Advocates dressed as emergency medical responders carried transit vehicles on stretchers across San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza on Monday morning at a rally for California to deliver emergency loan funding to prevent drastic public transportation cuts.
In June, as part of California’s 2025-2026 budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature committed to a $750 million emergency loan to prevent Bay Area public transportation service cuts until longer-term regional funding could go into effect.
Yet the Bay Area has yet to receive the emergency loans. Advocates warn that without the loans, Bay Area public transportation faces severe cuts, leaving residents without a safe and affordable way to travel throughout the area.
BART could be forced to cut 65-85% of service, according to a press statement from State Sen. Scott Wiener. That would mean trains running only every 60 minutes, no weekend service, station closures and line shutdowns, Wiener said. Muni could reduce service frequency by 50%, cut regular service after 9 p.m., and eliminate Muni fare subsidies for low-income riders, according to Wiener.
Currently, the State Legislature is set to approve Senate Bill 63, a funding measure that would allow five Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara — to propose a sales tax in support of public transit operations on the 2026 ballot. But the funding from the bill will not begin until 2027, making state loans critical to prevent immediate public transit cuts, advocates argue.
Elected officials including Wiener, members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the BART Board of Directors spoke in support of the emergency loans at the rally.
“There is this misconception that the challenges with transit are new, that they came from the pandemic,” Wiener said. “We have been facing these problems for a while.”
Wiener is just a shriveled up never been,as limp as one can get.So tiny ,this Wiener is hardly noticed or seen.
Safe?Affordable?
Kick the union out, might save a few bucks.
Typical California Democrat logic, mismanage money, then ask for more while threatening service cuts. Now Weiner and BART are using scare tactics — saying trains will only run every hour and no weekend service if they don’t get more funding.
Give me a break.
Back during COVID, BART dropped $200 million on a new building instead of tightening its belt. They never cut staff or reined in costs. And now, every year, they cry for more money. Enough is enough.
Keep the Bay Area moving! Support public transportation (especially bart and municipal) please support prop 50 in response to Texas cheating.
No to all those bad ideas.
That’s our pal Paul. Always in there for a good chuckle.
It’s only cheating when Republicans do what the Democrats have already done. It’s (D)ifferent!
BART is utilized by gangs and homeless it hardly keeps the Bay Area moving unless you call importing criminals to your neighborhood as that! HELL NO on prop 50 CA has already gerrymandered the state so not much room to wiggle there and why are the Republicans not represented in the state? Texas is doing what the Dems have been doing for years sounds good to me.
Prop 50 – Newsom says two wrongs DO make a right!
Screw up California’s Congressional Districts and representation to cheat the Dem’s into a majority in the House?
Do the Newsom Limbo…. how low can you go?
not sure if you are a troll, or a drone. Please explain, Paul, why what Texas is doing is illegal, what law or laws are they breaking? Cite the law, not some gavin speech. I myself do not care that much, and at the heart of it, am indifferent, so have not researched the validity of this action. Eye rolled when I first heard about it.
To me, Prop 50 would be an absolute no. Naked attempt for gavvy to influence the state’s elections (seemingly for his benefit, honestly), by subverting the current regulation requirements that redistricting be done by a Citizen Panel of 14 participants in years ending in “0,” and having a (clearly “non-partisan”) legislature (75% Dem in senate and 75% Dem in assembly, 76% if you include the empty seat in the calculation – total of 90 out of 120 dems in legislature) manipulate districts to benefit US House.
Paul knows ZERO about the reasons behind the Texas redistricting. Such a good little toady of the DNC.
Maybe should have been light rail? BART seems to be expensive to maintain.
It’s Horribly Mismanaged! DEI and WOKENESS Killed it. But be sure to give them another bailout!!
BART and Muni need to get their costs under control before we should think about another bailout, especially an interest free “loan” that everyone knows is going to be forgiven.
Why is anybody surprised that Gavin broke his promise? And what will they do if the voters
don’t approve another sales tax? Hmmph! Typical Dem logic, not thinking ahead and no
backup plan.
Any new bonds or tax increase, I’m voting No!
I have an idea, Work from home and then we won’t need that service. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean we need it. We don’t need horse and buggies anymore.And when I drive around locally during the day, I see buses with either just one person or zero people on board. How much is that costing us? There’s gotta be a better way.
Excellent……Also there is ZERO reason for all of the jobs to be in San Francisco. It’s not 1908 and we’re not waiting for Ships to come in!!
I thought that all of these advances in technology would result in more working from home. There’s no need for the mass transit as is.
No more handouts! Manage what you have – no cuts to service! you’re overspending on salaries and bonuses as it is! All Wiener can do is ask for more funding – always incremental more! – No!
Slave labor. That’s basically what democrat government wants. Work and work and work your life away, and give away all that you’ve sweated and worked for to them for their endlessly failing government programs and projects.
Wiener is a menace.
