bookends for this.

In one of them, which we call the cross the board service cuts, we did a flat percentage cut for several of the major operators across all their frequencies. So every single route would get the same amount of service frequency reduction. The other scenario, which we call the targeted service cut scenario from Uni and BART, we have very specific assumptions that we made about which lines to cut.

Now, again, these are not meant to reflect what the operators would actually do, but they're just a different way to approach some of the hard choices that operators would likely have to make under a fiscal cliff scenario. All right, so a couple of highlights of what we found. So, first of all, transit fiscal cliff would be disastrous for transit ridership.

We would likely see at least 100,000 fewer daily transit boardings throughout the region, probably doubling of transit crowding, and about a 20% drop in the amount of jobs that are transit accessible regionwide. And that varies a lot by location. So in some locations, people would lose more than 60% of their transit job access. If you have the type of transit service cuts that we're simulating here, these impacts are actually worse on average for Low income households and for households who live in equity priority communities.

And for them, it would be even more of a loss of job access. And those are often the communities that are most dependent upon transit. The other scenario that modeled the toll surcharge scenario has fairly modest impacts on travel. There were pretty minimal changes in travel patterns across the board. The biggest, most significant changes were a one to 3% drop in bridge traffic, with the Bay Bridge itself being the least sensitive and the other bridges having a little bit more sensitivity.

In all of these scenarios, the highly traveled and very congested Carters throughout the Bay Area, especially the Baybridge Carter, remain heavily congested. So those conditions do not change. I want to go into a couple important notes before I share a few more of the findings. So these are mostly just caveats. So work from home and transit hesitancy.

We used a version of our model where we're making assumptions about the current State of work from home and transit hesitancy that allows the model to pretty accurately reflect 2023 conditions. But as transit ridership continues to recover, by the time a fiscal cliff might actually come into effect and service cuts would have to be made, those assumptions might be out of date and therefore the transit ridership impact could be even more severe.

Another point is that this version of our model does not include hard transit capacity constraints. So again, there are people that when BART services cut, switch to AC transit, but those transit routes could be very overcrowded and people wouldn't actually be able to make those choices. So again, it might be underestimating the impact of the transit service cuts. We're also not evaluating here secondary effects. So lower transit ridership would lead to even less revenue for many of the transit operators.

And the secondary impacts of that lower revenue are also not being included here. And then finally, I just want to point out that we're basing transit service levels off current 2023 fall transit service where the budget shortfall figures are based off of a standardized fiscal year 21-22 level. And generally for many evaporators service levels currently are a little bit higher.

In terms of assumptions you're making. Just to be clear, you didn't make assumptions about specific service cuts. It's more of just what the range might be.

Yeah, well, so we looked at these two different scenarios that I brought back up on screen. So for the across the board service cuts, it's a 20% reduction in Muni frequency, a two thirds reduction in BART, a one third reduction in Caltrain 20% in AC Transit. We did not include service cuts from many of the other operators that are smaller, even though they would also be affected by a fiscal cliff scenario.

Right, but also, to be clear, these reductions are it's not like these are officially proposed reductions. You just assumption yeah, what could happen and what would happen if that level of reduction occurred.

Exactly. And this more or less reflects the State of the budget shortfall expectations around two months ago. The conditions have kind of evolved since then, but also they were something that could likely happen in a few years without additional funding. And then for the BART and Caltrain, the rail operators, the ratio of service cut to the budget shortfall percentage of operating budget is a little bit higher because the rail operators have a lot more fixed costs.

And so a smaller decline, a smaller percentage budget shortfall leads to a larger transit service impact. And then in the other scenario, we took 20 muni lines that were not operating during early COVID stages and that currently have the lowest ridership and lowest service frequency. And we just cut those lines entirely while preserving service on the more traffic lines. So that's in the targeted service cut scenario versus the across the board service cut.

And even though that is not a specific proposal, I will just note that SFMTA, especially at the beginning of this year when it was unclear if we were going to be able to get any money in the budget, did indicate that as many as 15 or 20 bus lines could be eliminated. And I would anticipate that the first to go would be those smaller neighborhood lines.

And that is tragic because I think a lot of times you look at, okay, well, we have the workhorse bus lines that have huge ridership, the 14 Mission, 30 Stockton, 49 Van Ness, et cetera. But these smaller lines that might have much lower ridership, the people who take those buses are very often very reliant on them. A lot of times they're going into hilly areas, and so it's still devastating. I know I'm preaching to the choir here.

Yeah. There are no easy choices here. And this really is a coverage versus service comparison, so they're really meant to be bookends of what transit agencies might have to grapple with. Okay, moving on transit ridership, we found our model estimated something like 100,000 daily reduction in trips across the region. For passenger miles, it would be even more severe with 16 or 17% of total transit passenger miles lost.

BART would be of the agencies that we modeled having service cuts, BART was the most severely impacted, with about 50% drop in BART ridership and a similar decline in Trans Bay BART crossings. And of the lost transit ridership, we found that for all the transit trips that were lost, almost half of those reappeared driving trips. So they're not necessarily the same driving trips. So a transit trip that at peak periods cross the Bay Bridge might not still make that same trip.

But there are about 50% as many new driving trips with different times of day, different destinations, different purposes making up for the lost transit. But kind of even more surprising to some degree is that almost 40% of the transit trips that disappear just disappear entirely and are not replaced by their trips. So that's just loss of mobility entirely.

Yeah, and I think this slide is really important in terms of the transit trips replaced by driving. And this, I think Bay Area residents get it.

And we saw from the polling that even people who never take transit agree that transit is important, because they know that even if they never in their life take a bus or a train, if transit deteriorates, that's a heck of a lot more cars on the road, on highways, bridges, roads and will just spike congestion and make everyone's driving trips longer and harder.

So job accessibility by transit takes a pretty big hit under these scenarios. With the toll surcharge, we don't see well, in any of the scenarios, we don't see much of an impact to auto job access. But under the toll scenario, there's very little impact, nothing significant for transit job access. Under the fiscal cliff scenarios, we're looking at regionwide somewhere between 16 and 18% total overall job accessibility reduction. Now, that's largely concentrated in areas outside San Francisco where the accessibility to transit accessible jobs is most significant.

And non San Francisco residents would lose over a quarter of their job accessibility. These impacts are even a little bit greater for Low income households and EPC households. And in fact, as an indication of the amount of loss of access to opportunity, we found that Low income households would reduce their overall work and school trips under the fiscal cliff scenarios by about 1%. Now, in modeling, we call these mandatory trips because people generally don't have a choice about work trips or school trips.

There are things that you have to schedule, and to lose 1% of those means a pretty significant reduction in access to transportation. Here's a map of how that looks region wide. We see that a lot of the areas of the kind of Inner East Bay and northern San Mateo County have very significant loss of job access. This is the number of jobs that someone that lives in one of these areas can access within 60 minutes by transit.

The dark red color indicates that job access has declined by more than 60%.

Yeah. This map is also when we debated the toll proposal, bridge toll proposal this year, there was a lot of discussion around equity and lower income drivers. You have to drive. And I know that your modeling on tolls did not take into account a toll equity proposal because there is no such proposal that's in process. And that is something that we had talked about. But putting that aside, it's so important when we talk about equity to talk about what happens when transit deteriorates.

And this map is very powerful. When you just look at what the darkest colors are on this map. It is not some of our wealthy communities. This is overwhelmingly working class and lower income communities, communities of color. We look at northern San Mateo County, which already gets the short end of the stick on transportation, on education funding, is also now going to be deeply impacted by lack of access to transit in Oakland and San Leandro and Richmond, et cetera.

It's hard to overstate how inequitable it will be if we make a policy choice to let transit unravel.

Thank you. We also found, of course, that transit crowding would increase. There'd be less transit ridership, but of the remaining transit ridership, riders would experience far more crowded passenger miles, doubling by about roughly doubling, and the share of passenger miles that would be in crowded conditions would increase from about 4% regionally to as high as about 10%.

We found the areas with the most crowding would be some of the Trans Bay crossings, such as AC Transit, Trans Bay buses that people would try to use as an alternative to BART service cuts, but then find that they're way overcrowded and they wouldn't actually be able to accommodate the demand. Many of the core munilines would also be severely constrained. We found that bridge traffic, somewhat unintuitively, actually had very little change under the fiscal cliffs scenarios.

And the reason for this is basically the Bay Bridge is already almost up to pre pandemic traffic highs during the Am peak period. So throughout the day, it's still down by somewhere between five and 10%. But at the peak period, it's very close to pre pandemic traffic highs. And there's just not that much more capacity to accommodate more drivers at the times of day and the locations that transit ridership would be lost. So we're seeing pretty flat impacts from the fiscal cliffs on the bridge traffic.

But instead, what we're seeing is just people having less access to opportunities. In the toll surcharge scenario, we see a fairly modest decline in bridge traffic. About 1% in the Bay Bridge, a couple more in the other bridges. It seems to be somewhat inelastic demand, but the cost of the toll is only one portion of the cost of a driving trip that typically crosses the Bay Bridge. There's also parking and other costs as well that make it a smaller percentage change.

The $1 and we modeled and then overall regional delay in traffic under the toll surcharge, we see a little bit less delay, 7000 fewer hours of vehicle traffic delay per day, 170,000 fewer vehicle miles traveled. Under the fiscal cliffs and areas, we see more. So about one to 3000 more vehicle hours of delay and 100 to 200,000 more VMT. And of course, as I mentioned, up at the top, the Baybridge Carter and the other heavily traffic Carters, they remain congested.

So either the toll or the fiscal cliff congested places remain congested. And those are the key highlights for now. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much. Colleagues, any questions? Seeing none. zero, yes, Senator Skinner.

Just a comment on the modeling. London, for example, has congestion pricing, which in effect, one could think of this as like that, and yet their trips into both their car ownership in the area affected and their trips into the area was greatly reduced as a result. But what you're showing is that there wouldn't be much impact on the auto traffic or number of vehicles crossing the bridge. Any explanation?

Yeah, during the peak periods, the model, because the bridge is already very close to capacity in the Am peak period in the westbound direction, the Bay Bridge, any additional vehicle trips over the bridge are going to cause cause the travel time to expand very quickly. And so that quickly discourages people from making those trips.

And the way that the activity based model works is that the loss in job accessibility or the work of General transport accessibility to central San Francisco neighborhoods is so severe that it reduces the demand for those types of trips. So we actually see just a lot less trips crossing the bridge and going into that market because of how much worse the overall accessibility is.

But I was asking about why you thought did not you don't project much reduction in vehicles crossing the bridge with a dollar 50 increase on top of that toll.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood. Apologies. Yeah. So the 1% is somewhat inelastic, and I think the why is it fairly inelastic? Generally because those are high value trips that people are making for reasons that are not very much affected by a 1.50 cent toll increase. In fact, on the way here, not to be anecdotal, but there's a sign in the BART station that says comparing BART trips to driving to the city. And they say that BART's 355 and the toll across the bridge is $7.

But there's also an additional $20 of parking and additional cost for gas. And I think it puts into perspective that the cost of the toll is just one portion of the overall cost of a driving trip across the Baybridge corridor.

Yes, but you can't say that BART is whichever dollar amount because you have to still get back. And that's only from, I think, West Oakland, not from most of the locations people would be taking.

... agreed.

Okay, gentlemen, thank you very much. We will now go to our second panel about the importance of public transportation, accountability and reform. We have four panelists Sebastian petty, the transportation policy manager at spur, Ian griffiths, policy Director at seamless Bay Area, Emily Loper, the Vice President of public policy at the Bay Area Council and Dylan Fabris, community and policy manager at San Francisco transit riders. So welcome and thank you. And if you could each keep your comments to about five minutes, that would be fantastic.

So we'll start with Sebastian petty from spur.

Great. Good afternoon and thank you, chair Wiener and Members of the Committee. My name is Sebastian Petty, transportation policy manager with spur, the San Francisco Bay Area planning and urban research Association. Today I'd like to spend a few minutes framing a big picture and talking about why transit is so important in the Bay Area, what it means for our transit system to have a sustainable business model and what the region is doing and can do to get there.

When I talk about transit having a business model, I want to emphasize that I'm not just referring narrowly to fiscal outcomes or being able to balance the budget, although that is part of it. Instead looking at transit's business model as a way to think holistically about the system, what transit does, why we value and need it, and how we can resource and support its success over time. Transit's business model starts with a value Proposition for both transit riders and the public as a whole.

