$17B tax grab would fund bureaucrats who want you – Latest News
Proponents of a large, five-county gross sales tax hike within the Bay Area want you to suppose their money grab is needed to avoid wasting transit and forestall congestion.
But the activists working hardest to move the levy have a larger agenda.
They want you to drive a lot much less, or in no way.
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They want fewer driving lanes, much less parking, more tolls, site visitors calming, bike lanes and streets redesigned to discourage driving.
They are usually not hiding it.
The car-haters at Streetsblog, as an illustration, referred to as one East Bay Area arterial a “traffic sewer” with “too many lanes of fast-moving traffic” and cheered protected bike lanes that give automobiles much less space.
An aerial view exhibits the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza early within the morning. Getty Images
Other main arterial roads have been singled out for “traffic calming.” That phrase sounds good, but it surely’s actually something however.
Anti-car curiosity teams are phone-banking for the gross sales tax plan, often called Measure RTM; they’re selling a “more bike-friendly Bay Area” and declaring that “biking is political.”
Indeed, a lot of the sales-tax-hike money will move to county transportation businesses that dedicate a lot of their energies to complicating driving.
Do taxpayers actually want to shell out more money to make site visitors worse?
Although the new gross sales tax funds are largely stated to help transit, we all know that money is fungible — and the businesses gathering the money are dedicated to tasks that sluggish automobiles, reallocate roadway space away from motorists and elevate bicycling over driving, even when impractical.
The anti-car crowd can solely hope that pissed off drivers will give up and take the bus or prepare.
This strategy is a drawback all through California.
A person rides his bicycle in Downtown Los Angeles. Getty Images
Los Angeles’ Measure HLA usually requires the town to put in Mobility Plan bike, bus and pedestrian tasks every time it resurfaces a qualifying stretch of road.
That means a whole bunch of miles of lane reallocation may be baked into commonplace repaving work — leaving even much less space to drive in congested LA.
San Diego’s City Council in 2025 adopted a Mobility Master Plan rating a whole bunch of tasks whose shared aim, as one report put it, is encouraging people to stop commuting by car.
The metropolis is now pairing decrease velocity limits with site visitors calming and road redesign.
Southern California is operating the identical playbook: Take space from automobiles, sluggish what stays and call it security or climate rescue.
This battle on automobiles began within the Bay Area, and has been operating for many years.
Cars sit in site visitors on their means into downtown San Francisco. Getty Images
The Metropolitan Transit Commission says its Active Transportation Program exists in order that “more people can make more trips without using a car.”
San Francisco has poured tens of thousands and thousands from its ride-hailing tax into Vision Zero quick-builds and residential traffic-calming. But Vision Zero spectacularly did not get rid of site visitors deaths by its 2024 goal.
Government planners more and more deal with altering how people journey as half of the job.
At the identical time, the rationale for all the anti-car campaign has crashed and burned.
Modern gasoline automobiles emit 98% to 99% much less of most typical tailpipe pollution than autos of the late Sixties. Electric autos get rid of tailpipe air pollution solely.
Cars are additionally far safer for his or her occupants. The US site visitors fatality charge was 1.19 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2024, far beneath charges of a number of a long time in the past when the anti-car motion rolled out.
Traffic and road indicators are seen on a freeway in Los Angeles. Getty Images/iStockphoto
Also: More purchasing and meals come to the door, more conferences occur on Zoom, and hybrid work has changed five-day-a-week commuting for a massive share of workplace employees.
The car isn’t swallowing California, as hysterics as soon as anticipated. If something, its footprint is shrinking.
Yet the battle on automobiles rolls on.
The five-county gross sales tax hike on the November poll would raise roughly $1 billion a yr for 14 years — a value to taxpayers of $17 billion together with inflation.
Adding 0.50% to 1% onto the issues people need to buy will make the Bay Area even much less reasonably priced.
All of this serves a motion whose conventional case in opposition to automobiles has pale.
Yes, mass transit is struggling, largely because of its own selections, together with an unwillingness to control labor prices and failures to make sure security and sanitation on systems equivalent to BART.
But such issues may be addressed with out a huge new tax steered to bureaucrats who want you to stop driving.
Marc Joffe is the treasurer of the Committee for Affordable Bay Area Transit, No on Measure RTM, Sponsored by Contra Costa Taxpayers Association. He can also be a visiting fellow at California Policy Center.
