The following joint op-ed from Lucy Dunn and Carl Guardino, President and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, ran in the San Jose Mercury News:
Demand for public transit is higher than it has been in decades. Even car-loving Orange County has seen transit demand rise by double-digit percentages, even after gas prices began sliding late last year. In Silicon Valley, bus and light-rail ridership is up by more than 3 percent. Yet California transit agencies are cutting service left and right.
The reason? State funding for transit operations — the money that pays for drivers and keeps buses and trains maintained — was zeroed out for the next five years by the governor and the Legislature in the February budget agreement. Transit agencies have had to respond by raising fares and cutting service.
For instance, in April, the Orange County Transportation Authority announced plans to reduce transit service by 29 percent that could result in the loss of nearly 400 jobs. Less than a month later, Caltrain, the popular train service that runs between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, announced it was running out of money and would have to raise fees and cut service.
The transit authorities have had little choice. This is the fault of Sacramento for making the cuts and then doing virtually nothing to solve this problem over the long term.
Unless policy leaders start looking for a solution to restore transit funding, everybody — rich, poor, young and old — will face worse traffic congestion and air pollution and experience greater difficulty getting to where they need to go.
Transit riders, business leaders, local elected officials and members of the public: Let's remind our leaders to connect the dots between good environmental planning and the need to fund transit in California.
Even with the tough budget decisions before them, it is time that the leadership in the Assembly and Senate bring together a bicameral, bipartisan special committee to dig in and find transit funding solutions. This should include long-term, sustainable funding to help local and regional transit agencies pay for operations, especially if local communities are going to have to comply with California's global warming law that calls for improved transit service.
Right now, 37 states provide some sort of operations funding to transit agencies. California is not one of them. It needs to rejoin that majority. Californians have proved time and again — by voting for local self-taxing ballot measures to fund transit around the state — that they want safe and reliable transit and are willing to pay for quality service.
Transit provides broad travel choices and is essential to meeting the state's greenhouse-gas emissions reduction targets and reducing air pollutants. Around the state, large companies such as Google are employing private bus services to transport workers. Reliable transit has proved to be one way to retain workers while also reducing traffic congestion. Transit service also provides thousands of jobs.
To ensure the state's long-term economic vitality, California needs an educated work force, and transit services help get students to and from their schools and universities. The California Transit Association surveys of transit agency members show that students account for up to a third of their ridership. Also, as the population ages, driving looks less appealing and transit becomes more important. The elderly represent a significant portion of transit riders, and that portion will grow as the baby boomers age.
Nobody expects the Legislature or other policymakers in Sacramento to magically reveal the key to funding transit operations. What we do expect, however, is a strong, rapid and public effort to work together to address the problem, identify solutions and ways to implement them to keep our people and economy moving.
