Commuters back tax to ease gridlock
Bay Area residents have grown so exasperated by worsening traffic and the paucity of government money to make things better that they’re willing to tax themselves to pay for a regional program of improvements.
That’s according to a poll released Friday, just two days after Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic state legislators announced a transportation funding plan that would boost fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees for $52 billion in road and public-transportation improvements. Two years in the works, the plan would deliver much-needed funding for transportation but still leave many needs unfunded.
The Sacramento plan would focus mainly on immediate needs like patching potholes, repairing storm damage and rebuilding neglected roads and bridges. But the Bay Area has larger, longer-range needs — including purchasing 306 more new BART railcars, connecting Caltrain to the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco and planning for a second Transbay Tube.
But the new poll by the business-backed Bay Area Council suggests that the regional needs go deeper, with 83 percent of those surveyed imploring politicians to treat traffic congestion “like an emergency” and cooperate on solutions that can be implemented over the next few years.
Likewise, 81 percent said Bay Area traffic has reached “a crisis level.” And 70 percent of the respondents said they would support unspecified new taxes for regional transportation improvements.
“With declining state and federal support to address the problem, current plans and funding almost exclusively targeted at maintenance rather than new projects, and an economy that continues to grow, the pressure on our roads and highways and mass transit systems is unbearable,” said Jim Wunderman, chief executive officer of the Bay Area Council. “It’s reflected in just about every national traffic ranking and packed-to-the-gills ridership numbers on BART, Caltrain, ferries and other systems.
“We’re well past the point of small patches and little fixes, we need to go big. We will huddle with our region’s leaders to find a strategy we all can agree on, and act.”
Bay Area transportation leaders are already considering regional measures to generate money for improvements.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is planning to ask the Legislature for permission to ask voters to approve a toll increase on stateowned bridges to fund transportation projects. The commission already has the goahead to place a Bay Area gastax measure on the ballot, but has never done so because poll results showed it would fail.
The Bay Area Council has sponsored the poll for about three decades. EMC Research of Oakland conducted the poll from Jan. 24 to Feb. 1, surveying 1,000 randomly selected registered voters via the Internet on issues including transportation, housing, economic growth and education. Those surveyed are considered representative of registered voters in the nine-county Bay Area. The survey has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Distress over worsening traffic conditions has grown by 35 percentage points — from 25 percent in 2014 to 60 percent this year, according to the poll results. Traffic was listed by 41 percent of those polled as one of the top three issues facing the Bay Area.
Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed said they rely on driving alone as their primary way of getting to and from work with another 8 percent carpooling and 7 percent relying on BART. Six percent walk to work, while another 6 percent take buses or light rail, and 3 percent ride their bikes.
Nearly everyone polled agreed, traffic is bad — and it’s not getting better.
Asked if Bay Area traffic will improve over time, 78 percent said no. The poll did not indicate how many laughed at the question.