Wrestling with budget challenges and ridership declines, VTA has zeroed in the core strategy of speeding up buses and trains, which have slowed dramatically over the last two decades. Speeding transit can increase ridership by providing more competitive service and reduce costs by allowing more transit to be run with the same amount of funding.
Transit ridership has been steeply down with many people traveling less in the pandemic. There are opportunities to make transit better to bring riders back and ensure that transit can thrive in the future. VTA has a FAST Transit program looking at options to speed transit. For this week’s SFMTA board meeting, the agency posted
Transit is in serious trouble because of the pandemic. We need to take steps now to ensure that transit can thrive in the future. One of these steps is to have countywide signal preemption throughout the county. Signal preemption would dramatically increase transit speed and make transit more competitive with driving. According to VTA, the
