Last week, the BART board made headlines when several board members expressed that exploring consolidation with other Bay Area transit agencies should be considered in order to help address the agency’s long term financial challenges.
Bringing up consolidation in the context of a budget crisis implies that the primary goal of consolidation is to cut costs by eliminating duplicative functions of Bay Area transit agencies. However, as Seamless Bay Area has stated before, while there are certainly opportunities to be more efficient, the creation of a well-governed, empowered, unified Bay Area transit agency – made possible by consolidation – covering the majority of the region could have potentially enormous benefits that go far beyond improving efficiency.
The benefits of creating a unified Bay Area transit agency with authority over regional rail, bus, and ferry services include:
Quicker deployment seamless rail and bus system around the Bay with integrated service, fares, and customer experience.
Improved accountability to riders and the public for regional transit service and connections.
Better and faster project definition and design, reducing the costs of capital projects
Faster and cheaper project construction for transit projects
Improved agency capacity, and attraction of better leadership and professional expertise.
It is not just the opinion of advocacy groups, a vast majority of the public, and numerous state legislators that consolidation would bring benefits. Transit agencies themselves explored and documented the benefits of consolidating regional rail. The MTC-led Rail Partnerships study, which was done with participation of Caltrain, BART, Capitol Corridor, ACE, and other California rail agencies. It concluded that “there are key potential benefits of ‘regionalizing’ some decision making and organizational capabilities”, and identified the next step “conducting a detailed-cost benefit analysis” on several restructuring, including a Consolidated Bay Area rail authority. Unfortunately, eight months after the Caltrans-funded Bay Area Rail Partnerships Study concluded, MTC has not taken any additional actions that were identified in the study.