The legislature passed and Governor Newsom is expected to sign a budget deal, which includes money for transit. The best explanation as of today is that by CalMatters: What you need to know on the California budget deal; scroll way down to A lifeline for public transit. From this article, “The deal includes a total of $5.1 billion over four years — restoring the full $4 billion for construction and adding the $1.1 billion from cap-and-trade — with complete flexibility for agencies to use the money for operations as well as construction, subject to accountability measures and state oversight.”
This budget funding delays but does not solve the transit cliff. SacRT has not been hit as hard by a drop in ridership as some other agencies, for two reasons: 1) it has recovered ridership better than many agencies, and 3) it was never as dependent on fare recovery as some agencies.
The flexibility to use transit funding for operations is the key issue that was promoted by transit advocacy groups, and we hope that SacRT and other agencies really take advantage of this. The success of transit is closely tied to offering frequent service to those people who need it and getting them to the places they need to go. But transit agencies, and particularly their boards which are in most cases elected officials from cities and counties, much prefer spending on transit capital projects (infrastructure) rather than service, because they get to do ribbon cutting on projects and not on service. But what riders care about is #1 frequency and #2 coverage. Light rail extensions usually do not increase ridership. New buses do not increase ridership. SacRT’s light rail modernization project may increase ridership on existing routes, if they carry out good platform design, and if riders are not turned off by the low floor rather than level boarding new rail cars. The disability community is very concerned about the deployable ramps and whether they will actually work for people with mobility devices and others needing easy access.
Probably many transit riders in the Sacramento region also use Bay Area systems including BART, Caltrain, and SF Muni. These systems are much more impacted by the fiscal cliff, and the current budget only partially solves their funding issues.
Sacramento Transit Advocates and Riders (STAR) 