Stated simply, when people choose to ride transit, everyone benefits. Later this afternoon, you'll be hearing from a number of transit operators regarding the foundational first part of this value Proposition, getting customers to ride. You will hear about changes they are making to improve customer experience and make transit more attractive and useful to new markets.

I'd like to spend some time talking about the other half of the value Proposition, how this individual use of transit generates public value and benefits and what that means for the future of our system. Transit shapes the region we live in today. The Bay Area accommodates nearly 8 million people in an economy larger than most countries via diverse urban form that includes big cities, small towns, farmlands, and protected nature.

The landscape we enjoy in the Bay Area today has been shaped by transit going back well over a century, and that influence continues today. As the prior presentation from SFCTA demonstrated, one of the most foundational ways that transit benefits everyone in the region is by creating access in a manner that supports dense, compact development and a vibrant economy. Our downtowns, particularly downtown San Francisco, simply don't work without transit, bringing tens of thousands of workers to them every day from across the region.

Our freeways don't work without systems like BART and caltrain providing lanes worth of capacity during peak commute hours along some of our most congested corridors. Major cultural and sporting events don't work without transit. Think, for example, about BART carrying an estimated 80,000 people to the Warriors Championship Parade in 2022. California and the Bay Area are counting on transit to do this, not just today, but far into the future.

Regional plans and state laws increasingly concentrate development and reduce parking around high quality transit a necessity to build the housing we need while avoiding excessive increases in traffic and sprawling development. This is the right strategy, but it only works when the transit is there. Transit also provides immense social value.

In a region and state where income inequality is among the highest in the nation, people of color and people with lower incomes are more likely to use and rely on transit, a trend that has become even more pronounced since the pandemic. The graph on the screen was developed as part of a spur analysis related to SB 532 and shows the relative incomes of all households in the region drivers crossing the Bay Area's bridges, and BART riders.

As you can see, people of all incomes use BART, but the system has a relatively higher proportion of riders coming from households with incomes of under 50,000 a year. A recent analysis by my colleagues at Transform, looking at the impact of potential service cuts, found that 80% of car free households who use transit earn incomes of less than 75,000 a year.

This same analysis found that if service cuts came to pass, more than 100,000 of these same households in the Bay Area would need to purchase vehicles to get around a cost of billions of dollars. That would disproportionately drain wealth and resources from the region's lowest income households. Finally, transit is also critical to our environment. California and the Bay Area have been leaders in climate policy and conservation, with transit playing a central role.

As of 2020, some 38% of GHG emissions in the state were generated by the transportation sector. Reducing these emissions in a timely manner will require more than just electrifying vehicles. In the latest Scoping plan, the California Air Resources Board estimates that vehicle miles traveled in the state also need to be reduced by more than 25% in less than 10 years and more than 30% by 2045.

This is an ambitious and daunting goal, and we cannot achieve it without a transit system that is not just healthy, but growing. So what is the business model that gets us to these goals? In 2019, the Bay Area transit system had a business model that cost about 3 billion to operate, recovered a third of its costs through fares and two thirds through subsidies, and moved 500 million people a year. That was at its most basic our region's business model for transit.

By 2021, that model had collapsed a system that was roughly the same operational size, was now relying almost entirely on public subsidy, and was moving just 127,000,000 people per year. The system is now partially recovered from these o's, but we need to ask how will this model change in the future? This is a critical practical question to guide how we reform the system.

If we want transit to help enable density, support equity, and reduce greenhouse gases, then it is very clear we need more transit, not less. But there are some basic practical questions we need to answer to operationalize those goals. Just how big a system do we need and by when? How many writers do we need to attract? How much service will we need to run and how much will it cost? How much public subsidy are we willing to provide?

What costs do we expect writers to bear directly? How can we grow our operational capacity to deliver services at scale and with efficiency? And how long will it take to get there? Answers to these questions are being worked on in various ways by operators, MTC and the state through the financial updates you've seen today, through the Plan Bay Area Update process, and through the State Transit Transformation Task Force being set up for next year.

While we don't yet have all the details, the General path towards a sustainable business model for transit is clear. And the good news today is that we're making progress. First, thanks to the actions of the Legislature this year, we have avoided near term service cuts and pushed transit's fiscal cliff into the future.

Second, as you've heard and will hear later today, transit operators are focused on sustaining, improving their core services, and addressing the key safety and cleanliness issues on their systems that we know are foundational to maintaining ridership. Third, operators in MTC have launched a number of key initiatives to improve the customer experience and build and grow ridership, programs like Coordinated Wayfinding Transit Priority Investments and the Clipper Bay Pass program that MTC discussed.

These efforts will take time to fully bear fruit, but we are moving in the right direction and making progress. Fourth, we are beginning critical conversations regarding new revenue sources for transit, both in the short and longer term, notably at the regional level, as we discuss a potential 2026 funding measure and statewide through the coming task force. What remains is the long, hard work to ensure that our system is organized to efficiently deliver the transit we need at scale.

There is no silver bullet to make this happen. It will be the result of iterative work at the state, regional and local level for years to come. We will need to continue refining and clarifying our goals for what we want transit to do and we will need to continue building and rationalizing the capacity of our transit system to deliver results.

Finally, we will reach our goals faster if we continue to pass laws and enact policies that help build the market for transit by concentrating development around transit and discouraging auto use. Thank you for your time and attention to this critical issue and happy to answer any question.

Thank you very much. We'll next. Go to Ian Griffiths.

Good afternoon. My name is Ian Griffiths, and I'm the policy Director of Seamless Bay Area, an organization that advocates for a seamlessly integrated transit system across our region. And I'll be presenting about a specific proposal for reforms that we believe should be connected with a future regional ballot measure to ensure that new funding is connected to an improved Seamless system. So if you can go to the next slide. Sorry, I have that.

So world class public transit systems across the world which have seen steadily increasing transit use over the past several decades and many of which have actually seen near full ridership recoveries in spite of also a high degree of remote work. These are regions across many parts of Europe. Vancouver is at 90% of transit ridership recovery.

They share in common a number of common success factors plentiful frequent service, connecting major destination and corridors throughout entire regions that serve a wide variety of trip purposes, competitive, reliable transit travel speeds and an excellent customer experience that makes using transit easy, connected and coordinated service across all modes and operators with integrated fares.

And this is possible because of an empowered regional authority that oversees regional coordination and is able to develop key standards and plans and hold all transit operators within a region accountable to delivering that seamless customer focused system, a network manager entity. To look at the Bay Area prior to the pandemic, it's important to remember that we had declining rates of public transit use, here we are, in most parts of the region.

Obviously, transit was getting stuck in traffic, but the fragmented experience for the rider was a real barrier to preventing more people from choosing transit. Long travel times, uncertain travel times due to uncertainty around transfers, a poor customer experience. These have suppressed transit ridership in the past, and they're critical that we fix those issues if we want transit ridership to get on a growth trajectory. The lack of our regional authority in the Bay Area to oversee integration has been a challenge.

And the lack of regional capacity that exists inhibits our ability to address some common shared challenges that are across all operators, like the challenges in recruiting a talented workforce, escalating costs, and recently, safety and quality of life issues. Therefore, to thrive, it's important that the Bay Area transit network creates a network manager that is accountable and has the capacity and authority to deliver integration with new funding.

This is the norm in high performing, high ridership regions, even where there are many local fund sources like we have here. And a network manager should centralize and oversee key functions of the transit network as a whole, including network planning, fair policy schedule, coordination, service standards, customer experience.

The network management structure that's been put in place over the past six months that has come out of the Blue Room task force that you were hearing about earlier is an important step in that direction, but it lacks sufficient authority and capacity in these other regions that have succeeded in making this pivot. Legislation has been essential in terms of formalizing the roles that occur at the regional level and how operators are all held accountable to meeting those common goals.

So the opportunity here is really linking a regional funding measure with the creation of an empowered network manager that can focus on delivering outcomes to riders across all transit operators. And we have developed this proposal in partnership with a number of stakeholders across the region, including advocacy groups on this panel, transit agencies and MTC. Seamless transit isn't just good policy, it's actually essential to winning the confidence of the public. And poll after poll has indicated that seamless integrated transit has got 90% support.

It's one of the most important motivating factors to get people to show up and vote for new taxes. And people do see the importance of linking the reforms to deliver that seamless outcome with those promises. So our specific proposal that I'll only go through briefly right now, happy to answer more questions about,

Is that a regional measure and the enabling legislation that creates the forum for that regional measure, first of all, needs to have authorized a significant amount of operations funding, one to two billion a year, in order to address the need and to Fund transformation. But it needs to be connected with the creation of a network manager that can tie new funding and allocations to all operators in the region with the outcomes of an integrated system. And that means integrated fares, schedules, routes, and information.

Specifically, we propose establishing a dedicated division of MTC as the network manager and expenditure authority that has that clear mandate and authority to oversee that integration with a dedicated board that is made up of a combination of experts. And elected officials that has delegated responsibility for transit policymaking driven by system outcomes and a dedicated centralized staff group brought together from many of the staff working at existing agencies as well as existing staff from MTC that focuses really on this region wide project of transit integration.

We've begun to move in this direction, but it's important that the enabling legislation create a clearer, more robust framework for this moving forward. So, just to visualize this, currently,

Are you suggesting that elected officials are not experts?

Those are not meant to be mutually exclusive categories. So the current governance that we have right now, this diagram shows the relationship between the Metropolitan Transportation Commission with its 21 Member board and transit agencies, and in terms of operations funding, about 25% of the operations funding that goes towards funding Bay Area transit flows through MTC, with the remainder coming from fares and a number of local sources. That funding that comes through MTC is typically not tied to standards and plans around integration.

So the proposal here that we hope to see incorporated with a regional measure is establishing a distinct division within MTC with a clear institutional mandate and capacity to oversee integration with the regional funding measure. Something like 50% of the funding for operations would be flowing through the region. So it's important.

So we have this expanded leverage to be overseeing common regional standards, but we need the staff group and the appropriate decision making that can develop those standards around coordination and integration, and that those can be tied to future annual allocations every year, seeing continuous improvement in implementing this integration across all of our agencies. Just a little bit more detail here on that specific proposal.

This Network Manager and Expenditure Authority Board, or it could be named something like Bay Metro for short, would have a board mixing qualified experts and MTC commissioners and have a distinct staff division that can oversee this project. I think. Just lastly, on the importance of experts guiding this, it's really important as we build out a function of something that we've never done before in the region.

This is not something that we need to have people guiding this project closely, that have experience in transportation operations, customer experience, knowledge of global best practices. People that can also represent the entire region aren't just there to represent one county and can really be accountable to the average transit rider. Not a transit rider in any specific part of the region or who uses just one operator.

And this importantly builds off of the current structure that's already been put into place that we've done voluntarily, but it really strengthens it and makes it suited for a major new funding source and annual allocations that would be coming from a regional funding measure. So finally, in closing, while the Bay Area faces many challenges that are significant, we can take inspiration from other regions that have successfully pivoted from declining ridership and fragmentation to an increasing virtuous cycle of ridership improvements.

This is an image from the opening of the Integrated Regional Rail Service in Zurich in 1990, which occurred simultaneously to the establishment of a common fare structure and the establishment of the network manager for the Zurich region called Zvv, that oversees the 20 something operators that operate in that region. This was approved overwhelmingly by voters. They also have a ballot measure system. There this positive vision that comes with the reforms, and the funding was the successful recipe for successful ballot measure in the Zurich region.

And since the 90s, Switzerland and Zurich has seen sustained and constant increases in transit ridership and successive future ballot measures. So this is the pivot we hope to undertake here, and this is the moment in time where we think we have the opportunity to do so. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ms. Loper.

Good afternoon, Chair Wiener and Members of the Select Committee. I'm Emily Loper with Bay Area Council. Grab that. So the Bay Area Council has been advocating to improve our public transit system around the Bay Area since our founding over 75 years ago. And today, transit remains essential to our regional economy. In fact, we believe that our economic recovery depends on our ability to run safe, clean and reliable public transportation. Despite the rise of remote work, we know that residents are still commuting around the region.

