Sign Our Petition: No Bridge Toll Hikes to Fund Bureaucratic Waste
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By now you have probably heard that politicians in Sacramento are planning a $1.50 per vehicle bridge toll hike on Bay Area bridges to “bail out” transit agencies – but what the politicians are not saying is that these funds are really going to maintain massive waste and duplication in our transit systems.
For someone commuting across one of those bridges for work every day, that could amount to an additional $390 year through 2028. This is yet another example of Sacramento politicians asking workers, tax-payers and commuters to foot the bill to bail out a public agency, and fund a “solution” to a problem of their own making.
The Bay Area is home to 27 separate transit agencies. That means that 27 teams of bureaucrats that need to be funded to keep these fragmented agencies alive. And perhaps more wasteful than the massive duplication of bureaucracies, these agencies run competing lines against each other.
So, for example, you have a half empty AC Transit Bus competing against a half-empty BART train – on essentially the same route!
But instead of Sacramento politicians requiring that these agencies consolidate and become more efficient – they are preserving the “status quo” by making us pay for it.
This is exactly the kind of status quo “solution” I am going to Sacramento to fight against. Commuters, workers and taxpayers are already burdened with high inflation, high rents, increasing gas prices, increasing grocery costs, and other rising cost of living expenses. I don’t believe that nickel and diming people who are just trying to travel or get to work is the right way to “bail out” public transportation agencies.