From BART trains packed to capacity during the commute to freeways that jam well before dawn, the strain on the Bay Area's transportation backbone is intensifying.
And with the region's population expected to swell from 7.75 million to nearly 10 million by 2040, big engineering fantasies like a second trans-bay rail crossing and a stretch of Caltrain tracks through downtown San Francisco have become urgent needs. But the projects won't come cheap: The Bay Area needs hundreds of billions of dollars to build them.
"This isn't a problem that's going to wait for us -- we really need to run at it," said Jim Wunderman, president and chief executive of the Bay Area Council, an advocacy group for major employers like Google and Kaiser Permanente.
Sensing an opportunity to harness frustration, he and other business leaders recently collaborated with transportation agencies and nonprofits to develop a ballot measure for November 2020 dubbed Faster Bay Area. It aims to generate at least $100 billion in 40 years.
Though in its early stages, the measure would likely be a penny sales tax to fund a wish list of infrastructure projects. Among them: the downtown extension of Caltrain into the Transbay Transit Center, a project that has long intrigued and eluded political leaders in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
Faster Bay Area would first require state legislation to grant taxing authority to a regional agency. This initial bill would have to pass early next year so that Faster Bay Area could place the initiative on the November 2020 ballot.
The timeline is aggressive, in part due to pressure to compete with Los Angeles, which enacted a similar sales tax. Mayor Eric Garcetti hopes to complete 28 transportation infrastructure projects by 2028, the year the city hosts the summer Olympics. That goal, propelled by sales-tax revenue, puts Los Angeles in a strong position to obtain federal grants. The Bay Area would vie for the same pot of money.
While Bay Area voters don't have the singular focus of a sporting event, they're still hungry for efficient mass transit and traffic relief. Last year's Regional Measure 3 bridge-toll increases won with 55% of the vote, showing that people are willing to reach into their wallets for new BART cars and ferryboats and a latticework of freeway express lanes, among other improvements.
Policymakers view Regional Measure 3 as their first stab at a deep, complicated, expensive problem.
"We've seen in focus groups that people identify traffic as one of their top quality-of-life concerns," said Alicia John-Baptiste, president and chief executive of the urban think tank SPUR, which is working on the ballot measure. "They want to see big solutions, not incremental solutions."
Big, audacious ideas tend to draw opposition, and taxpayer advocacy groups that fought Regional Measure 3 are already wary of this one.
"This whole regional approach to transportation funding is problematic to me," said Jack Weir, president of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association.
Faster Bay Area may also clash with local governments that want to pitch their own sales tax measures for things like road repair, parks and flood control. Voters sometimes get turned off or baffled when staring down at a tax-heavy ballot, which leads people to vote "no" on everything. Some supporters of Contra Costa's ill-fated Measure X -- a 2016 sales tax that would have fixed potholes and paid for other local transportation improvements -- say it went down because of competition from BART's regional Measure RR.
Commuters standing at the bus stop outside El Cerrito Del Norte BART Station on Thursday night said they might vote to approve a new sales tax, so long as they see the benefits. Some wanted BART to extend to Hercules and Vallejo. Others just want the Bay Area's hodge-podge transit systems to better align with one another, so they don't have to walk a distance or wait 15 minutes to make a transfer.
"Just make the schedules more compatible," said Michelle Square, a nurse at Kaiser's Richmond Medical Center who commutes from her home in Suisun City. She stood waiting for the Green Express bus, alongside other riders who trek from Solano County -- where real estate is cheaper -- to work in the inner Bay Area.
Among them was Cathy Jensen, an interior designer from Vallejo. She said she does not have a working car and relies on buses to travel throughout the Bay Area, often with two suitcases full of samples.
On Thursday, Jensen took three buses to get to a client's house in Novato -- about 20 miles from her home -- a journey that took 2 1/2 hours. At 6 p.m., she braced for the same long trip back home.
Demand for synchronized schedules and a better bus network has grown as long-distance commutes become the new normal. At the same time, early-morning traffic is getting heavier on Bay Area freeways.
Data from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission shows a dramatic increase in vehicles crossing the Bay Bridge between 3 and 4 a.m. -- from 1,500 a day during the third week of May 2015 to 2,256 a day in the same week this year.
Traffic over the Altamont Pass between Tracy and Livermore has grown by 43% in seven years, owing to people driving into the Bay Area from the more affordable Central Valley, said Stuart Cohen, a transportation policy expert who is helping steer the Faster Bay Area campaign.
Revenue from a new sales tax could provide some relief for these super-commuters. One project in the works is the Valley Link rail, which would run from Lathrop in San Joaquin County to the Dublin/Pleasanton BART Station.
Another solution is to build a better network of freeway express lanes, which allow buses to bypass traffic. Officials could add additional tracks to railways like the Capitol Corridor. The system's passenger trains, which run from San Jose to Placer County, currently share tracks with freight cars, which limits service.
While the ballot measure is driven largely by companies trying to get their employees to work, it will also have ramifications for working-class people in the suburbs. That population pays a greater share of its wealth to sales taxes, so the measure might include some form of low-income rebate, said Cohen.
He and John-Baptiste are cognizant of the economic injustice built into the Bay Area's transportation system, in which lower-income people generally have longer, costlier commutes. Faster Bay Area will need their buy-in if it stands a chance of success.
"Honestly, to win passage it's going to need to benefit every county," Cohen said. "We want to act and move as a region."