Many are just choosing to drive more frequently than before. So we know that traffic on many of our highways and bridges has returned to, or in some cases surpassed pre pandemic levels, while transit ridership has been slower to recover. Of all of these systems, we were most concerned about BART. This is a system that carried two thirds of all Trans Bay morning commute trips in the Bay Bridge corridor before the pandemic, and people relied on BART to get to their jobs more than anything else.

And yet, as of this spring, the ridership was still hovering below 40% of pre pandemic levels. So we conducted a poll in the spring to better understand why people weren't riding BART as frequently as they were and identify strategies to draw them back to the system. The results showed that concerns about safety and cleanliness were the top reasons why people were choosing not to ride. Those concerns far outnumbered those who cited the lack of commute.

So we know it wasn't just remote work as a barrier to regrowing ridership. This is also consistent with what BART riders were saying in the BART customer satisfaction survey, which also showed safety and cleanliness as the top priorities. But we're getting some of the lowest ratings. But fortunately, our poll showed that if BART focuses on these improvements, a lot more people would return to the system and help bring fair revenue back.

78% of residents said they would ride more often if BART were significantly cleaner and safer. So how do we get to a clean and safe system? According to our poll, riders want more cleaning of stations and trains, better enforcement of the passenger code of conduct, more uniform BART officers. And so we've been advocating for these improvements, and BART has responded.

Their new safe and clean plan includes, among other things, redeploying their existing police force to have a more visible presence in stations and on trains, doubling the cleaning of their trains and stations, and running exclusively new train cars, which are much cleaner and feel safer and are more comfortable. I'm sure we'll hear more from BART on the next panel about these improvements, but the results have been impressive. Police incidents on trains have declined by 60%, and it seems to be working to draw riders back.

Average weekday ridership has been steadily increasing since they announced these improvements, and they just hit their highest post pandemic ridership last month. So we're certainly on the right track now. But we do think more work needs to be done to ensure that all riders feel safe riding the system at all times. For example, while police visibility has substantially increased recently. Still, only 17% of riders have cited seeing police on trains.

And in our own return to office survey of employers around the Bay Area, they have acknowledged the great progress that BART has made, but are asking BART to continue to focus on these improvements going forward. So addressing these concerns is essential to not only regrow ridership, but also rebuild voter confidence. As we work towards future funding measures, we need to make it clear that these transit systems are worth investing in.

So we were proud to help secure the state budget operating relief this year, and now we hope the agencies continue to use this aid to continue to focus on rider improvements beyond the essentials of a safe and clean system. We also want to make sure that commute service is not sacrificed because there's great ridership growth potential in that area. It's also important that we see a commitment from the 27 operators that they're willing to work together to deliver a more connected, efficient and user friendly system.

We know the public wants these improvements, as Ian just showed in his slides, and so we want to make great progress on that before going to the ballot. And lastly, we urge the agencies to do everything they can to try to cut costs internally and help extend that fiscal clip funding as long as possible. Demonstrating cost efficient operations will help pass future ballot measures with the voters.

So we must be willing to prioritize these improvements to demonstrate to voters that we're serious about creating a better transit system for the Bay Area. If we don't, we risk failing at the ballot and failing our region by letting these transit systems fall apart. So we look forward to working with you to help deliver that better system. Thanks very much.

Thank you very much. And then finally, we'll hear from Dylan Fabris from San Francisco transit riders.

Thank you, Chair Wiener and Members. My name is Dylan Fabris. I'm the community and policy manager at San Francisco Transit Riders. San Francisco Transit Riders, or SFTR, is a nonprofit working to center the voices of the transit riders and advocates who have long desired an affordable, equitable, sustainable and accessible public transit network for residents, commuters and visitors of San Francisco. Essentially, we represent the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on public transit in the city each day.

But while my organization usually focuses specifically on San Francisco, it's important to note that the challenges and sentiments I'll be covering today are being felt by transit riders all over the Bay Area. The impacts of the fiscal cliff are not exclusive to San Francisco. The transit improvements and funding we are fighting for improve speed and reliability for riders. But in the process, they also provide hundreds of thousands of daily Bay Area transit riders with the freedom to live their lives on their own terms.

As Professor and writer Kafui ATO argues, we know that the fight for transportation. Justice is never a fight over transit alone. Good, accessible and affordable public transportation provides access to so many of the things we value vibrant neighborhoods, clean air and water, participatory politics, access to health care, food, community nature, and public spaces where we are free to speak, gather, play, create and organize. The multifaceted nature of transit's impacts means it's something that influences everyone in our region, whether they are regular transit writers or not.

This means the looming transit fiscal cliff should be top of mind for everyone working in government right now. So what exactly is at stake if we don't address the fiscal cliff? Well, failing to adequately Fund transit operations will harm everybody who relies on public transit or indeed anybody who drives in the Bay Area. But the most transit dependent and Low income transit riders will be impacted first and foremost.

We've heard from agencies and we'll hear later, that lack of funding could lead to service cuts, fare increases, service disruptions, and cutbacks to staffing, which could lead to negative changes to cleanliness, safety and comfort. This is all unacceptable to Bay Area transit riders who still don't have fully restored service since the start of the Pandemic. Over the past several months, we've heard from hundreds of transit riders about why transit funding is important for them.

Barbara S lives in the Richmond and like many seniors, doesn't own a car and relies exclusively on public transit to get around. Bruce M from the Tenderloin is disabled and can't get around without frequent and reliable muni service. And Alex K from the Mission saves thousands of dollars per year by opting to take transit rather than be weighed down by costly monthly car payments. Several additional testimonials are on the screen now, and we have hundreds more.

For thousands of people like Barbara, Bruce and Alex across the Bay Area, transit is a lifeline. Status quo simply isn't enough. Never mind the cuts that will have to happen over the next several years if transit agencies aren't funded. Since 2022, SFTR has been convening representatives from a range of community groups as part of the Transit Justice Coalition to build a riderled movement to invest in transit and define what accountability means from the transit riders perspective.

As part of this coalition, we've conducted outreach with a diverse group of community organizations and community Members to learn how transit could better meet their needs. Several of the improvements, which had broad support from the communities across from communities across the city, are on screen now. We heard from coalition Members that service should be improved along multiple criteria, including range, frequency, speed and others. We also heard that transit should be safe and affordable.

Several groups we talked to had a lot of great suggestions for how we can increase safety beyond just increasing policing, for example, and problems with current discount programs for Low income riders were also brought to our attention. Finally, we got a lot of suggestions for how transit can be made more accessible for riders, especially those who don't speak English or who have disabilities. The overall takeaway from all this outreach is that in order to thrive, our communities want and need better public transit.

Community Members have a lot of ideas about how we can improve all aspects of public transit. But in order to implement those ideas, transit agencies need enough money from the state and region to not only survive the fiscal cliff, but also to improve beyond the pre pandemic status quo. To get there, it's also crucial that everyday writers be included as key stakeholders in any discussions about what accountability means for our public transit agencies.

As writers know best what improvements are needed and can offer key insights into whether agencies are living up to their promises. As we saw during the most recent state budget process in which transit riders across the state were mobilized to make over 10,000 calls to their legislators, transit riders are eager to get engaged, especially when service cuts or budget cuts are on the line.

Any changes to our transit system, from catastrophic cuts to momentous improvements will be felt by transit riders first, and it's important that we keep them in mind as we work to make a more connected Bay Area for everybody. Thank you for considering the writer perspective today and in the future as you continue to work on these important issues.

Great. Thank you very much, colleagues. Any questions or comments relating to this panel? First of all, I want to regarding the seamless proposal, I want to just acknowledge Senator Becker for his leadership in that realm. So did you have a question?

Yeah, more just a comment. I want to thank all of you for doing this. And again, we will hear from BART, but good to hear about some of those improvements and taking the feedback in my recent ridership. It's been seen positive results there. I want to thank you Ian and seamless for looking at other parts of the country and other parts of the world where we can look to for inspiration and where some of this has been done and where we've seen positive results.

Because I think that's part of that positive vision, right? And that provides sort of the hopefulness of hey happen other areas. It can happen here too. If we do take action. And I agree that now is an important time. We tried to pass Bill for a few years. We're already seeing action. But now with this opportunity here with the possibility of a measure to really bring a lot of this all together. So I wanted to say I appreciate that.

Great, thank you. And Senator alert, I was just going.

To ask a follow up question on the barrier council's survey. And if I remember the number right, because you went by it quickly, I think there were 19% that said they post pandemic, don't ride or work from home was that it was.

17% of respondents cited lack of commute or remote work as the reason why they weren't riding BART as often and 45% cited issues related to safety and.

Fear and cleanliness.

And I wonder, I have a sprawling district to where, yes, I have Santa Clara County, but it goes to the San Luis Obispo Santa Barbara County line. And I have more, less urban ones, and that is a real issue that we are working on, is dealing with people that don't use transit because they don't commute the way they did before and trying to compensate in the planning because as was ably demonstrated earlier in the hearing, people just can't live without this.

And so that was just sort of a surface survey of what it is. It didn't go into it more like that's going to change or hear reactions to it.

Yeah. We are still surveying employers. We've been doing this return to office survey for a couple of years now to track mute patterns and trends and projections into the future, and recent data does show that the in office attendance is increasing as of this fall. So there is a slight uptick in in-person work. And I think as Executive Director Fremier said on the first panel, we want to make sure that those who are returning to commute more frequently are choosing to take transit over other modes.

Well I know that we have the next panel and that may well be something that comes up there, but I appreciate the response.

Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. We now have a--next panel is a star-studded cast. We are very lucky to have senior leaders from a number of our transit agencies.

We'll be hearing from Bob Powers, the General Manager of BART, Michelle Bouchard, the Executive Director of Caltrain, Jeff Tumlin, the Director of Transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Beverly Greene, the Executive Director of External Affairs at AC Transit, Carolyn Gonot, who the General Manager and CEO at Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, VTA, Denis Mulligan, the General Manager and CEO of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Seamus Murphy, the Executive Director of WETA, the Water Emergency Transportation Authority, and Bill Churchill, the General Manager of County Connection, who will be speaking, I think, on behalf of a number of the small operators in the region.

So welcome. Thank you all for being here, and did we have everyone here? Yes. Everyone's here. Okay, great. So if you could each take maybe just like five minutes or so and I'm sure there will be questions. So we will start with Mr. Powers, who is always on the hot seat these days. You know, if they're talking about you, that's a good thing, right?

Always a good thing, Senator Wiener. Yes.

At least they care.

Yes.

Mr. Powers.

Well, first, Senator Wiener, Members of the Committee, looked on behalf, I think, of all the operators. Just wanted to thank you for your support for public transit. It doesn't go unnoticed, and without you leading the way and asking the tough questions, we're not going to be able to deliver for the Bay Area. So just thank you for your support now and your continued support moving forward.

This first slide is just to recognize that from some of the operators here that we very much do appreciate you and all you do for public transit. Look, we fully understand that the state funding came with accountability measures. There's no--completely we understand that; the operators sitting in front of you today and some of them who are not here, and let me just speak for the ones that are here today, right now. We convene a Monday morning call every Monday morning at 9:00 a.m.

And many of the topics that we're discussing here have been topics at that meeting. And we communicate, we navigate, we coordinate, and I would put to Senator Wiener--to you and to the Committee Members here--that public transit has never been better coordinated and better communicated in the Bay Area than right now at this moment in time, and we're very proud of that. The next slide here is this is a slide of BART's ridership recovery trends. The blue--let me just orchestrate you.

It's seven days on the bottom--the ridership on the vertical axis there. The blue is October of 2023, and the yellow there or orange, whatever color, is pre-pandemic October of 2019. And so what that shows you is--Senator Wiener, you mentioned the numbers earlier--that we're running about 42 percent during the week of pre-Covid, but on the weekends much better, and we have just implemented a new service change and I'll get to that in a minute.

Senator Laird, you mentioned it, and Emily from the Bay Area Council mentioned it as well. So I'll get to that slide in a second, but we really have overhauled the rider experience from our service from the moment you get into the BART system to when you exit.

And to complement that, the Clipper BayPass is really what you're going to hear which the operators and in partnership with MTC and our Executive Director there, Andy Fremier, and his leadership there, the Clipper BayPass has encouraged thousands more trips by students and affordable housing residence, and we're looking to expand that. So this slide here in front of you gets to what Ms. Loper from the Bay Area Council said. Look, at BART, it starts and ends with safety and security.

