Will voters continue to subsidize transit’s death spiral in 2026?
By D. Dowd Muska | October 23, 2026
On Election Day, transit enthusiasts will direct their attention to greater San Francisco. There, five counties will decide whether to hike their sales taxes to bail out rail, bus and ferry services in the region. But transit is on the ballot beyond the Bay Area. How several other measures fare will reveal the extent to which voters accept urbanists’ assertion that the only problem with government-provided mobility is that taxpayers don’t shower it with enough revenue.
Measure C, passed by Fresno County voters in 1986 and renewed for two decades in 2006, imposed a half-cent sales tax “to fund transportation projects within the County, which includes 15 cities.” Extension attempt No. 2, begun five and a half years ago, offers a glimpse at how much trouble the transit lobby’s militant wing can inflict upon the policymaking process. The documentary-worthy donnybrook features a voter-rejected renewal attempt in 2022, multiple courtroom battles, intervention by the governor and state Legislature, and per Fresnoland, a public meeting in which “digital hecklers” played “random music” and hijacked “Zoom software to draw lewd sketches.”
What emerged from the lengthy, costly melee was Measure S, a 30-year replacement for Measure C. Supporters —including unions, the Fresno Metro Black Chamber of Commerce, the Mennonite Community Church, Stop the Violence Fresno, the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the California Nurses Association, Planned Parenthood, the Children’s Movement of Fresno and the Fresno County Bicycle Association — claim that their proposal “meets the needs of everyday … residents.” But consider the source. Since 2018, The Kresge Foundation, a Michigan-based charity backed by Kmart’s founders, “has sought to expand equity and opportunity by funding cross-sector planning and collaboration, community and economic development, community organizing and advocacy” in Fresno.
With such a progressive pedigree, it’s not surprising that Measure S mandates 120 miles of “new, physically separated bike and pedestrian paths.” It also devotes 29% of its projected $7.4 billion revenue to transit. The “investment” is wholly indefensible. Transit’s share of Fresno County commuting is now below 1%. For the city, the figure isn’t much better: 1.2%. More people in the region walk than take a bus to work — and have, for decades. While ridership on the city’s Fresno Area Express fell by 8.9% between 2019 and 2024, boardings on the county’s buses tumbled by 42.1%. But facts mean little to transit’s faithful, especially when they’re boosted by a billion-dollar benefactor.
Bus expansion is worrisome enough, but a larger boondoggle-in-the-making looms. In 2025, Caltrans awarded a $700,000 grant to “study … the feasibility of Light Rail Transit … in the Fresno Metropolitan Area,” since there’s “strong travel demand into the City center,” and “connectivity and accessibility of sustainable, quality transportation for underserved communities” is needed.
Measure S retains Measure C’s levy rate, but in the Pacific Northwest, two local governments are asking voters to increase their taxes for bus service. It’s an odd posture, given transit’s dramatic reversal of fortune in the region. A decade ago, urbanists swooned when more workers in metro Seattle began to board trains and buses. Bucking the national trend, the MSA actually saw transit’s claim on commuting rise in the 2010s — from 8.2% to 10.7%. The Atlantic gleefully noted the unique development, and a foundation “that works to secure a more just and sustainable future with abundant public transportation options” beamed that the Emerald City was “demonstrating how rail and buses can work in tandem to build a fast, frequent and reliable network that encourages people to use transit.”
Yet Seattle’s car-ditching boomlet fizzled in the 2020s, and it isn’t likely to reignite. Lockdown, the telework transition, the “JumpStart” tax, and voluminous tech-sector layoffs took a heavy toll. By 2024, transit’s portion of the commuting market stood at 6.3%. Ridership on buses plunged by 29.9%. For commuter rail, the decline was 58.5%. And the financial situation is downright dire. Sound Transit is “working to close a $34.5 billion future funding gap projected through 2046 to deliver what’s outlined in the voter-approved Sound Transit 3 program.”
No matter. Seattle Mayor Katie B. Wilson, and the city’s councilors, want 280,000 new “bus trips a year and 22,000 free … transit passes for qualified lower-income residents.” The cost is to be covered by a decade-long doubling of the Seattle Transit Measure, a 0.15% sales tax that “invests in local bus and streetcar service to make public transportation better, more reliable, and more accessible for everyone.”
To the south, Pierce County, which includes Tacoma and boasts a population close to 1 million, claims that “[r]apid growth … is straining our transit system.” You wouldn’t know it from the data. Between 2019 and 2024, ridership on Pierce Transit buses dropped by 19.1%. Yet the agency’s board is pursuing “a plan to deliver what our community has asked us for: transit that serves more people, more places, more often.” The price? A 50% hike in the 0.6% sales tax that is the system’s “primary source of funding.”
Our tour of 2026 transit taxation concludes in Tempe. Nestled within the Phoenix MSA, the city is home to 190,571 people. Few of them rely on transit — the mode’s share of commuting is 5.0%. As is the case in Fresno, more people walk to work. So it was probably solid strategy for elected officials to amalgamate “improvement and operation of Tempe’s public transit system” with police/fire and preschool expenditures as part of a budget-gap-closing scheme. Proposition 424 seeks to impose a half-cent sales tax. One fifth of its revenue would be committed to transit.
But resistance has sprung up among an unlikely element. Many liberals, concerned about the regressivity of levies on consumption, have publicly opposed the proposal. Doris Provine, “Emeritus professor of justice and social inquiry in the School of Social Transformation” at Arizona State University, decried “the largest tax increase in 30 years,” and charged that the city “has failed to prove that this massive and perpetual tax increase (an estimated $50 million of your tax dollars annually, forever!) is necessary or justified.”
However Election Day’s transit taxes fare, one thing’s for certain. Americans overwhelmingly prefer the speed and convenience of personal mobility to the pokiness and unreliability of government-monopoly trains and buses. With a helping hand from taxpayer-funded advocacy, the transit lobby might notch a few battlefield victories on November 3. But overall, it’s losing the war.
Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.
© Banner photo Austin Cross