I would venture to say that for the foreseeable future, transit will never provide transportation for any level of residents in the Sacramento region worth its cost, and that is due, very simply, to the suburban nature of the region and the impossibility of ever providing the level of access to where people want to go with rails and buses as can be done in a highly urban area like New York or San Francisco.
The car (and the bike to some degree) will continue to rule the valley floors, due to weather, employment base, and the car culture gene embedded in valley life.
Editorial: Is transit worth a tax?
Regional Transit kick-starts the debate
Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Regional Transit General Manager Beverly Scott is right that transit in Sacramento needs more money. Buses and light-rail trains don't run frequently enough or cover enough ground in the region.
While 20 percent of downtown workers use transit to travel to their jobs, countywide on a typical workday, no more than 5 percent of Sacramento commuters use transit.
Most drive. Persuading those drivers to tax themselves for a transit service they don't use will be difficult.
Yet ridership can't be boosted significantly unless transit service is improved, and service can't improve significantly without more money. That's RT's conundrum.
Armed with a new survey that shows 74 percent of Sacramento County residents would support a ballot tax measure for transit and roads, Scott wants to put a new tax measure on Sacramento County's ballot as early as 2010.
Although she would prefer a comprehensive measure that would pay for roads, transit, and pedestrian and bike needs, Scott noted that the district's telephone survey of 2,000 registered voters found that 68 percent would support a tax increase just for bus and light rail. If other transit agencies are not willing to support a ballot measure in 2010, she thinks RT should consider moving forward alone with a transit-only proposal.
Sacramento is the only county in the region that has a local sales tax for transportation. County voters approved an extension of Measure A, the current half-cent sales tax for transportation in 2004, endorsing a plan to raise $5.2 billion over 30 years. Going back so soon to voters would be risky; a transit-only measure would make it even riskier. RT also needs to demonstrate it's a good steward of the money by better managing its work force. RT's bus drivers on average are absent 21 days beyond the 12 annual sick days allowed under their contract. That's unacceptable.