And we relaunched and put a new service plan in just a few months back where we're running shorter trains, we're improving the headways on the nights and weekends, and we're improving the headways on our most busy line, the C-Line coming in and out of the city here. But from a safety and security presence, we've doubled the number of officers in the system.

So Senator Becker, when you and I are taking the train to a meeting or something, likely you and I will see maybe some sworn officers, some ambassadors, some crisis intervention specialists walking the trains or on the platforms when we're out in the system. We've doubled that. And you're like, 'well, why run shorter trains? Why is that such a clever idea?'

Well, when you're coming back from a meeting and it's a ten-car train, and the first two cars, the ten-car, nine-car, the one-car two-car, there's nobody there, the concept of strength and number and having a presence in the system, it really has made a difference. And it's allowed our frontline employees, our partnership with Labor, capital L, to maintain the system in a higher state of quality, and I just wanted to thank Labor for their participation in this.

And you can see some of the other improvements there. Staffing of the restrooms, new lighting, new escalators. Just really focusing on the customer experience in 2024 here. Here's something that I think one of the Committee Members mentioned earlier. This is the new Fare Gate Program, and it was part of the performance metrics and accountability metrics that Mr. Fremier, CEO of MTC mentioned, that we're being held accountable for BART. And that's a rendering of the new fare gates there. There's 700 plus fare gates throughout the system.

They're all going to be in place by the end of 2025. West Oakland by the end of this month, by the end of December, West Oakland is the prototype, and they'll be in at West Oakland. They're up and running right now at our facility lab. Kind of a mock up of that. We've had people in there testing them out. I've been in there, my chief operations officer pushing them, pulling them, trying to see if it can withstand the impacts of the public.

Senator Laird, you're not going to be able to jump over them. You're not going to be able to go underneath them. You're not going to be able to piggyback. Folks are going to be paying their fair share in and out of the system. This program is the number one project at BART, and it's on schedule, and it's budgeted. And so, you know, scope, schedule, budget; this is all about schedule. Again, this gets back to a little bit what the Bay Area Council presented.

And really, you asked me about what can BART do to extend our runway? The best thing I can do is to improve the rider experience, right? Drawback riders. And our on-time performance, we're at 92 percent. Our ridership is up about 11 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. Our customer satisfaction rating has improved a few points to 74 percent.

The other part that I didn't mention here is what we're doing on progressive policing, and not every quality-of-life instance on BART should or is being addressed by sworn officers, crisis intervention specialists, CSIs, ambassadors. They're deployed, and what it's allowed to do is to try to match those individuals up with services. And it's allowed the BART police officers to really address and focus on some of the bad actors that are out in the system.

And you can see the BPD incidents fell from 374 to 295 in October, and the other part that goes unspoken is the reduction in train delays. When we do a BART police hold, I got to hold a train at wherever, pick a station, and BART that arrow. And then it ripples through the system. That's nearly dropped by over 40 percent. And so the decisions that we've made over the last 30 months are all starting to intersect here.

The point of this slide in front of you, Senators, is primarily the light blue bar there. That's our operating revenue, and it was brought up--I think, Senator Wiener, in your opening marks, used the term 'unfortunate farebox recovery.' And I thought about that a second. I'm like, 'well, I'm not so sure I agree with that word' because BART was so very proud of our farebox recovery. We were pushing 70, 75 percent.

We were kind of the envy of the industry and couldn't foresee Covid and the ridership and remote work and all that. And what was my strength is now my Achilles heel, right? And we have to, collectively, we have to go and replace that light blue. I got to invert my funding model, right? And so that's that light blue there and just wanted to thank you again for the support in public transit there.

That's the intent of this slide, and then this one, Senator Wiener and Senators, with the help from Andy Fremier and Alex Bockelman and MTC, the funding coming out of the state and out of MTC, our BART budget is fundamentally--will be balanced for the next two fiscal years, and we very much appreciate that.

We're committed to the accountability measures that have been discussed with--Senator Wiener, you and the Committee here and with the MTC commission--and are willing and able to report back on those throughout the course of the funding. And so with that, I'm going to turn this over to Michelle Bouchard.

Thank you, and if I could just--farebox recovery, it's an interesting thing. Obviously, BART and Caltrain in particular were very reliant on fares. And I will say that I'm sort of old school here. Even before the pandemic, I had some discussions with Caltrain that I do not personally believe that high farebox recovery--I think Mr. Murphy, I think, remembers this. I do not think that high farebox recovery is ever a good thing.

It was good for BART only because you were forced to do that, because we forced these systems, not all of them, but some of them--particularly BART and Caltrain--we have forced you to be very reliant on fares. And that's because the U.S. unlike so many countries--and we don't put enough tax dollars. This is a public good. It should be supported by tax dollars.

I will note for the record that in New York and in Minnesota, they saved the Minneapolis and New York transit systems by having the state step in and fixing it with public tax dollars, and that's how it should be. And when a system is overly reliant on fares, it means that when you need more money, you raise fares. And I know it's always a push and pull at BART and at Caltrain, and this isn't a criticism. Some of these systems should not be--the fares should be lower than they are, but you have no other choice than to do that. That's the position that we put you in.

No, no. That's good. No, that's fair enough. Yep.

Yes. Mr. Cortese?

Thank you. I just want to ask a question right here, and I don't rather wait to the end, and I thought it would be a good time. In your presentation, you talked about convening everyone at 9:00 in the morning every week, right? And I appreciated hearing that. The question I'm going to ask is this: to what degree is accountability addressed from, in effect, a peer review?

What kind of lateral negotiations are going on in those meetings in terms of holding people accountable within the system of operators? I appreciate very much that you seem to be almost the first one that's come up with accountability measures here, whether we agree 100 percent with fare box recovery or not, but are really aimed at trying to reverse something that was flawed in a system in terms of collections or whatever. The fair gates is something I think certain people want to hear.

But I asked the question and I'll let you answer it, but I asked the question because I think in the Bay Area Caucus itself, without divulging any confidential conversations, that there's folks who haven't necessarily spent a lot of time serving either here or in the world of transit operators who believe that, pre-pandemic, there wasn't just a need to grow business. I don't think there was with BART at all. I was pretty much a frequent flyer before I went to the Senate.

But amongst--aside from Caltrain and BART pre-pandemic, there's a concern out there that there were folks running routes that were kind of useless and still looking for state and federal pass-through funding to support those.

In my own county, VTA--obviously a big kind of singular operator down there--regularly seems to run comprehensive operating analyses to dive deeply, get involved with riders, get involved with labor, get involved with everybody and say, 'where can we make some tough decisions and try something different here to see if we can produce a different result?' Is that kind of accountability discussed? Again, I just think there's a feeling of probably, right?

I got to say, I've always felt for MTC, having served here for a number of years. It's kind of like the United Nations. There's a few more countries than there are cities here in the Bay Area, right, in the world. But, I mean, it's a tough job to listen to everybody and try to do everything with the limited power that MTC really has to force accountability.

Thus the question: to what extent is the industry, if you will, of operators trying to hold each other accountable on what the public sees sometimes as two people riding on the same bus route, the same two people for seven days in a row and nobody else? We saw those numbers here pre-pandemic, and we were trying to effectuate change, but with very limited power to do so.

And I want to be able to go back to the Bay Area Caucus to bring this full circle in terms of my comments and tell folks we had this hearing, and what we heard was not just a bunch of stuff about improving, growing the system, making it more attractive for people to ride, but what about the systemic, the actual management issues that some of the operators have historically turned a blind eye to, frankly, and can that be resolved?

Yeah. Senator, thank you for the question. I can tell you--I'll give you my answer to that question. If a group of people--I was thinking about it when you asked it, you know--meet every Monday for three years at 9:00, you develop relationships. You know, whether it's Jeff and I or Carolyn and I, it doesn't--pick any two you want.

And because of those relationships, we're able to have some pretty tough conversations there and hold each other accountable in a fashion, you know, that allows that dialogue to happen and common ground to be found, whether it's on schedule coordinations, and signing up. You know, when I do a bid, when BART does a bid, many, many of the other operators feed into the BART system, right?

So when I bid out a new schedule, I have to coordinate with Michelle. I have to coordinate with Carolyn, with Bev Green from AC Transit, with Jeff. We don't always agree eye to eye, and I have to explain to Michelle or to Carolyn or to Jeff, you know, we're trying to balance five counties, and we're not trying to provide any one bit of service better to any one agency. But it's because of--we've been meeting every Monday morning, Senator, at 9:00.

We've had some very good conversations, and the relationships are there that allow us to hold each other accountable. If Jeff doesn't think that, 'hey Bob, I'm seeing a lot of stuff in the press about BART and the safety and security; what's going on there,' he'll call me up. He'll text me about that. Carolyn's in the system. She doesn't see somebody on the platform at VTA. She's, 'hey, Bob, I'm not seeing anybody down there.' That's the kind of relationships that are there right now that allow that, and I'm telling you, we do hold each other accountable, sir.

I appreciate it very much. It's through the chairs; let me say, it would be helpful, I think, to hear more of that going forward and specifics that are coming out. Not to say that you would--I'm not suggesting that it's being cloistered or anything like that. What I'm suggesting is that because of what happened in a pandemic, this fiscal cliff situation came along, the legislatures approached, and I think what a lot of folks heard is we the operators and we, BART, Caltrain, and everybody else are in it together.

We're all looking out for each other. We all got each other's back on this. We're all going to go to the Legislature. We're going to make sure everybody gets some help here. And I just think it provoked a question of, 'wait a minute. Besides having each other's backs, do you have our backs?' Okay? Do you have the State of California's back if it comes in and helps out?

And what that means to some people, not necessarily me, I can't say my colleagues here would vouch for the fact that I haven't been very vocal in that regard, but I served here at MTC for a long time. But people want to hear in the Legislature the nuts and bolts of what's going on, I think, and I was very happy to hear you say that some of that is actually happening.

It is. A lot is happening, and if I could just add, Senator, just prior to coming into this meeting, the region stood up the Network Council. Network Management Council. Just happened over here. And I would say--and I was elected Chair, and April Chan was elected as Vice Chair.

But I would say, a third of that meeting, everybody at this when we went around and we're talking about next steps, it was about accountability and it was about performance metrics and how we're going to report out to you and other elected bodies about what's being done on schedule and holding each other accountable. That was a third of the meeting, and that was the first meeting. We just stood up. It just happened.

Lastly, no offense to Andy in the opening which was really the only slide to really identify as an accountability slide deck, it just felt much more collegial and supportive about growth than it did about sort of nuts and bolts. And again, I appreciate your slides in your presentation really went into more--I think what the public hears is much more effective, concrete measures to make adjustments. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Senator. Okay. We will now go to Michelle Bouchard, Executive Director of Caltrain. We went a little long on BART, and BART deserves extra time because it's been the center of a lot of discussion, so if folks could keep it at about five minutes or so, that'd be great. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, and so much appreciate the opportunity to present today and really appreciate your leadership on transportation issues. Just really to delay the land here, Caltrain is the regional railroad that serves San Francisco through San Jose down to Gilroy. So we operate on our own right of way. We operate on others' rights of way. We have tenants on our right of way.

And this is all just to highlight the fact that we as an organization need to partner not only with other transit entities, but also with the communities through which we operate. And it's not only with operations, but it's also with the key projects that we have going on.

I'm going to focus on electrification, but also want to highlight the fact that we've got 21 grade separation projects up and down the peninsula that are in some way, shape, or form happening, whether it's planning through to design and construction, and really, want to focus on the fact that we fully support and are really doubling down on the rail network management.

And I have to agree with what Bob said, it's really important that we measure ourselves and we do a better job of talking about what we've done. And so, in that vein, just wanted to talk a little bit about what Caltrain has done throughout the pandemic and that we continue to do now. Some general categories are along the lines of customer experience as well as cost containment.

And Bob, to some degree, stole a little bit of my thunder in terms of: we completely redesigned the schedule to be able to provide more rides for more types of customers, so not totally jammed into the peak period. And that's really important because you can secure cost savings by operating more efficiently that way in addition to reducing consist sizes. So it really has provided some cost containment. But really, we are doubling down on launching electrification.

