GROWING PAINS
A bill in the works would raise bridge fees to pay for congestion-easing transportation projects
Voters in all nine Bay Area counties will be asked, likely next year, to approve a bridge toll hike of up to $3 on every bridge spanning the bay, except the Golden Gate.
But what would commuters get for paying as much as $9 at the toll booth?
Plenty, if lawmakers’ vision becomes reality. Among other projects, the list includes:
• Longer BART trains with brand new cars and (hopefully) more breathing room
• Electrified Caltrain vehicles rolling into downtown San Francisco
• BART extending into San Jose’s Diridon Station
• A new rail link connecting Redwood City and Union City
• More ferries cutting across bay waters
• More rapid bus routes zipping through the East Bay
• Express lanes speeding the
commute along the region’s most congested freeways
• Interchange improvements to reopen notorious bottlenecks
At least, that is what’s in the plan now. The bill authorizing the ballot measure, SB 595, must first be approved by the state Legislature and is still subject to change as it makes its way to the governor’s desk. It allows the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the Bay Area’s regional transportation planning agency, to decide whether to ask voters for a $1, $2 or $3 toll increase, or whether to phase in those increases over time.
Each dollar is estimated to generate roughly $127 million annually, or about $4.2 billion over a 25-year period — if the tolls are raised by $3.
The money is critical for addressing what state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, calls the Bay Area’s growing pains: booming jobs and housing growth throughout the region. The transitheavy proposal focuses on getting people out of cars and into buses, trains and ferries, said Beall, who introduced the bill earlier this year.
Although the money, while significant, won’t completely fund any one project on the proposed list, Beall said it will help Bay Area cities and transportation agencies win competitive state and federal grants, which favor projects with significant local contributions.
“It’s to make sure the bridges and the roads don’t continue to become so congested that we can’t continue to function,” he said. “The result will be a better Bay Area for quality of life and a better economy for the Bay Area.”
A recent poll of Bay Area voters found that 74 percent would be willing to pay higher bridge tolls, if that money is invested in “big regional projects” to ease traffic and improve mass transit. But, when asked to fork over gradually increasing tolls that rise by $3 by 2022, only 56 percent said they would “probably” or “definitely” be willing to pay the extra fee.
And, on a recent weekday afternoon in downtown Oakland, most people balked at the sticker shock of an $8 or $9 bridge toll, even while they grudgingly acknowledged the traffic choking the region’s major transportation corridors. Oakland resident Kathy McCurdy said she is already planning to leave the Bay Area once she retires in a few years. It’s just too expensive to live here now, she said.
“Bridge tolls are part of that,” McCurdy said. “I just feel like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
South San Francisco resident Luis Melendez drives into Oakland every day. He usually waits to cross the Bay Bridge until after 7 p.m., when the price of the toll drops from $6 to $4. If the toll increased by another $3, that’d be a big financial hit, he said. The toll for the other Bay Area bridges that would be affected by an increase is currently $5 at all times.
Melendez would rather see some of the major employers in the Bay Area pitch in to pay for some of the infrastructure upgrades, or enter into publicprivate partnerships, since they’re part of the problem.
Some elected officials in the East Bay are pushing back on the plan, saying the money, as it’s currently allocated, isn’t distributed fairly to residents in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, who collectively pay 49 percent of all tolls but will only see roughly 39 percent of the funds allocated to projects in their counties.
Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty, who sits on the MTC, is fighting to ensure that certain projects, such as improved freight movement in and out of the Port of Oakland, are included in the measure, along with more money for capital projects at AC Transit and funding for interchange improvements at State Route 84 and Interstate 680, he said. Officials from AC Transit and both the Contra Costa and Alameda County transportation authorities echoed his concerns with other projects they’d like to fund.
“These are very important projects we want to see funded that are not funded,” Haggerty said.
But Los Altos Councilwoman Jeannie Bruins said it’s no longer possible for residents to think only about their county of residence. The unequal concentration of jobs and housing in the Bay Area is changing the way people commute, with more people crossing county lines to get from home to work and back, she said.
More than 64,000 Alameda County residents, for instance, commute to work in Santa Clara County, according to the MTC.
“(This bill) is about facing our increased job growth and our increased population growth and the disparity between jobs and housing,” Bruins said. “It’s about addressing the challenges of the Bay Area as a whole.”
And there’s room for change in the bill, Beall said. Legislators chose the initial mix of projects based on the region’s transportation plan and the project’s ability to ease congestion in any given area, he said. Those changes will likely be finalized soon after the Legislature gets back from its summer recess on Monday.
“The projects you see there are based on a regional transportation plan, and they are all based on the impact they have on traffic congestion and the impact on bridge traffic and easing bottlenecks,” he said. “It’s not enough money to do everything … and we’re not going to please everybody.”