San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
High bridge toll dings low-paid commuters
San Francisco and Oakland state lawmakers are pushing a bill through the Legislature that would raise tolls by $1.50 on seven Bay Area bridges starting next year and direct the revenue toward the region’s public transit systems that have been struggling to survive post-pandemic.
Without this infusion of an estimated $900 million, they say BART would enter its own death spiral and be forced to cut hours and staff — and further crush any hope that San Francisco will crawl out of its so-called doom loop. The people most hurt by public transit’s demise, they say, would mostly be low-income people of color who rely on public transit to get to work.
Fair enough. But what about low-income folks who have to drive for work?
Right now, the bill, SB532, only includes a vague promise to require the Metropolitan Transportation Commission “to study, design, and implement an equitybased program to mitigate the impacts of the $1.50 toll increase within two years of the effective date of this act.”
Two years? The temporary $1.50 bump is supposed to end in five years, according to the bill. What are folks like Jose Castillo supposed to do while further study grinds on?
Castillo and his wife, Dalia, are janitors. Every afternoon, they drive from their Richmond home to clean office buildings in San Francisco. He doesn’t get off of work until 2 a.m. — after BART stops running.
Another $1.50 a day won’t mean squat to the Tesla driver in the carpool lane, but it will to Castillo. The proposed bump would come on top of a $1 hike scheduled to take effect in January 2025, which voters in the Bay Area approved in 2018 with a measure designed to ease congestion and improve regional transit and highways. That means that tolls could be $9.50 through 2028. In 2018, crossing a state-owned bridge cost $5.
It all adds up to more bad news for Castillo and everyone else struggling to survive in the Bay Area.
His mortgage is $3,450 a month. Car insurance is around $600 a month for his family’s vehicles — and Castillo said that bill just spiked, too. Gas remains high at $4.86 a gallon in Contra Costa County, far above the national $3.58 a gallon average. Fortunately, he gets free parking in the buildings that he cleans until the wee hours of the morning.
But now bridge tolls could be going up to $8.50.
“That’s another payment. And (that increased toll could be used for) a bill that I could pay,” Castillo told me. “We’re working people. Every single penny counts, you know?”
The other day, Castillo was thinking about the companies that have left the Bay Area because of the high cost of doing business. “And I asked myself, ‘If the big companies are moving out from California, what about my small family? Should I move to another state? ’”
Castillo has support from an unlikely source: The Bay Area Council, which represents more than 325 of the largest employers in the region, including companies like Amazon, Kaiser Permanente and Gententech.
In a letter to state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who has been leading the charge on SB532, Bay Area Council CEO Jim Wunderman sounded like Bernie Sanders.
“Those that are still driving a car or pick-up trucks across our bridge and paying tolls are statistically lower income, have lower levels of education and are disproportionately people of color,” Wunderman wrote to Wiener. “Post-pandemic, we have a bifurcated society in the Bay Area, of those with the luxury to work remotely and those that cannot. Many of these bridge-crossing drivers cannot reasonably take transit, and the cost of providing transit to them would be prohibitively expensive. Tolling these already disadvantaged residents more, now, is not the right move in our mind.”
The council’s analysis found that the median income of people who crossed a bridge to work in San Francisco was $65,000 compared with $80,000 for nonbridge crossers. The difference between the two groups was more narrow in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Seven in 10 bridge crossers are people of color.
Wunderman channeled the concerns of the Jose Castillos of the world when he wrote: “Many workers are already struggling with the high cost of living in the Bay Area, and this toll hike may contribute to forcing more residents to leave the region.”
Supporters of the bill — starting with Wiener — realize they need to help out people who have no choice but to drive to work. A leader in that effort is Zack Deutsch-Gross, policy director of TransForm, an Oakland organization that advocates for equity in transportation, housing and other issues.
“That’s kind of been one of the biggest questions TransForm has wrestled with in sponsoring the bill,” Deutsch-Gross told me.
TransForm supports the bill because it envisions what could happen if failing transit systems don’t get the cash infusion. Those hardest hit would be poor residents and people of color.
If transit service was scaled back because of budget cuts, TransForm said at least 104,000 Bay Area residents who are dependent on public transit are likely to have to buy cars to get around. Most of those folks earn less than $75,000, its research has found. Buying an average-priced used car could eat up about a third of their income — and push more cars onto the road, further worsening pollution and the climate crisis, according to TransForm.
John Arantes, a longtime BART mechanic who is also president of the BART chapter of SEIU 1021, said if the transit agency is forced to cut costs, “then instead of waiting 15 to 30 minutes for a train, now you might have to wait 45 minutes to an hour.”
“That’s going to lead to a lot of people saying, ‘Forget about it. I’m going to drive,’” said Arantes, whose union — which represents BART maintenance and other workers — supports the measure. Many other unions haven’t taken a position yet. Deutsch-Gross is working with supporters of the measure to help low-income commuters who need to drive to work.
One idea: If you cross a bridge more than 10-15 times a month, you’d only have to pay the increased $1.50 toll on, say, your first 10 trips.
Another would be that if you make less than $60,000, you’d pay only half of the increased toll. Another idea being considered, which would be harder to implement, would be a discount for folks who need their vehicles for work — like someone who needs to haul large tools or equipment.
Some of those proposals could help Castillo, who said he makes less than $60,000 annually. But what does he do until a plan is in place? That’s the dilemma for those trying to fix this equity hole.
“Is it better to implement a program on Day One that may leave some people out versus evaluating a better program, knowing that it may be a year or two years before it gets implemented?” Deutsch-Gross said.
Meanwhile, Wiener said the legislation faces “an uphill climb.”
Wiener didn’t want to propose raising tolls on the bridges. No sane politician would. Besides, the bridge toll inequity facing lowincome people who have to drive to work already exists. He would like to see that addressed.
But Wiener felt he had no choice. He did yeoman’s work to squeeze $400 million more out of the state budget for Bay Area transit systems in a year when California faced massive deficits. Still, Wiener said, revenue from proposed tolls would “solve only 15% of the fiscal cliff over the next five years” for transit systems.
This proposal is meant to keep Bay Area transit systems afloat until a potential bond measure can provide more long-term funding in several years. Until then, Wiener said this is the best option.
“I wanted to solve the lion’s share of it, if not all of it, through the budget. That did not happen,” Wiener said. “And so we have to engage in self help in the Bay Area, and we have limited options to do that. We decided this was the least problematic way of solving but we’d have to solve it.”
Politically, the bridge toll proposal faces some challenges. At least six mostly suburban Bay Area state legislators oppose it. Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, told The Chronicle earlier this month it “is regressive, inequitable and doesn’t force the kind of accountability that we need on our transit agencies.”
Wiener told me, “I have no problem tying new funding to reforms. I have no problem with strong accountability measures. But job one is making sure these systems don’t fall apart. And that’s what we’re on track for.”