BART and MUNI are the two of the three main transit systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they are on the ballot again in California. Two new taxes – a new sales tax and a parcel tax (fixed tax on land in SF) – are proposed. If they fail, both systems will make absolutely massive service cuts.
I personally find public services in California deeply frustrating, as it feels they’re always demanding more capital while producing ever worse outcomes. So, I wrote this almost looking for reasons to vote against the tax. What I found is that transit in the US is an unusually labor-intensive service with very high fixed costs, and most of the obvious solutions are not sufficient.
Yes, there are too many administrators, but no, that doesn’t fix it. No, we don’t overhire train operators. Yes, public unions make this worse, but no, removing them wouldn’t have a material change here. And no, automation won’t fix our budgetary problems within the next decade, and it requires a huge capital investment first.
Really, the problem is just Baumol’s cost disease: transit requires a lot of blue-collar labor, and labor is very expensive in San Francisco because it has to compete with a booming private sector. That brings in the housing theory of everything as well – cheaper housing means cheaper labor.
In the long-term, we need large-scale investment in automation to break this cycle. In the medium-term, we need better transit funding mechanisms. And in the short-term, we have to vote for the tax and stave off disaster.
Relevance: We care about effective public services here. This is a deep-dive into what makes transit systems in the US have such high operating expenses.
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BART and MUNI are the two of the three main transit systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they are on the ballot again in California. Two new taxes – a new sales tax and a parcel tax (fixed tax on land in SF) – are proposed. If they fail, both systems will make absolutely massive service cuts.
I personally find public services in California deeply frustrating, as it feels they’re always demanding more capital while producing ever worse outcomes. So, I wrote this almost looking for reasons to vote against the tax. What I found is that transit in the US is an unusually labor-intensive service with very high fixed costs, and most of the obvious solutions are not sufficient.
Yes, there are too many administrators, but no, that doesn’t fix it. No, we don’t overhire train operators. Yes, public unions make this worse, but no, removing them wouldn’t have a material change here. And no, automation won’t fix our budgetary problems within the next decade, and it requires a huge capital investment first.
Really, the problem is just Baumol’s cost disease: transit requires a lot of blue-collar labor, and labor is very expensive in San Francisco because it has to compete with a booming private sector. That brings in the housing theory of everything as well – cheaper housing means cheaper labor.
In the long-term, we need large-scale investment in automation to break this cycle. In the medium-term, we need better transit funding mechanisms. And in the short-term, we have to vote for the tax and stave off disaster.
Relevance: We care about effective public services here. This is a deep-dive into what makes transit systems in the US have such high operating expenses.