This says planned in 2024; it is going to happen in 2024. Before I jump to that, if I could just talk a little bit about Caltrain's version of the fiscal cliff. We too had a 75 percent farebox recovery ratio. I agree, it's because we had to do that pre-pandemic. We benefited so much from the federal funds, but also from the passage of Measure RR. And that really has been the lifeblood of Caltrain throughout the pandemic.

We've estimated a 33 million dollar fiscal cliff number for 2026, but again, thanks to the state and to MTC, that will largely be covered. And so we are still looking at average weekday ridership increasing and this is despite the fact that we've been shutting down on the weekend. So I think there is some reason to have some optimistic perspective and I truly believe we've been able to do that because we have diversified the types of trips that folks take on Caltrain.

But moving forward, we are on the precipice of transformation. The Electrification Program has been 30 years in the making and we have been hitting major milestones. You see them here. We are going to have the full corridor energized in early 2024. We've got six of these train sets on property, we've been testing them, and so all things are going well.

So again, we're looking at passenger service to the riding public in September 2024 and there are some amazing benefits that I'm going to talk about that correspond with electrification. But here are some pictures of a couple of events that we had that each of them drew over 4,000 folks to come see the EMUs. People are really starting to touch and feel what electrification is going to do for the riding public.

So I'm not going to go through all of this, but this just demonstrates how beneficial this 2.5 billion dollar investment is going to be for job creation or has been for job creation, traffic relief, all sorts of things. I'm going to focus on three particular benefits. The first is: we will have the capability to provide faster trips, and that's because of the technology and the performance of electrified trains. And so you'll see serious time savings.

And we know that reduction in travel times is something that is very attractive and will get customers out of their cars and back onto transit. Also, we're able to provide more service to more stations. We are planning to have more service provided to equity priority stations, and what we think is really going to be beneficial is on the weekend, we'll be going to 30 minutes service. We can do that within existing budget dollars because of the efficiency, again, that electrification brings us.

And when ridership warrants it, electrification will bring more capacity to the system. And then finally, it supports a zero-emissions future, and we're really happy to say that we're going to be able to provide that zero-emissions future between San Francisco and San Jose commensurate with the Revenue Service in 2024.

And we've also partnered with the state to plot out what could be zero-emission service south of San Jose on the Gilroy segment by using battery-hybrid EMUs, and we'll be testing those in the coming years. So with that, we really are expecting a huge, huge benefit from electrification. And so I will end my presentation there. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Senator Becker.

Thank you. All of these are exciting. I wanted to say particularly, this presentation is tremendously exciting for me since Caltrain goes up through the middle of my district. But everything you said about all the tremendous work that has been done now over the last years here to lead to this point where we're going to have a positive impact on local air quality, we're going to have positive impact on quieter trains going through our neighborhoods, and obviously, the potential dream of more service--longer trains, faster trains--all that's incredibly exciting.

Just, I guess, two quick notes. One is, you mentioned grade separations, and how important is grade separations to that vision of more frequent service? And I note that because obviously I've been a strong advocate of getting more funding for these. We know they're very expensive, but it seems to be important part of the vision going forward.

Yeah, I think that's correct. I mean, it is going to be a heavy lift. As you pointed out, we've got about 40 of these to grade separate and they are very expensive. We are working on a plan right now to figure out how we can build them more cheaply and build several of them together, and that will help us put together megaprojects that we could really seek funding for, but fewer cars idling as service increases--that's going to help the environment.

It's also going to help the overall safety of these grade crossings, whether it's car to train. Anytime you get cars and trains at different levels, it's always a safer traveling environment.

Yeah. We certainly have some of the--many of the most dangerous crossings in my district. And we've had, you know, constant fatalities, you know--I think almost on an every year basis essentially, we've had fatalities. It's very important, and so we look together as we look to create this vision across the Bay Area. Just don't--want to make sure I take the time to highlight the importance of, I think of those great separations to our area. But yeah, overall, just really excited about the vision.

And I just want to say, just sort of for the record, I'm certainly very supportive of the seamless vision, carrying this seamless bill and looking across all of our networks. I think--say--just looking, I know there's been some rumors or some thoughts just looking at a merger or say, a Caltrain BART merger or something. Specifically at this time, I don't think that makes sense.

I think we have to look at, obviously, the totality of all the experience that we've talked about and I just want to address that quickly because I know it's something that's come up. But just want to again, thank you for your presentation here today.

Yeah. I also just want to say, first of all, this presentation I think encapsulated a lot of things that we already know, that Caltrain has really been making huge strides in modernizing and improving in all the ways that you described, and I think this is really another example and we've seen it with BART too and Muni and other systems that we talk about the need for reform of our systems and transformation, and that's incredibly important, but I think sometimes that discussion occurs based on some sort of implicit assumption that it's not already happening.

And we know that Caltrain is modernizing. BART is doing great work with the fare gates and safety improvements and the train transformation and so forth. And as a regular Muni bus rider, I can say that Muni's bus system is so much better than it was ten years ago, just like night and day. And I know this is true of the other systems as well.

So I think it's really important for the public to understand that as we of course want to hold all of our systems accountable and have change and reform and transformation and improve service, there is already really good work happening and we just need to build on that work. Yes. Senator Laird.

Just briefly, thank you for your focus, even though you brush by it on Morgan Hill and Gilroy and I get more questions about the number of trains through there, and in our Members' associations, I got money in for the grade separation in Morgan Hill to try to add. And the fact that you might be bumping up it a little there is really popular. So just thank you. I never have a have at to Caltrain, so this is great to be able to just say it.

And by all means, I did not mean to rush through it.

That's okay. I'll tell them you were very articulate.

Thank you.

Okay. We will next go to Ms. Greene from AC Transit. What? Oh, I'm sorry. I skipped over my own hometown. I'm sorry, Jeff. We'll now go to Jeff Tumlin from SFMTA. Sorry.

Thank you. Thank you, Senator Wiener and other Members of the delegation. Thank you so much for your time. My name is Jeffrey Tumlin. I'm the Executive Director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and we're a strange creature in that. We are a municipal department. We run the Department of Transportation for San Francisco, all the streets and everything that moves on the streets.

And we run Muni, which at 470-odd thousand riders per day, carries nearly half of all transit riders in the nine-county Bay Area. We knew early in Covid that the impacts of Covid were going to be big and long-lasting, and we made drastic changes. We retreated to a place of radical resiliency, taking our 80-odd transit lines and stripping them down to the 15 lines that were most needed for our riders and served essential institutions.

About every quarter since then, we have rebuilt the entire Muni system from the ground up, responding to dramatically changed travel patterns as well as our changed financial circumstances. So, pre-Covid, our funding was roughly equal quarters transit fares, parking fees, state and federal grants, and a fixed chunk from the city's General Fund. As a result of Covid, three of our four sources of revenue have declined.

Some of them are back up, but our transit fare revenue is still 56 percent lower than it was pre-Covid, and our parking revenue is 12 percent lower than it was pre-Covid. And thank you to the incredible generosity of the state and federal governments, we've been able to push off our fiscal cliff, sustain essential services, but we're left with about a 270,000,000 dollar annual gap about two years from now. We also knew from the very beginning that we needed to focus on quality rather than quantity to survive.

We knew that the impacts were going to be long lasting, and we needed to go to the voters in order to get additional funding to keep our system afloat. So we heard a lot from our customers, and we incorporated all of that feedback into our Covid era recovery plans that was really focusing on making Muni faster, more frequent, and more reliable than it has ever been. During the course of Covid, just over the last four years, we have built more than 21 miles of new transit-only lanes, and at 70 miles of transit-only lanes, I believe San Francisco now has the densest network of transit priority facilities in all of the United States.

This has resulted in massive improvements in speed, on our key lines up to 35 percent improvement in speed that we were then able to reinvest in better frequency and reliability because if I can make the buses 20 percent faster, I get 20 percent more service for free. We also knew that we needed to not paper over our deficit by worsening our deferred maintenance program, and instead we did the opposite.

We used the opportunity of having shut down our entire rail system for two years to put our maintenance crews in the subway, rebuilding the subway to the extent that we could with no real resources. The result of that is that significant delays in the subway have been reduced by 70 percent, something that we had never dreamt was even possible, but it demonstrated just how important dealing with deferred maintenance is for delivering on reliability and how important delivering on reliability is for improving the customer experience.

We made another hard decision to not gut our customer information system budget in order to sustain operations, and instead continued with the pre-Covid program, investing in improved real-time information, signage, and other services to make sure that our customers reliably knew when the next bus was coming. We, like all agencies, are also hearing concerns about safety. So this is something that we've investigated very deeply. When you look at reported crime data, reported crimes on Muni are at historic lows.

They are a quarter of what they were in 2015. That said, as we talk to our customers in more detail, we realize that our customers are concerned not just about crime, but about social conditions on our vehicles, and specifically the unprecedented increase in untreated mental health and addiction issues on all of our streets.

A situation that finds its way onto public transit, but in which policing is not necessarily the right solution but rather directing people into services and collaborating with other social service agencies in order to make sure that people in crisis on transit get first priority for being directed into treatment. We also know that there has been a significant increase in harassment based upon race or gender and have responded accordingly. We have significantly increased our Transit Ambassador Program as well as our transit fare inspectors.

All of those teams are trained in how to deal with social response as well as deescalation. We have invested in our video cameras. Every single Muni bus has at least 11 cameras on it and audio recording. Our stations have as many as 100, and we've finally fully staffed our folks who are using that data not only to stop crime from happening, but to also ensure that our police prioritize dealing with crime on Muni and more importantly, the District Attorney prioritizes prosecuting crimes on transit because we have better data that allows courts to make hard decisions about making sure that folks who are committing crimes are no longer on the streets.

We've also heard a lot about cleanliness, both on our vehicles and in our stations, and despite our financial crisis, we took the Bus Sterilization Program that we developed in the worst days of Covid and simply retrained our folks, knowing that we don't necessarily need to sterilize all of our surfaces four times a day, but we do need to keep our vehicles clean.

And the sum total of all these investments are being noticed by our riders. In fact, Muni has the highest rating by San Franciscans since 2013, over a decade. Our public approval ratings are up nine percentage points, with 66 percent of riders rating our service as good or excellent, which is not to say that there's not still a lot of improvement that we need to make.

The result is also that our ridership is growing, but also when we parse the data in a lot more detail, we see that travel patterns have changed dramatically, with our weekday ridership being at about 65 percent of pre-Covid levels, but our weekend ridership being at 78 percent of pre-Covid riders. And when we look in even more detail, we see in the city in the United States that arguably has the greatest number of former commuters now working from home and where our rail station ridership matches BART, we have two of the lines with perhaps the highest rate of pre-Covid ridership in the country.

The 22 Fillmore and the 49 Van Ness, both of which are operating in new transit-only lanes, and both of which we've had to invest in improvements in frequency and reliability that has, in turn, generated additional transit ridership. And finally, as Bob said, we all have been meeting every Monday morning for the last four years altogether as a group.

And today we had our first meeting of the Regional Transit Network Management Council. We are all not only working together with the council and with the new Transit Network Manager, Melanie Choy, who may be here, but also continuing to lend staff to MPC in order to drive delivery of the key things that our riders want in the region, including fare integration, the delivery of the BayPass, improved wayfinding and signage, time transfers, and finally, regional speed and reliability improvements. Thank you.

Thank you. Now we'll go to Ms. Greene from AC Transit.

Good afternoon. My name is Beverly Greene, and I'm the Executive Director of External Affairs, and I'm here on behalf of Michael Hursh, who is the General Manager and could not be with us today. I'm here representing AC Transit. We are the East Bay's largest mobility provider. We provide service to 13 cities and eight unincorporated areas, including the cities of Oakland, Fremont, Berkeley, Richmond, El Sobrante, and others. We are providing about 140,000 rides per day.

65 percent of our riders are low income, 75 percent are people of color, 43 percent do not have access to a car, and we transport students throughout the district every day. Thank you. So I do want you to know that we are operating 87 percent of our service, and we have recovered 72 percent of our pre-pandemic service. For this fiscal year, we have actually increased our ridership 16.6 percent from the last fiscal year.

We understand that remote work is changing transit patterns, and we are trying to make changes that reflect that. And just to put your attention to, if you can look at the brown bar from FY18-19, that's 53 million, and then go to the FY22-23 bar, which is green, we are at 35 million average weekday rides. As a result of the pandemic, and despite continued ridership growth, we are nonetheless projecting a five-year operating deficit.

