Will San Francisco's Caltrain Be the Pandemic's Next Casualty?

Photo by Jules Marvin Eguilos on Unsplash

Public transit experts have been warning for months that the coronavirus pandemic is set to have a devastating effect on transit agencies, and the earthquakes are beginning to be felt. Public transit tends to run on very slim margins and insecure funding and, in our automobile-dominated world, political leaders are quick to view transit as expendable or a bargaining chip. 

Many cities from New York to California have already made drastic cuts to transit service as ridership plummeted this spring, but the worst may be yet to come—as evidenced by startling news last week that Caltrain, a commuter rail line in the San Francisco Bay Area, may have to shut down entirely.

This is startling because Caltrain is unlike many public transit agencies in that it is, in some ways, better off financially. Prior to a 95% drop-off in ridership as a result of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, Caltrain was drawing 70% of its revenue from fares (whereas 25% is more typical) and was patronized by many high-income riders going to tech and other office jobs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley—creating, in theory, a powerful political base of support for its operations.

As recently as April, the news about Caltrain was still its ambitious plans to electrify its entire 50-mile line and make service more frequent, with the help of a proposed regional 1/8-cent sales tax.

The sales tax measure now appears necessary simply to keep Caltrain running at all. It needs the approval of four transit boards and the elected leadership of three counties—San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara—to appear on this fall's ballot. And it is imperiled after two San Francisco Supervisors (the equivalent of City Council members in most other cities) declined to move the sales tax measure out of committee and advance the process of putting it on the ballot, for reasons that seemingly amount to a political turf war. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported on July 14th, "Caltrain might have to shut down after supervisors scuttle sales tax measure": 

Caltrain, faced with financial ruin as it runs a near-empty commuter rail line along the Peninsula, may have to shut down altogether.

Officials made the grim prediction Tuesday after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors declined to introduce a 1/8-cent sales tax measure for the November ballot — a vital lifeline that would have generated $100 million a year....By opting not to support the measure, the San Francisco supervisors effectively scuttled it.

Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Shamann Walton had previously voiced opposition to Caltrain’s governance structure, saying they want to separate the rail line from the San Mateo County Transit District, which manages and operates the rail system for a three-county Joint Powers Board. They say the two other counties served by Caltrain, San Francisco and Santa Clara, should have more control of its leadership and operations.

“It’s taxation without representation,” Peskin said Tuesday, adding that he disagrees with regressive sales taxes. He and Walton committed to “find a policy or legislative solution by next year,” possibly in the form of a state bill.

By the weekend, a group of politicians representing San Mateo County, the middle segment of the Caltrain corridor, had fired back, arguing in an open letter that the two San Francisco supervisors' actions threaten to bankrupt the line.

A few takeaways here from a local political turf war that could have far-reaching consequences:

• A shutdown would be tragic, and have long-term fallout. Shutting down any transit service, let alone a heavy rail line, is not as simple as just flipping a switch off for a few months and then flipping it back on when the coronavirus is gone. Staff will be laid off, including hard-to-replace engineers with decades of experience. And riders will be forced to make huge changes to how they get around, or, if they can't, quit jobs they can no longer access. A Caltrain shutdown would surely convert some train riders to drivers, and they may not convert back.

• In actual politics, you can't let the theoretical be the enemy of the practical. Aside from the issue of who controls Caltrain, the two progressive San Francisco supervisors who scuttled the sales tax measure identified a second objection: sales taxes are regressive, meaning they fall most heavily on the lowest-income taxpayers. This is true, but one questions its short-term relevance: surely eliminating transit service that allows some people to avoid the $8,000 (and up) yearly cost of owning a car is also regressive! This reminds me of debates about whether toll lanes hurt the poor, which similarly elide all the ways that car-dependent cities in the first place—a development pattern that is subsidized by our habit of not charging drivers for their use of the roads—hurt the poor.

  A lot of things about our tax structures would be different if we could design them with a blank slate, but we cannot. Absent a workable alternative proposal for funding Caltrain through a less regressive means, by November, it's hard to take this objection as a good-faith one.

• When fragile systems break, the consequences aren't easily contained. This is the final, and most theoretical, lesson here. We've built fragile systems that all of our big cities run on: they're dependent on fragile sources of funding, fragile political coalitions, and vulnerable to many potential breaking points. Debates over jurisdiction and mechanisms for funding public services are much easier to resolve when there is an expanding pie of resources with which to do it—but as soon as that pie is shrinking, things get ugly and you find out which priorities are really seen as expendable.

  This is a hard lesson that America's shrinking cities in places like the Rust Belt have already had to learn over decades. Now, thanks to the pandemic, it's a lesson that even its richest cities may be getting a taste of.

Cover image via Wikimedia Commons.

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