SF Muni has long known about its fiscal cliff but has done NOTHING about it. First, Muni management & admin staff needs to be cut… they are a bloated bureaucracy. Then pare down routes and adjust schedules according to coverage & demand.
NO BAILOUTS.
Were stretcher bearers careful where they stepped ? ? ?
.
Given condition OUR state, thanks mostly to democrats,
they think voters will go for more sales tax ? ? ?
An how many of millions will they throw at advertising, trying
to CON voters into passing it ?
.
You can be assured they’ll have a catchy deceiving name for it.
.
Best thing to do with bart is sell it.
A for profit company would straighten it out.
.
Hmm, did janitor overtime ever get figured out ? ? ?
No more tax money to BART. Ridership is down so go ahead and cut service. Get BART performance to very high levels with the service cut – focus on being a transportation agency, not a housing agency or a homeless care giving agency. Let people work from home to offset the traffic while BART gets it together to demonstrate it deserves more funding. Go back to the days when public sector workers made great benefits and regular salaries – we can’t afford to pay public servant management the same salaries as tech workers. For 25 years we heard that the public sector can’t compete with the private sector for good employees unless we pay the public sector employees six figure salaries. Now you can see that is not sustainable. Non-public sector employees do not have increases in wages that are keeping up with the cost of living. We can no longer bear the burden of paying public sector employees double the average salary of non-public sector employees. Would love to pay high wages but until the politicians start caring about the average worker, there is no more money to do it. Or go ahead and pass the tax measure – you will price average workers out of California and no one will be around to ride BART. Rich people don’t ride BART. Most tech workers don’t ride BART other than the community of tech workers from India going out toward Fremont. Then you really will destroy BART completely instead of merely cutting service. Or maybe one of those Democratic billionaire oligarchs can invest some money in BART instead of funding all the Dem election campaigns.
They spent hundreds of miilions making train cars that dont run on electricity to use beyond the Pittsburg station.The cities out there wouldnt spent the money to make it electric.Now the cars are standing room only going from Oakland to Concord with people that got on for free.Last time i rode the train couldnt take everyone and they drove away with people yelling.So even though they are going broke,ridership ISNT DOWN,paying for a ticket is.Class dismissed.Ticket sales are down.After the last rate hike.
Why call it a loan as We just keep dumping Millions and Billions into it! Bart has always been out of control with spending! No oversight! Just keep paying workers like the janitor who earned 270K in one year! C MON PEOPLE WAKE UP! ALL WIENER DOES IS SPEND SPEND SPEND!
Shrink the service &/or increase fairs for those who
use it. Taking out loans or taxing everyone is not the answer. So many of us continue to fall behind as prices escalate but many do not receive pay increases, live on a fixed income and even those that
are lucky enough to receive a cola continue to find
themselves falling behind. When does it stop?
Does California need their own Mamdani?
Govt does a great job with Amtrak & Covered California. Why should anyone believe that they will
fix the issues?
While some union leaders only care about themselves, many fight for their members to have a
competitive wage & benefits.
Newsom is not the answer.
Do we eliminate unions and force them all to take
pay cuts?
Look at the city of Placentia. They have successfully
done away with pensions and yet they do not
find themselves short on staffing.
Where is that fine line? It’s not in loans.
Maybe cities & counties should pay their liabilities
and not put it on all of us. We can’t do that & neither
should they.
Cut 65%-85% (where did they get those numbers?) of the service. As Margaret Thatcher said, “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Sounds like these guys are running out of our (taxpayer) money. Or, simply, raise the rates to pay for all the dross and detritus if you do not want to cut. Perhaps cut the advisory committees from 10 to 3, expecting members to do operate more efficiently. 3/4 of a billion dollars in emergency money. Maybe let BART die on the vine or at least wither away to a more manageably sized organization.
The budget for BART and Muni combined this cycle is ~4B. And now Wiener wants us to approve a 20% emergency loan to cover this budget cycle. Let’s say that again, 20%! And if we don’t give the 20%, they will cut 50% or more of current service. This implies that they need roughly 40% .. let’s say for kicks, 50% of their current budget to run.
Ummm … where does the rest of the money go? Where does that 2 Billion dollars go? Is 50% of their budget overhead cost? Seems like before we give them a loan, I would want to better understand why they need so much overhead cost.
Time to Face Reality…BART will always need taxpayer dollars under the current Operations… Cut Service… Cut Costs…
Cut bait.
no mention of the young Ukrainian girl getting stabbed to death by a black man on the train in north carolina??? WTF
Maui Dude – You just mentioned it.
I get the impression you are referring to the left wing media keeping the story hushed up tho, not Claycord, since it isn’t something that happened locally & we have plenty of useless Judges, District Attorneys and immigrant criminals right here in our own backyard to complain about.
let supply and demand dictate pricing and whether this service should even exist. If BART cannot stay afloat on its own, then it needs to go.
What spending all that money building housing on bart land not paying off. Who new. You where supposed to just run public transit.