News, Views and Analysis from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments
Passengers can expect smoother rides as BART works to switch out the system's third rails, which powers the rail cars. Read More
BART is starting to revitalization its system thanks to 2016's Measure RR, a voter-approved, $3.5 billion bond measure that has allowed the agency to replace decades-old track equipment among other improvements. Read More
The U.S. Department of Transportation this week announced $900 million in discretionary grant funding will be made available through the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development Transportation Discretionary Grants program. Read More
MTC and ABAG have released their first-ever joint annual report to Congress for 2018, urging lawmakers in Washington D.C. to honor long-standing bipartisan commitments to transportation, housing and disaster relief. The report, Accelerating Progress: Strong Partnerships Move the Bay Area Forward:
For more detail on these and other issue areas and initiatives, download the report. Read More
Four meeting will be held on Friday, March 9, starting at 10:00 a.m. at the Bay Area Metro Center, including the MTC Operations Committee, Joint MTC Planning and ABAG Administrative Committees, Joint MTC and ABAG Legislative Committees, and Joint MTC Commission and MTC Policy Advisory Council.
Major items for discussion include a proposed amendment to Plan Bay Area 2040 (Plan) and the Amended 2017 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) to revise the cost and scope of the U.S. 101 Managed Lanes Project in San Mateo County (see the staff presentation and memo); a summary of the 2018 housing landscape in Sacramento (see handout); and an overview of the Trump Administration’s proposed FY 2019 Federal Budget and the White House Infrastructure Initiative (see handout).
Continue reading for more details and tune in to the meetings live once they are underway here. Read More
Earlier this morning, KQED Forum discussed President Trump’s proposal for $200 billion in federal infrastructure spending over ten years, including how much money might make its way to the Bay Area and which projects it might support.
MTC’s Director of Legislation and Public Affairs, Randy Rentschler, joined host Michael Krasny, along with Sean Randolph of Bay Area Council Economic Institute, to discuss the proposal and a host of other Bay Area transportation issues.
Listen to the whole interview on KQED’s website. Read More
The Bay Area economy has mostly had a good run since the dark days of the Great Recession (although the benefits have been uneven and not without their complications). For all the hype about the latest tech boom and the length of the current expansion, however, many key regional economic measures had not surpassed records set during the dot-com era nearly two decades ago.
New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (via FRED) indicate this is starting to change, though. To wit: most key urbanized areas (or MSAs) in the region are at or near record low unemployment levels. As shown in the above chart, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward MSA is now at 2.8 percent, a level last seen during a heady pre-millennium stretch from July to December of 1999. Read More