Our deficits are relatively modest through FY24-25, but they increase dramatically in FY25-26 as we will fully exhaust Federal Emergency Relief funding. At that point, we will need to balance expenses with our regular revenues. Without additional funding from either the state, a regional measure, or some other choice of some other source, AC Transit will be forced to consider cuts in serviced. A diminished public transit system will worsen the inequities and inequalities that are already faced by those who rely on AC Transit to connect them to their communities.

We, like other operators, have heard how important it is that our buses are both clean and safe. We know this is the bedrock of any plan to increase ridership and sustain our service. To this end, we continue to make masks and hand sanitizer available on board for use by our riders free of charge. We are keeping our operators safe and secure. This remains a top priority because, simply put, we cannot provide service without them.

We are absolutely committed to operating service that our riders can depend on. And we know that reliability is the key to increasing ridership. At this Committee's last hearing in May, we shared that we were addressing reliability concerns and running cancellations due to operator unavailability. Despite ongoing challenges in each month, during the first quarter of this year, we exceeded our on-time performance goals.

We're confident that the comprehensive operations analysis that we are currently moving through and underway of our service network will improve reliability and encourage more people to use our service. We call this top to bottom analysis and update of our service network, AC Transit Realign. We're reviewing where our routes go, how often our buses are running, and what days of the week and when they are operating. We're doing this because obviously the Pandemic dramatically shifted how riders use our system to get around.

And to that effect, we are in a five phase realign. And in the first phase of the realign, we surveyed more than 15,000 people to learn how they currently use our service and what they'd like to see moving forward. In phase two, we took that feedback and identified three core principles to guide our work equity, reliability, and frequency. And with these principles as our guide and based on community feedback, we've drafted new service network proposals.

Now, in phase three, we are asking the public to tell us what they think of the proposed changes and if we're on the right track. Community input is essential to creating a system that is equitable and meets the needs of transit riders. We are encouraging the communities we serve to review the proposals and provide comment by December 13. We are currently in this process right now. On the website, you can also find additional information about the December 7 online community workshop.

One of the greatest challenges that we have right now is recruiting and retaining bus operators. This is the greatest barrier to delivering our service. We are increasingly focused on getting new operators. We have one bus operator training class per month. We've been averaging between 50 to 60 new operators per quarter. We have a $2,000 hiring bonus and a $500 referral bonus. And we are hosting in-person recruiting events and where we are able to provide conditional onsite offers.

And I will say AC Transit has continued to provide excellent service and we were rewarded with an APTA outstanding public transportation system this year for our category, between 15 and 50 million average weekday rides. I think there is one more, but we will go to the next one. Thank you for your attention to AC Transit.

Thank you very much. Senator Skinner.

Hi, Beverly.

Hello.

On your second slide, where you show the pre-Pandemic versus Pandemic trends, so the 23-24, what's your fiscal year? From when to when?

Our fiscal year is from July 1. So that is a partial period. That's just from the beginning of this fiscal year, July 1.

Right. So it doesn't show us that. Okay. All right. So you don't have a projection yet of whether it will be better than the based on the number of months you show so far, whether it'll be better than the 22-23?

We believe that it will be. We are just about 17% higher than last year.

So right now, as of the same month period, you're 17% higher than you were at that time last year, or no?

Actually this is the whole fiscal year that we're 16.6% higher.

Okay.

And we are at 72% of our pre-Pandemic ridership.

Okay. Yeah. It was hard to tell that from looking at this graph that it would. Okay, great.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much. We will now go to VTA. Carolyn Gonot.

Good afternoon. I'm Carolyn Gonot, General Manager and CEO.

Sorry for mispronouncing.

Oh, no, that's all right. Of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority I know you've heard a lot about the positive impacts of the state funding was for operations to many of our peers. And I also want to thank the Bay Area delegation and MTC for state funds that were allocated to the region. Also to the BART Extension Silicon Valley Phase Two Project. So there were capital funds available as well, and the 375,000,000 we received actually does complete the funding plan for the project.

Now, VTA is not mentioned a whole lot today in some senses because we don't have a fiscal cliff right this moment. We pretty much faced our fiscal cliffs in the early 2000 s and made a lot of service cuts then. We're currently running slightly less than what we ran in 1990, and that was before the .com boom.

So we have not kept up with the population growth that's in Santa Clara County and the amount of service that we provide, but we have slowly restored the service that we have, but just to the pre-Pandemic levels. And most of that was just due to just for operating staffing. And we're actually fully, I think we're at 96% right now of our operators staff to date.

Is that service reduction from 1990, is that more on the bus side or the rail side?

Not all the rail was running in 1990, so we've had a lot of rail extensions since then. So it's primarily the number of service hours total that we're serving the passengers and that has a lot to do. So we did quite a bit. I think Senator Cortese might have even been on our board during some of those hard times as well. So it's been rough. We're now committed to the full 100% service, and we are continuing to move forward on that.

And as part of that, I do want to talk a little bit about just what some of our policies are. Our board just recently adopted the Visionary Transit Network that's our transformational plan for significantly better service. This allows us to really start to run services that meet what we had primarily actually at the levels that AC Transit is per capita. The amount of service levels that would be per capita, because we are not running those, which makes it difficult.

When we meet up with Caltrain or meet up with BART, or we meet up with AC Transit, our service hours and our frequencies are much less. So it's a lot harder on our riders than making those connections. So it's really important for us to start to move into making those connections stronger. In January 2020, we did put in a whole new service plan based on a comprehensive operational analysis.

It was heavily focused on what you would now call the essential riders that ran during the pan, that used it during the Pandemic. But we also had a lot of midday service and weekend service as well. That has grown. We're up a little over. We're close to 75% of our ridership has been restored. But in those first three months before the Pandemic, we jumped up significantly on our ridership just within three months by putting that service out there.

But what we have seen, and many have seen, is that that midday service is absolutely critical. We're not serving peak markets as much. And what we really need to do is also serve weekend service. We're talking about the grocery store worker or the food service worker who doesn't have an eight to five shift, but is working weekends and working late at night and to make sure that they can use transit that's so important to us.

And then also looking at innovative service models, not just for first and last mile, but actually potentially for the whole trip. So these are all things that we are starting to tend to look at going forward in the future. Just right now, you can see this has a lot to do with providing more service on every transit route. I'm not going to read all these ideas, but this is primarily the visionary plan. We do have it phased.

So we actually are looking a first phase, primarily focused on bringing up our rapid and frequent doubling, our rapid and frequent routes for weekends to improve those both the weekdays and the weekends. And that's primarily the first phase and some of our local routes as well. We really did in that comprehensive operational analysis focused on customer, I mean, on the ridership factor and less on coverage.

So there were some hard decisions our board made many, many months, took almost nine months of monthly board meetings to actually get to that point of being able to make that decision and put a lot of focus on the ridership. And that's something that many of the agencies have done here as well. But we're continuing to do that as we move forward.

I think one of the things is primarily getting up to the level of service that we need, that people could reliably take on transit in a county like Santa Clara County. And to make those connections, we've invested a lot into BART, we've invested a lot into Caltrain, we invested a lot into our connection points and we really want to make sure that those work.

The last thing that we've actually started to do, which is minor, but it's amazing how important this is to people, which is a better bus stops program. And we actually take our program right now, it started in 2020 as an annual program to improve all of our bus stops system-wide. It's very analytical. We have over, I forget, over 2,000 stops, I think over 3,000 stops in our county.

We're going forward with all of them and taking a look at how do we upgrade them, particularly looking at terms of equity, the ridership areas. We're looking at everything from lighting to actually, you can see a picture there with just very basic benches on poles that allows for two seats for somebody to sit down. So we're looking at that whole thing. We actually are completely making sure that we have money for that program every year.

And it's actually funded from our 2016 sales tax measure as other matching grants as well. And developments from the cities help fund a lot of those as well. So recently, just this year, we installed 100 shelters, 225 benches and trash cans to keep them cleaner. So there is a number of activities that we are doing. What's next for us is that this visionary network is estimated to cost quite a bit more, about $180,000,000 annually.

If you don't know much about VTA, we're more than just a transit operator. We're also the congestion management agency. We do land use and transportation integration. We're a funding partner in Caltrain. But we also are a major builder of highways as well as the toll operator for Santa Clara County. And we are this year going to be looking at putting revenues from those tolls back into transit. And we're hoping to continue to build out that system to help support our transit operations going forward.

The most important thing for us is to also be able to be prepared for the events that we have coming up FIFA and Super Bowl 60, which will be happening in 2026. One of the things we are looking at is a pilot project. We are actually talking to all the vendors right now across the country to actually look at bringing light rail vehicles on that can run on battery fuel cells as well as on catenary.

So we could take them off and run them on the rails without catenary overhead, which allows us to potentially increase our speeds, realign some of the areas that were really slow and also allow for additional extensions to help support the project. Because then you're really talking about various pieces of just the track work at that point. But we're continuing to look at that. That would actually be a big savings as we are the one the highest cost light rail organizations in the country in terms of costs.

And we are continuing to look at how we can save there by looking into each area of our major costs, which are in parts and in non-labor. And last but not least, I just want to say that we're continuing to work on, I'm sorry, enhanced safety measures for our employees and our riders. And I do want to say how important this is. I want to acknowledge Senator Cortese for Senate Bill 129 after the tragedy on May 26, 2021.

You said that funding has been able to strengthen our partnership with labor where we are all focusing on the well being of our workforce, which is really helping us also working with our writers as well. And what's so important about the workforce and having that program is we're now seen, thank you very much, Senator Cortese, as pretty much a model agency in terms of building an employee mental health care wellness program for our employees.

And as many people, as driver assaults are going up, there's a lot more safety concerns by even the families of these drivers. They are offered those support services as well that we're able to move forward and that actually is a big draw as well as our workforce development program to VTA.

And last but not least, Assemblymember Low also allowed us to authorize VTA to establish a prohibition order program to keep our frontline workers safe and our riders by being able to fully prosecute as VTA, to prosecute those who would bad behavior on the system, but also any kinds of assaults or any other types of crime activity. So I want to thank you that's just my minor comments for today. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Yes, Senator Cortese.

I think Senator Skinner wants to acknowledge but I just wanted to acknowledge I thank you very much for the acknowledgement on the last minute, as it were, relative to the state budget timing dollars that were able to come in for the mental health work and so forth. But I really need to acknowledge Senator Skinner as the Senate Budget Chair for making that actually happen on her end. Of course, my colleagues from the Bay Area who chimed in with votes and support for that.

But anyway, thank you very much for the overall presentation.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you very much. We'll now move to Dennis Mulligan with Golden Gate Bridge, highway and Transportation District. Mr. Mulligan.

Thank you, Chair Wiener, Senators, Members of the public. My name is Dennis Mulligan. I had the pleasure of serving as the General Manager for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District. We're a regional transit operator providing service to four counties. We're primarily focused on the one on one corridor connecting San Francisco to the North Bay.

So if you leave here today and you want to go north, you're our customer regardless of the mode, whether you travel by automobile, bicycle, bus, or ferry, it's all coordinated under one agency. And from a customer perspective, that makes sense because most customers don't exclusively use one mode. Most people may drive one day, take the bus a couple of days, and take the ferry on the weekend.

And so because our customers use a variety of modes, it's important to them that they have one agency and one person they can reach out to to talk to if they're unhappy with their customer experience. And today I'm here to tell you that I'm that person. So we're providing connectivity between San Francisco and Marin and Sonoma, primarily, and downtown offices in San Francisco have not bounced back. And because we control the entire corridor, we can tell you how many people come in by the minute.

So I'm here to tell you that North Bay commuters are not back in force to San Francisco. Bridge traffic from 05:00 A.M. To 09:00 A.M. on weekend, excuse me, weekdays is down over 25%. The good news is, six months ago, I would have told you it was down over 30%. That's important because that's how I pay my bills. But we are seeing a slow, gradual return of commuters on bridge, bus, and ferry.

And we are adding back bus and ferry service incrementally as we see our customers return in the corridor. Next slide. Having more than 25% fewer commuters on the Bridge affects our finances. Before the Pandemic, tolls were the largest source of funding we had for our bus and ferry system. The second largest source, I apologize, Senator Wiener, was fares. So we are a fee-based agency, and today our revenues from tolls and transit fares are down over $900,000 each week compared to the same week pre-Pandemic.

