Bridge toll hike must help commuters
UPDATE (April 16, 2018): The East Bay Leadership Council is now in support of Regional Measure 3 thanks to changes in the final expenditure plan. More funding is now directed to projects that will help East Bay commuters.
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Commuting across the Bay Area’s bridges is painful.
If you live in the East Bay, you know it better than most. To help ease that pain, lawmakers are proposing a $3 bridge toll increase to fund transportation projects across the nine-county Bay Area. The only problem is that those toll dollars would do little to make your trip across the bridges any easier.
The toll increases are a key component of Regional Measure 3, likely to appear in 2018 on ballots across the region once it has been approved by the state legislature. It is intended to generate more than $4 billion in new money for transportation in the region.
Rather than focusing on funding transformative projects like an additional Bay crossing, the plan focuses on funding as many projects as possible — in most cases with far less funding than would be required to make the token improvements a reality.
The reasons for this approach are political and have little relation to good public policy. Increasing bridge tolls requires only a simple majority vote, rather than a historically difficult two-thirds vote for raising taxes. But to make even a 50 percent threshold feasible, the crafters of this bill believe it is necessary to spread funding across the region to gain the support of voters and local leaders across the nine counties, including the East Bay.
This dynamic would dilute Regional Measure 3’s ability to make it easier to cross the Bay, while forcing toll payers to pay for projects with little benefit to them. That strategy may be good politics, but the East Bay Leadership Council, representing hundreds of employers in Alameda and Contra Costa County sees this proposal for what it is: a high-cost, low-reward measure balanced on the backs of East Bay toll payers.
Whether you live or work in the East Bay, a $9 commute across the Bay Bridge will be a hardship that amounts to a $2,025 annual bill on top of the rising cost of gas. Frustrated commuters will then look to other transit options to contain their costs. But when most of the toll funds are directed to projects other than transit alternatives and enhancements to the bridge corridors, these same toll payers will not have a viable alternative. Horrific commutes will continue.
Proponents will undoubtedly point to funding for a second transbay tube and troublesome interchanges leading onto the San Mateo Bridge as headlining projects for East Bay commuters. But those projects are set to receive only a symbolic down-payment at best. Compare that to the significant resources set aside for BART to Silicon Valley and on improvements to San Jose’s Diridon station, projects with less benefit to toll-paying commuters.
The problems resulting from our current jobs/housing imbalance are painfully obvious every day and will only increase with job growth in the urban core and the construction of additional housing in the outer suburbs. While a measure like this cannot fix the imbalance alone, it could better anticipate this increasing demand and build for the future. It could also incentivize the building of workforce housing closer to jobs, reducing future traffic congestion.
The East Bay Leadership Council has historically been a strong supporter of public investment in transportation infrastructure, but the latest plan to raise bridge tolls is a bad deal for commuters and should be transformed or rejected by the legislature before it ever gets to the ballot.