Ballot measure’s apparent victory shows that voters are willing to reimagine public transportation in a post-pandemic world.
By Mariana Duran / Mother Jones / Nov. 4, 2026
In a huge win for public transit, voters in the San Francisco Bay Area appear to have approved a measure that will slightly increase the sales tax to fund transportation in the region over the next 14 years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The measure will allow transit agencies, including BART, to preserve their service and avoid deep cuts to stations and transit lines amid the end of emergency pandemic funds.
Unlike other ballot initiatives in the state, the Regional Transit Measure didn’t face a well-funded campaign advocating against it. But it presented voters with a big ask: to rethink their relationship to public transit dramatically, and shift to a system where all residents—not just riders—pay to keep their region connected.
The measure reflects a growing reality for many metropolitan public transit systems post-Covid, which have had to reimagine their funding models as ridership patterns have shifted and people’s lives have become more digital. It is especially salient in the Bay Area, where BART, the primary transit system connecting the region, had warned it could cease to exist if it continued to struggle financially.
In response, transit advocates and scholars say we need to figure out how to fund a system where high quality transit is accessible to everyone, even when it might not be profitable.
“We need to make adjustments in thinking about what we want to get out of transit and how we do it,” said Elizabeth Deakin, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think we ought to treat this as a public service. We ought to manage it well as a public service.”
The alternative, rejected by voters, was to cut down operations, though policy analysts have warned limiting transit could worsen residents’ quality of life and aggravate social and economic inequities, especially impacting low-income residents and people with disabilities.
Bryce Maples, a power wheelchair user based in Berkeley, said he doesn’t think California politicians have given enough attention to the bus system AC Transit, his most common mode of transportation, which the ballot measure will also fund. “It’s very clear that for the decision makers and politicians, the [bus] is essentially a welfare system,” Maples said. “This country spends billions and billions of dollars on roads.”
“It’s ironic that a system that was highly successful is now being beaten up because of the success.”
In 2019, BART got 71 percent of its operation budget from fares and was seen as a model of self-sustainability in the United States—a system that other metropolitan transit agencies that relied on state and local subsidies could look up to. But this funding model quickly became the agency’s Achilles heel when ridership plummeted during the pandemic.
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