Fortunately, we've received federal and now state funds, and fortunately, we've reduced our costs so that we're surviving to live to see another day. While the commute is not back, we are being creative about how we welcome customers to the corridor. And while the commute is not back, our weekend ferry ridership today is 20% above pre-Pandemic ridership levels. So people are not scared to write our service. They want to write our service when they have a reason to go into San Francisco.

I might add that this 20% increase above pre-Pandemic ridership does not include our Ballpark service. Our Ballpark service this last summer had the highest ridership since 2017. For several years prior to the Pandemic and I dare say without much help from the Giants. Next slide, please. Today our buses are carrying much less passengers. Also because people are not commuting in. But today, over a third of our bus customers are new customers people that never rode our bus before the Pandemic.

So our being creative, we are trying to get people to use our buses to use our ferries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the quality of life in the community. I'll pause momentarily to thank some of my colleagues. During the Pandemic, in the darkest days of the Pandemic, SFMTA sped up our bus service. So our buses operate in four counties. But they're faster today in San Francisco than they ever have been.

And I look forward to the other three counties with MTC's assistance achieving that same outcome. I also would like to thank Marin Transit. In the darkest, darkest days of the Pandemic, overcrowding was a problem. It's hard to remember social distancing and 6ft apart. But when we were struggling with overcrowding on the one on one corridor, Marin Transit was able to add extra service that overlaps with ours to help bail us out. So I'd be remiss if I didn't thank them.

And I'd like to thank BART for their leadership on our Monday morning meetings. Mr. Powers does a fabulous job chairing them. And many of the agencies recently did a transit sign up where we adjusted our service to meet the BART schedule at the Del Norton Station to better coordinate with our customers. Next slide, please. And finally, I want to thank all of you because absent Senate Bill 125, I would be having a much more dire speech in front of you.

And with that, I'm available to answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you. Mr. Mulligan. Okay. Yes, Senator Skinner.

I found it curious that the autos crossing the bridge is 25% below the Golden Gate Bridge. Compared to it seemed like there was kind of only a minor drop in autos now, in autos crossing the East Bay Bridge, if I remember from the. I'm not sure what that's quite indicative of. And I'm wondering if we have data this wouldn't be so much for you, but on the East Bay Bridge, do we have data on how many of the vehicles are, say, delivery vehicles?

Just trying to figure out why the issue of vacancies, not vacancies, but rather people not working in their downtown office is the same regardless where you live. Maybe it's that Marin, a higher percent of those workers would have been office workers versus service workers. I don't know. But it's just interesting to me that the number of autos on the Golden Gate Bridge is 25% below on the East Bay Bridge. So much, such a big difference.

That's during commute hours, overall it's down about 15%. But 5:00 A.M to 9:00 A.M. weekdays is down over 25%. And it's tied, I think, primarily to the demographics of Marin County and Sonoma County having a higher percentage of workers who can work remotely from home because unless they're swimming across, we know how many people are going in. And so we've added bus and ferry service here and there, and we've watched the car traffic tick up, but people are out and about midday.

They're going to ball games, concerts, they're going to street fairs, but they're not going into the office, at least in our demographic from our geographic area.

Right.

Okay, thank you. Next, we'll go to Seamus Murphy with WETA.

Thank you, Chair Wiener. Thanks, Members of the Committee. I'm going to join the chorus here and just thank you all for the continued focus on this issue. I know the dialogue that happened at this Committee was really instrumental to the success we saw out of the state budget. It's bought us all a whole lot of time to be able to pursue other alternatives and other solutions to this really important issue. WETA operates the region's largest ferry service between all counties not known as Marin.

We operate six routes carried before the Pandemic, 3.5 million riders. We were the fastest growing transit system in the Bay Area. On a percentage basis, we've been one of the fastest to recover. We're sitting at about 80% of pre-Pandemic levels right now. We've hit as high as 90% just the week before APEC. So continuing to see just gradual increases in ridership, which is encouraging. And that didn't happen in a vacuum.

We were sort of early adopters of some of the concepts that Seamless Bay Area has been talking about that are included in the Transformation Action Plan. One of the first things we did when we brought service back is we aligned our fares with other travel modes in the same corridor. People used to pay a premium for ferry service, and we wanted to make sure that we were aligning our fares so that we could take costs out of the equation.

And riders, customers, travelers could just choose the system that works best for them. And we're happy to see that the ferry service works best for a lot of riders. And they returned to our system, some of them coming from other modes, some of them choosing to ride the ferry because it was now affordable and leaving their car at home. We also adjusted our service. We saw that recreational trips and off peak trips were an opportunity for growth more than commute based trips, for obvious reasons.

So we added in service in the off peak and service on weekends. I think we're seeing a trend here with some of the other operators and what they're reporting, but our weekends are back to 111% of pre-Pandemic levels. It just shows that people are back to doing what they used to do on the weekend. They're just not back to doing what they used to do during the week. We've made other customer experience enhancements.

We've upgraded our mobile applications, changed our boarding process to be able to add in more frequency to the system and make the overall experience better. We've set some records for customer satisfaction during the pandemic, which I think is encouraging. The one that I'm most proud of is we've doubled the number of riders who are very satisfied with our service from 40% before the pandemic to over 75% now. In terms of regional network integration, progress is being made.

Others talked about the Regional Network Management Council and how that's finally been put together. There's some really important work that's going to happen there and I think it needs to happen in a really public way. It's encouraging to see that that is unfolding. We also know that when it comes to fiscal sustainability, we have to just acknowledge that returning to pre-Pandemic ridership levels is not going to solve this problem.

Low ridership has been accompanied by some pretty extreme inflationary pressures that have touched every operator back to the farebox issue. We know that WETA was one of those fare dependent systems. Before the Pandemic, we were at about 60% farebox recovery. And even though we're back to 80% of what we were pre pandemic, our farebox recovery is still around 30. So operating costs have really continued to increase and we need to do more than just bring ridership back.

We've underfunded our systems in the Bay Area. The Bay Area was an outlier when it comes to farebox before the Pandemic. Other regions around the country and other countries around the world, as Senator Wiener pointed out, have invested more in operating investment for their systems. And we need to do the same thing. We often think about the Bay Area as a bellwether for the rest of the nation, but when it comes to funding transit operations in an equitable and financially sustainable way, we're just way behind.

State and federal funds have bought us time. If we value public transportation, yes, we need to improve it. Yes, we need to get riders back, but we also need to urgently find ways to invest in public transit the way other states, the way other regions have. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Murphy. Yes, Senator Skinner?

I may not have caught it, but did you say what is ferry ridership now compared to pre-Pandemic?

We are at about 80% of pre-Pandemic ridership.

And you're not necessarily counting the ferries that are in the Golden Gate system or are you counting all?

We're not counting the Golden Gate ferries, just the ones that we operate.

Okay. And just remind me, that includes the ones from?

Vallejo, Richmond, Oakland, Alameda, South San Francisco.

Okay, and what was the total number of trips per day pre-Pandemic an now currently?

I would need to get you the exact number. We're operating a little bit more than what we're running pre-Pandemic, mostly because we were able to find some efficiencies in our system and increase frequencies without increasing the crewing that's required to operate those trips.

Okay. But the ridership total numbers?

We're a little more than 3 million riders a year, compared to about three and a half million writers a year before the Pandemic.

Okay.

Which is about 10,000 a day.

A little less than 10,000 a day.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. We'll now go to our final speaker, Mr. Churchill with County Connection, who I think is here to represent all the small operators. Lucky you.

Well, good afternoon. My name is Bill Churchill. I'm the General manager of County Connection. But unlike all my colleagues, I will probably be the only one not talking about my system. I will reference it, but it's certainly not my focus because I do represent all the small operators, and I wanted to take an opportunity to give maybe a brief, high-level overview of all the different transformative things that the small operators have been engaged in since the Pandemic.

So I think I will begin in my backyard, so to speak, and try to look at each region of the Bay Area, if that makes sense, kind of clump it together to try to provide a sense of understanding as I work through it. So four of the East Bay operators represented by County Connection LAVTA, TriDelta, and WestCAT implemented a fare integration program, allowing passengers to travel across all four transit agencies with one fare that included a unified daily fare cap and free transfers.

Once a rider has taken three trips in any of the four participating systems, then the rest of the day is free for that passenger, regardless of which system they are riding in. This fare integration program allows passengers to travel across multiple transit agencies without barriers in a seamless way, making public transit a much more viable travel option.

As a group, we look forward to the regional fare integration task force efforts and how our program will become a component of a much larger effort as we continue to knit the entire Bay Area together with fare integration. Another project of perhaps even greater significance, the same four East Bay operators created a one seat ride for paratransit users, essentially consolidating all four operator service areas into one. Our most vulnerable riders no longer transfer from bus to bus as they traverse across different transit systems.

Rather, they take one ride in one vehicle from door to door. These trips are shorter, faster, more efficient, resulting in a truly life altering transportation experience for our paratransit passengers. This pilot project has received national attention for its benefits to our riders and to that point. The East Bay operators are currently working with the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, region to help them implement a similar program.

This one seat ride has also received considerable attention from the federal transit Administration, and they have indicated that they would like to see iterations of this concept duplicated across our nation. Similarly, in the North Bay region, Sonoma County Transit, Petaluma Transit and Santa Rosa City Bus, in coordination with Sonoma County Transportation Authority, are developing a unified brand for transit in order to provide a more user friendly system for transit riders in their region. This initiative is a multifaceted one.

It includes several components that are being worked on at the regional level as well. For example, harmonization of fare structures, development of coordinated marketing and public information materials, integrated service planning, and a unified customer service approach. Recognizing the heavy lift to complete this project in its entirety, they've begun implementing components of the project now. They have already implemented a unified base fare among the collaborating operators.

Similar to the East Bay operators, they have also implemented a paratransit one seat ride program, and additionally, they have developed a cross training program of customer service staff so that each agency's staff are better able and equipped to answer questions related to the other operator's service area. They've connected their phone systems together, enabling direct transfers of callers between customer service teams.

Also in the North Bay, the Smart Rail system, which along with Golden Gate Transit, connects all the North Bay transit systems together, providing a great venue for individuals to travel through the region in an efficient way. They had a problem. One, connection was not working well for them, and passengers were struggling to get from the rail system to the Sonoma County Airport. So Smart implemented a hybrid micro transit solution that has fixed stops at both ends, one at the train and one at the airport.

But it also incorporated an on-demand component in the airport area, linking passengers with the train. Passengers use an app on their phone to schedule their trips, making it simple and easy to use. This project went live in June and has proven to be a very unique and effective solution, connecting the rail system with the airport, realizing ridership growth every single month since its implementation.

In the Northeast Bay region, represented by Solano and Napa counties. I think they had one of the most unique and perhaps creative approaches that I have ever seen. During the height of the Pandemic, when ridership was at its lowest, they put eight fixed routes on pause serving the City of Napa, and transitioned them into an on-demand service, allowing passengers to travel from any bus stop to any other bus stop within the city.

This allowed the agency to gain an incredible amount of data regarding passenger travel patterns, and as ridership began to return, they were able to use that data to reinstate fixed routes in a way that better reflected their passengers travel needs. As a result of this experiment, they have also created a permanent on-demand zone within the city. As they have recognized, some areas within the city just require more flexibility.

Moving a bit to the South Soultrans is really the system that plays a key role in connecting residents of the Northeast Region with the rest of the Bay Area by connecting them with the ferry system or BART, either in Walnut Creek or Richmond. They found that many of their customers could not purchase monthly passes, or many of their customers actually came from out of area and were not interested in buying a whole pass.

They then implemented an open payment system allowing credit cards and debit cards to be able to buy single ride passes in that day. This has made public transit more accessible. Customers have indicated that they can be more spontaneous when choosing to use public transit.

Stepping back and looking at all the small operators as a whole, they've implemented more than a half dozen microtransit programs and a similar number of partnerships with TNCs such as Uber and Lyft to create flexible, cost effective transportation solutions to meet our passengers' needs. They've created free fare routes through communities of concern, developed non-emergency medical transportation programs, and one seat rides for our vulnerable passengers.

