With public transportation ridership declining throughout California and the United States for the past decade and further impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, legislators and citizen groups in the San Francisco Bay Area are exploring various methods to reform how public transportation is governed to attract more passengers to unify fragmented transit systems. Among these solutions is the creation of a “regional transportation coordinator” which would be tasked with uniting the region’s many fragmented public transit systems into a single, interconnected network. This study examines current transit ridership trends in the Bay Area, proposals for transit integration in the Bay Area, and comparative case studies from developed countries.

The findings of this study show that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is already becoming a regional transportation coordinator but faces structural challenges such as conflicting mandates with transit agencies, the proliferation of local option sales taxes for transportation funding, and the shift to county-based funding allocation. Proposed solutions include consolidating the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and restructuring the MTC to give transportation providers and professionals a larger voice in policy decisions. While the discussion on what a regional transportation coordinator would look like and what the future relationship between ABAG and MTC will look like is ongoing, additional research is encouraged.

This report investigates how local governments (cities and counties) are implementing California’s Senate Bill 743, adopted in 2013 to eliminate traffic delay, measured using level-of-service (LOS) standards, as a basis for analyzing and mitigating transportation-related impacts of development projects and plans as called for under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Based on a survey of local planning directors in California, administered in Spring, 2024, the report finds that more thanfour-fifths of localities are continuing to apply LOS standards on an “off-CEQA” basis in the permitting process for individual development projects, as well as in community-level plans and policies. Most respondent localities reported that using both VMT and LOS at both the project- and plan-level has not created conflicts, indicating that they are able to align VMT and LOS. Mitigation strategies reported as effective in reducing VMT and also improving LOS include improving active travel facilities,supporting mixed-use development, and relaxing parking requirements; these strategies can be deemed “best practices” foraligning VMT and LOS objectives. 

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