It’s a tax that would run for 14 years and raise an average of $1.2 billion a year. The four northern counties of Marin, Napa, Solano and Sonoma looked at the deal and opted out.
To work around the need for a two-thirds majority, tax proponents funded a petition drive to place the tax on the ballot as a “citizens’ initiative”.
In fiscal year 2024-25, Bay Area transit operators across the five counties took in roughly $6.2 billion in tax, toll and government grant revenues (these federal and state grants are funded by federal and state tax revenue respectively). That figure, drawn from the operators’ own audited financial reports, excludes the fares, parking fees and advertising revenue the agencies also keep.
It is public money, and it dwarfs what riders themselves contribute. Statewide, California transit recovered just 10% of its operating costs from fares in 2023. The proposed billion dollars a year would be layered on top of the $6 billion already flowing in, and by the transit agencies’ own admission it would still not close the structural gap they face.
So where has the existing money gone? Costs have climbed while service has not. BART’s annual operating subsidy rose 257% between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2026, from $191 million to $682 million, even as the agency cut service. The inflation-adjusted cost of carrying a single rider on a single trip has averaged roughly five times its 1980 level in recent years.
Ridership tells the other half of the story. Regional transit carried close to 500 million trips a year for decades before the pandemic, then lost three-quarters of its riders and has clawed back only to about 70% of where it was, leaving it roughly 30% below pre-pandemic levels. The region is being asked to pour more money into a model that is carrying fewer people at a higher cost per trip.
Compensation is part of the picture, too. In 2024, the highest-paid BART employee was not the general manager but a police officer who collected $661,388 in pay and benefits, including more than $272,000 in overtime. That year, 51 BART employees took home over $400,000 apiece. These high compensation packages coupled with the large number of transit agencies across the five counties reinforce concerns that transit funding is not being spent optimally.
The structure of the measure invites its own skepticism. SB 63 writes fixed percentages into state law dictating how each county’s money is divided among BART, Muni, AC Transit, Caltrain and the rest. Only about a third of the revenue returns to county agencies to spend at their own discretion. The rest is locked by a Sacramento formula that local voters cannot amend, which means a community approving this tax gets very little say over where its own dollars actually go.
There is also the matter of timing. Fourteen years is a long commitment to today’s cost structure at a moment when the ground is shifting underfoot. Driverless services such as Waymo are already reshaping how people move around the region, and the shift to remote and hybrid work has permanently altered commute patterns. Locking in a 2026 spending model until 2041 is a bet that none of this will matter, which seems an unwise bet to place with other people’s money.
The defeat of the tax would not end transit service. It would force the state and the agencies to do what they have so far avoided. California spends roughly a billion dollars a year of cap-and-invest funds on a high-speed rail project that will not carry Bay Area commuters anytime soon, and some of that could support local operations now.
Pausing the region’s two largest capital megaprojects, BART’s Silicon Valley extension and Caltrain’s downtown San Francisco extension, would free committed dollars for the buses and trains people actually ride today. That breathing room would give planners time to design a leaner, smarter measure for 2028, one that asks less of the highest-taxed region in the state, where this measure would push sales tax rates past 11% in several cities.