They have collaborated with each other in profound ways, integrating fare structures, consolidating paratransit operations, rationalizing routes through each other's service areas, and centralizing ADA certification data. And this is by no means a complete list. It has been an honor for me to work with and represent the small operators in the Bay Area as they strive and succeed in reshaping public transit to meet the needs of our writing public. And that concludes my comments, and I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you very much. Okay, colleagues, any questions for Mr. Churchill or for the panel generally? Nope. Okay. I really want to thank you again for participating today. And that was our final panel. We are now going to go to public comment. I would ask for anyone who wants to give public comment to please line up to my right by the microphone there. Let's see how many people we have. Okay, I think that one right there. The elevated one? Yes. And you may proceed.

All right. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for this opportunity to give public comment on the incredibly important public transit system that we have here in the Bay Area. My name is Cyrus Hall. I'm a resident of San Francisco. I'm a sustainable transportation advocate, and I ride transportation and bike my way around the Bay Area.

I want to thank you, first off, for your efforts in restoring both the $2 billion in TIRCP funding and also allocating 1.1 billion, 400 million of which is coming to the Bay Area. And I want to note that transportation is actually doing well. We hear a lot about transportation problems, but as every agency talked about today, ridership on weekends is recovering very well. Crosstown routes are recovering very well. Some of them, like the 49 here in the city, are thriving.

But unfortunately, we're planning for transit mediocrity. Sorry. A mediocre transit experience. We're estimating our budget deficits for fiscal year 22 service levels. This is very concerning as a transit rider. We're already seeing buses and trains crowded. We're seeing people have missed rides as buses pass them by here in the city. Last week at the SFMTA board meeting, multiple schools showed up to discuss missed trips. Rider showed up to discuss missed buses.

And our agencies are stuck in a cost neutral planning mode, shifting service hours around to squeeze every bit of capacity out of the system. This is great for efficiency, but it's not good for growth. And it will inevitably start to slow down recovery. The state has the money. We're plowing $20 billion a year into Caltrans, much of which is going to highways.

It's going into roads, moving just 10 to 20% of that budget, and aligning that money with our environmental goals, with CARBs goals of reducing car use by 25% by 2030 would be transformative for transit. We hear about the need for tough decisions for transit, yet when roads are in danger when I-10, had a fire, we spare no expense and effort. We need to have that same energy for public transportation.

The Bay Area, yes, needs to hold a regional measure and find over $1.0 billion a year. But the state also needs to rethink its historical reluctance to fund operations. The future is not highways. It's seamless, abundant, sustainable public transport. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Next speaker.

Riders through just many sources, including polling and the public, say that they want to see the public transportation system to transform and improve. And so it's really good to hear the stories from the transit agencies about what they are doing to improve safety and cleanliness and integration with more opportunities to keep that going. And hopefully with that confidence and improved rider experience and efficiency, we can move forward at the regional level and at the state level to have that abundant and seamless service. Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker.

Hi there. My name is Zach Deutschgross. I'm the Policy Director with Transform. We're one of the co sponsors of SB 532. I just want to thank all of you for taking your afternoon to listen to transit agencies and advocates around this vital issue. It is clear we are still in a near term and long term crisis for transit and that transit is essential to our climate, our jobs, our local economy, and the housing and homelessness crisis.

And so I'm just here speaking on behalf of Transform and other advocates of the Voices for Public Transportation Coalition, thanking you for what you do and letting you know that you have allies, you have community who are interested in working on solving this issue with you in the near term and in the long term. Have a great day.

Thank you very much. Any additional public comment? Okay, come forward, please.

Good afternoon, Senator Wiener and other panel Members. I'm Brian Larkin. I have lived in the Outer Richmond district since 1985. I'm a regular Walker bike rider and transit user. I seldom drive, and I would do it even less frequently if connectivity among the different agencies were better. Among the things that the agency, pardon me, the organizations which I am here advocating for, would like to see would be a regional coordinator.

An overall I guess the term you hear is Tsar, to improve interconnectivity and efficiency among the different agencies. That first and last mile business for me is a consideration. On a related but peripheral note, I have been an advocate for a Muni Metro rail extension out to my neighborhood, the Outer Richmond, since I moved there in 1985. And it's 38 years ago with limited success. The bus routes in my area along the Gary Carter, among the most heavily traveled patronized in North America.

And for reasons known only to God, we don't have Muni Metro service out there. As you people together if there's anything you could do to improve that situation to advocate for an additional service to us, I'd be forever in your debt. Thanks a lot.

Thank you very much. Any additional public comment? Okay, seeing none. We'll close. Public comment. Senator Skinner.

Senator Wiener, thank you for organizing this. I wanted to sort of couch my comments that in my questions to a number of the operators around, especially MTC around looking for a new funding measure, I did not want to convey being not supportive of making sure that we fully fund our transit systems so that they are operating in the way that we hope.

The thing that I have felt frustrated by is I feel that we have not evaluated the measure we did so far and whether the RM three measure as conceived is still the direction that we need to go in. But I would say further, and there have been some of the public comments were in this vein, but I wanted to speak to our seamless presentation. It was really the only presentation that caved the kind of vision let me back up.

Is that what really is frustrating to me is that it seems like we're purely trying to dog paddle and that rather than trying to envision a transit system for the Bay Area that would, in fact, achieve the type, of climate goals that were being talked about or the type of coordination and seamlessness so that anybody would ride it without question that there would be the last thing they'd want to do is turn to their car.

That that kind of vision was lacking on most of the presentations, especially from MTC, whose role I think it is to do that. And I personally am a transit user, and I want to give BART Kudos the types of improvements they described. I have experience. It is an improved experience at BART Cleaner. I see the liaisons, the folks who are non sworn officers, but who are there to help and assist patrons if they are experiencing circumstances with other patrons who may be having issues.

I've also seen the sworn officers more, which, depending on which station you're in, is something you will welcome at times. But that kind of vision. If we're going to go to the residents of the Bay Area and ask them to add more funding, then it seems to me we need to have the type of vision and the type of plan that really embraces.

That kind of expansion and that it's not enough to just go back to well, we may never go back to the ridership patterns we had before, because we may never go back to that type of office pattern. But we certainly want to get if our goal is, for example, the VMT reduction and the climate type of goals that were being described, then other than Seamless, there was no description that could help us achieve something like that.

So certainly if I'm going to be being asked to vote on something, to ask my constituents to increase whatever the revenue is that we're going to be looking at, then I'm going to want something that's more inspiring.

Thank you. Senator Skinner and I fully agree. I think, as we move forward, and I think we've really and we've had meetings with our Bay Area colleagues, it's very, very clear, and I think the public understands this, too, that we need to stabilize the funding and envision a better and better and more comprehensive and more integrated regional transit system. And the two, I think, really need to travel together. And as we go to the public to say, would you please provide more funding for these systems?

We need to be able to say this is what we are doing to improve service, reliability, safety, et cetera, and integration, and this is what we will do in the future to do that. And I know having I think we all visited various transportation systems around the world, and I think at the seamless presentation talked about this, you may have various operators, some public, some private, and it's all under one umbrella. It's all under one umbrella.

And for the know, you go to Paris or London and you don't even realize that there are multiple systems. It seems like just one system, but it's not one system. It's integrated, but it's a bunch of different operators. And we have not done that in the Bay Area. And we need to do that.

And I think if we give the public confidence that we're going to move in a better direction, that we are moving in a better direction, I know that Bay Area residents want good transit, and I think big picture here for any bright future for the Bay Area, it's not going to happen without strong public transportation. Our housing goals, our mobility goals, our economic goals, our equity goals are all reliant on having robust transit. And so that's what this is about.

And I thought this was a great hearing, and I'm optimistic that we will, in the next few years really come together as a region and set ourselves on a stronger path. So.

Senator Laird, thank you. This hearing was very interesting to me, and I had maybe the misfortune to be chair of the Santa Cruz transit system. At the time that the earthquake happened in 1989, I was also a Transportation Commissioner, and we had something like 17,000 car trips over highway 17 a day, and suddenly it was closed for nine weeks.

And we never could get an over the hill service because Santa Clara County didn't want to prioritize their part in their transportation plan, and neither did Santa Cruz. It was a regional thing. And so a couple of days after the earthquake, the Highway Patrol escorted me and the transit General manager up on the Santa Cruz side and Zoe loughgren and Rod Deirdon and theirs up on the Santa Clara side and on a handshake, we started the over the Hill bus service.

We brought the buses and the insurance. They brought cash and different parking things. And now there are more people that ride that service than wrote it when the highway was out. And the interesting thing to me about this hearing as somebody that hasn't been as intimate as some of the other committee members to what's been going on, is it seems to me that out of the pandemic there's been a similar shift to do a lot of things that needed to have been done over time.

And that was really interesting in the different reports, whether it's the Bay Area wide regional Clipper Card or many other things. And maybe more things need to be done along the lines of what was just said by the previous two.

But I also served eight years as a cabinet secretary for Jerry Brown and his strategy whenever he was going to the voters was to make sure that you'd either done cuts, exhibited pain, done all the improvements you could, and then you made the case for going to the voters. And it seems to me like the first major steps of that have been done and that was what was outlined by the different speakers.

And it's really hard because you're in this triage mode of making sure that the systems don't collapse, but it requires this vision of where we're going to be. I did a Bill this year for the Santa Cruz Transit system to allow them to go above the sales tax limit. And they're not going to do it until they can demonstrate that there'll be additions to the service and what people will get in a way that it is a vision for the future that people are voting for.

And I think that is a little bit of what was being called here. And you also need to go back. I mean, in that case, the analogy is at the same election the voters were approving Proposition 13, they were proving permanent half cent sales tax for transit, same election. And you have to demonstrate what that half cent of sales tax is doing for transit before you can ask for more as well and before you have that vision.

And so that is not a diss on what happened today because I am impressed at what people are doing and how the state money is making a difference until 2026. And so this is really about laying groundwork for all those next steps and making sure that you could talk about those things in a clear way to the public that they understand and they get the accountability.

So I thank the chair for doing the hearing and I think the fact that there are very few residents of the Bay Area that were not witnesses at this hearing and you managed to be succinct and get it all in. So I'm appreciative I think this is a very useful hearing.

Just thank you. Mr. Chair, I also want to thank you for convening us and thanks to the MTCA Bag legislative team for all the support. I know you put some thank yous out there already. But clearly thank you to all the panelists for coming here prepared and I think giving us some new information that we haven't had before that we can go back to Sacramento with and really kind of arms us for the next conversation we need to have with our colleagues. Thank you.

Right. Thank you. Thank you colleagues. Thank you again to the MTC for hosting us of Senator Skinner apologies.

Senator Cortesi referenced this, but I think you did. You know, there's discussion both in the Capitol and elsewhere around this notion of accountability. And I just wanted to raise that. I think one of the things that we may be grappling with is that what accountability means to one person may mean different to another and that we may want.

Well, I invite our operators, since they're meeting, understand now every Monday, that they might think about what a set of indicators or whatever that they might recommend to be used as our accountability yardstick. But we internally, this Select Committee may want to think about it also because some people think, well, okay, increasing demonstration of how much ridership you've increased would be like an appropriate accountability measure.

But depending on what the nature of your riders are, if you're a type of system that's primarily based, say on a commuter type ridership and there's not going to be a return to the office, then that's not really a fair accountability measure. If integration with other systems, then that might be. But I think it would be very worth it to have not only you all, but us start to get clear on what we mean by accountability.

Because for example, in the discussions, in trying to develop that budget language, it was done close to the end of so there weren't while there were a couple of, I think at least one Subcommitee hearing on it, there wasn't really a public discussion about what those accountability measures would be. And so the discussions internally were a little bit crazy because the different people at the table all had a different version of what they thought should be accountable.

Like we want accountability to be that this entity cuts its costs or we want accountability to be this entity cuts its staffing level or we want accountability to be this entity cuts increases ridership or we want account. And so I think it would behoove us because this will come up again and again and it'll especially come up when it comes to talking about another revenue measure. So getting a clear definition of agreement on what we are going to have as our accountability measures would be good.

All that is the devil's in the details. And I agree. People have different perceptions. So colleagues, thank you. Thank you, the MTC, for hosting us. And to all the panelists, I want to thank my staff as well for working really hard on this hearing. And with that, this hearing is adjourned.