By Joseph Rodgers
Over 1.2 million people in the Bay rely on transit according to recent Clipper data. That’s more than double the entire population of Wyoming! But despite playing such a vital role to our regional and state economy, transit agencies around the San Francisco Bay Area face large budget deficits and are in desperate need of funding. As our region’s 27 transit agencies consider potential solutions to the problem; advocates, elected officials, and the public are tasked with making sense of a slew of gigantic figures – ridership, economic impact, budgets, and funding needs, just to name a few. With all these big numbers in the news, it’s easy for things to blur and for people to lose a sense of scale.
Let’s put some of those numbers into perspective.
First, how many people use our transportation networks? How important is transit? The SF Municipal Transportation Agency, or Muni, serviced over 158 million passenger trips last year – the most in the Bay Area! BART had a comparatively modest ridership of 50 million in 2024, but each trip averaged 15 miles – enough to cross San Francisco twice! AC Transit clocks in at nearly 40 million trips, while Caltrain is at 7 million and growing due to its recent electrification project. Together, these four agencies account for over 250 million trips around the region each year!
To put those numbers in perspective, consider another essential piece of transportation infrastructure – bridges. The Golden Gate Bridge carries around 32 million vehicles every year, according to recent data. Meanwhile, the Bay Bridge carried around 43 million last year. The effects of losing either of these bridges would be catastrophic to the region – and yet, our four largest transit agencies carry more than three times as many people as both bridges combined! We must keep our transit agencies funded so they can continue to keep people around the Bay Area connected.
How much do our transportation networks cost? Can we afford to spend more on transit? Many Bay Area transit agencies are facing imminent budget shortfalls. Leading the pack is BART, facing a staggering $385 million shortfall by the 2027 financial year. Muni is not far behind with a $325 million projected shortfall of its own. Meanwhile, AC Transit and Caltrain face smaller but still significant deficits of $60 million and $80 million respectively, which is not to mention the numerous smaller agencies around the Bay facing the same challenges.
All together that’s a little over a billion dollars – that’s a big number! But what does a billion mean in the world of transportation?
This year, US-101 in Marin and Sonoma Counties is getting an additional lane that will be about 16 miles long. It’s costing taxpayers over $750 million. In 2022, US-101 in San Mateo County got 22 miles of new express lanes at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $600 million. These projects make up just a fraction of Caltran’s annual budget, which was over $18 billion in 2023-24. Highway projects add more cars to our roads and pollution to our air, but never seem to shorten travel times, let alone pay for themselves. So for a billion dollars we can keep the entire Bay Area region moving, or make highway upgrades that affect far fewer commuters and have a negative impact on our environment!
If billions of dollars of large construction projects is too hard to picture, the Bay Area is home to a memorable piece of American history that might help readers out – the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. It’s stationed in Alameda just a short walk from the Alameda Seaplane Lagoon Ferry Terminal (and is worth a visit if you haven’t seen it yet). This summer, the US Navy gets a new aircraft carrier, the USS John F Kennedy. The modern aircraft carrier has a lot more oomph to it than the USS Hornet, which was built during World War II, but the two aircraft carriers are roughly the same size. The USS John F Kenenedy costs taxpayers roughly $12.8 billion, not counting the annual upkeep. This one ship in the navy costs more than the annual budgets of all Bay Area transit agencies combined!
Now back to the original problem – what should we do about the transit deficit? A billion dollars translates to a lot of essential mobility when spent on transit! But when it comes to roads, it’s shocking how little of a difference a billion dollars makes – we continuously spend hundreds of millions on roads each year to move far fewer people per dollar than transit can, while hurting the environment to boot. Meanwhile, we could prevent all cuts to the major Bay Area transit agencies for less than a tenth of the cost of one big ship!
So, while these big numbers may seem daunting on their own, in the context of the region’s transportation at large, the value of transit becomes clear. At the end of the day, we live in an extremely wealthy region, in a wealthy state, in a rich country. Our governments have more than enough to fund what we need – it’s just a question of value. It is essential that we find funding sources to maintain or increase transit capacity around the Bay Area, or transportation networks of all kinds around the bay area grind to a halt at immense cost to us all.
Thankfully, there is reason to hope that the funding these agencies so desperately need may become available! The state is setting its budget of roughly $300B right now, so write to your reps to ask them to fund transit! Together we can win the funding needed to save and expand our vital transit service.