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Almost everyone in the Bay Area wants something done about the chronic traffic congestion choking the region. But when asked what would get them out of their cars, most said there isn’t much chance of that, according to a new poll.
Even if traffic gets much worse, a mere 21 percent said they would cut back a great deal on driving.
The five-county poll of 900 registered voters, conducted for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and this news organization, shows the challenges ahead for a region where traffic congestion increased 80 percent from 2010 to 2016.
More than two-thirds of the poll respondents said they strongly support reducing traffic congestion as a top priority for the region. Filling potholes and maintaining roads ranked even higher, with 75 percent expressing strong support. But when it comes to abandoning cars, the Bay Area — where more than two thirds of commuters in 2015 drove to work alone — seems stubbornly reluctant.
A 12-cent hike in the price of gas — the amount of the new tax — or higher parking fees would have very little impact on their driving, a majority of respondents said. Incentives like telecommuting were more popular, with 34 percent saying they would reduce driving a great deal if their company allowed it.
And 63 percent of respondents said they would stop driving “some” or a “great deal” if they had more options in public transit.
That’s not surprising to Saratoga resident Glenn Thum. As a nearly life-long Bay Area resident who mostly uses his car to get around, Thum has watched traffic rise and fall with the economy. He’s seen cars grind to a halt on Highway 101 while wondering why there aren’t more buses going to and from Caltrain, which shares the same corridor. Or why the last train to any station south of San Jose’s Tamien leaves Sunnyvale at 6 p.m.
“It’s nuts. If you’re an information worker, 6 p.m. is kind of early for your last train,” Thum said. “That would be a very fast commute to bring in tens of thousands of people who have to drive that stretch of 101, where it bottlenecks at Morgan Hill.”
Mark Himelstein lives in Emerald Hills, an unincorporated part of San Mateo abutting Redwood City. He bought a plug-in Toyota Prius just so he could use the carpool lane and beat the traffic, he said, but he’d rather take public transit when his job takes him into San Francisco and elsewhere in the South Bay. Unfortunately, he says, it’s impractical.
“Part of the problem is for me to get to Caltrain, it’s a good 10 to 15 minutes, and then you have to park,” Himelstein said. “That’ll add another 40 minutes onto whatever the train time is, so it’s hard to believe that’s really going to help me a whole lot.”
He could take a bus to the station, he said. But that also means he might be transferring between two to four different transit agencies by the time his commute is complete if, for example, he rides a SamTrans bus to Caltrain, transfers to BART and then hops on MUNI when he gets into San Francisco.
“Personally, I look at how stressful the ride is … and it’s not a very attractive option,” he said.
He’s not alone. When asked why they think people don’t take public transit, 79 percent said it doesn’t go where people want it to go. Another 53 percent blamed poor schedules, while 48 percent said they think it’s too slow. Just 27 percent cited cost as a factor.
Randy Rentschler, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, likened the challenge to the old chicken and the egg question. Transit agencies can’t justify new extensions or increased service if there aren’t enough riders to fill the seats. But riders won’t take public transit if the schedules aren’t convenient or stations aren’t close enough to jobs and homes.
Just 8 percent of respondents said they take public transit every day. But that varies by county, with 3 percent using transit daily in Santa Clara County and 31 percent in San Francisco.
There’s a big difference between San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area that affects public transit use, Rentschler said, and that’s density. San Francisco is the most densely populated county in California. The city also serves as the region’s largest job center, pulling in a net 150,000 employees every day, roughly 50,000 more than travel to Silicon Valley, according to the MTC.
“People think we can have a 1960s development pattern and then think public transit can work well,” Rentschler said, referring to the East and South Bay’s sprawling suburbs, which were developed at a time when automobile mobility was prized above all else. “In order for public transit to work, you need a different built environment.”
San Francisco also has another distinction. As bad as traffic is elsewhere in the Bay Area, the city clocked in as the fifth-most congested in the world, according to a new survey of 1,360 cities in 38 countries released this week by the data-crunching company, Inrix.
And for that, San Francisco is in esteemed company. Cities with the best public transit systems in the world — New York, London, Tokyo, Paris — also have some of the worst traffic in the world, said Asha Weinstein Agrawal, director of the Mineta Transportation Institute’s National Transportation Finance Center.
Transportation planners in those cities didn’t solve the traffic problem; they gave people a viable alternative, she said.
“In an economically vibrant region like the Bay Area — and we hope it continues to be — you should think about improvements other than just reducing traffic congestion,” she said, “making the region more accessible so people don’t have to drive as far to get places, improving health … or reducing costs for people. We never do much for traffic congestion, and we’re not likely to get rid of it.”
About the poll: The poll of 900 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties was conducted by J. Moore Methods Inc. Public Opinion Research for Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the Bay Area News Group. Silicon Valley Leadership Group provided funding for the poll with significant financial support from Facebook. The poll, conducted from Dec. 27 to Jan. 9, has a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percent.
