Tag: Taxes

KRON4’s report on Regional Measure 3 featured dueling appearances by the Bay Area Council’s John Grubb and TRANSDEF.org’s David Schonbrunn. Schonbrunn asserted: This will do nothing whatsoever for congestion. What it will do is move politically-favored projects along. The Bay Area Council attempted to erase the politicized legislative origin of the measure: The Bay Area Council points say this is no pork barrel project but one designed by both regional and local traffic engineers with the goal of reducing congestion. Grubb, of course, claimed the measure would improve traffic. We’ll see if voters are taken in by the hype…

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Another voice for sanity: The Daily Cal’s endorsements include opposing RM3: Bay Area residents are no strangers to the congested, poorly maintained transportation infrastructure that litters the region. Regional Measure 3, with its 25-year goal of raising $4.45 billion in funding for 35 transportation projects, aims to alleviate this Bay Area congestion. But while the Bay Area desperately needs solutions to its transportation problems, the eventual $3 increase in bridge tolls that the measure would necessitate makes transbay travel unsustainable for the scores of low-income workers who commute to San Francisco. Ultimately, while this measure is a step in the right…

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A very significant opinion piece by three women leaders suggests that the upcoming San Mateo sales tax needs to acknowledge that the era of highway widening is over: Please urge our county’s Board of Supervisors and the leaders of our transportation agencies to end the cycle of highway widening, and instead, fund projects with this ballot measure that improve mobility without adding polluting car trips. TRANSDEF applauds these leaders for helping the public grasp the seemingly counterintuitive notion that widening highways doesn’t solve congestion. The piece is well-worth reading. Highway widening is controversial up in Portland, where strong dissenting opinions…

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Two union officers penned an opinion piece for the San Mateo Daily Journal that laid out their fantasy for transportation: We can all dream of a future when today’s unbearable traffic congestion is a thing of the past. Traffic would flow freely on Highway 101, Interstate 280, State Route 92 and the Dumbarton corridor because smart, safe, reliable technology will have improved mobility on our traffic corridors, expanded the use of public express buses and maximized the capacity of our highway network. The problem is, their fantasy is actually the unexamined assumption underlying all transportation planning in the U.S. When…

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TRANSDEF’s David Schonbrunn was on Santa Rosa radio station KSRO to talk about Regional Measure 3. Leading off the segment was a discussion with Jake Mackenzie, a Rohnert Park Councilman and the current chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (the MTC in OccupyMTC). In his segment (the lower of the two audio players on the KSRO page), Schonbrunn addressed sprawl growth, Sonoma’s big climate and congestion challenge for the future, and urged a shift of future development to sites near good transit service.

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The Chronicle’s lead story today, Measure would hike tolls to cut congestion, is a glowing promotion of the benefits of Regional Measure 3. To be able to check the box for journalistic balance, a short section on the opponents is stuck near the very end of the article. This perfunctory treatment, however, is immediately neutralized by MTC spokesmouth Randy Rentschler: Considering all the fixes we need in the Bay Area, there are going to be people upset they don’t get theirs included. I get it. It doesn’t take more than a day driving around in the Bay Area to figure we…

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The Mercury News published a report on the large contributors to the Yes on RM3 campaign. What’s so interesting about this measure’s sponsors is they’re not the usual group that typically bankrolls transportation funding measures. Usually, it’s contractors seeking to make money on the public projects funded by the measure. This year, however, high-tech firms are leading the charge to charge the public more for using the bridges. Is this public-spirited? Or is it an attempt to distract the public from connecting the dots between the big increase in congestion and the high-tech economic boom? If the public is told, through…

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A news story on KPIX-TV showed an RM3 commercial in the background, while delivering poll results: According to the exclusive KPIX 5 Survey USA Poll, 40 percent of Bay Area voters support the plan, while 34 percent are against it. Another 26 percent respondents said they weren’t sure. That support is a lot softer than earlier polling, which had made MTC confident enough to try pushing the toll hikes. Host Phil Matier pointed out the overt contradiction between the claim that the measure’s added public transit will reduce traffic and real-world experience: An interesting pitch, considering the poll shows that after all…

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