Sacramento Regional Transit held the third in a series of community workshops at the Pannell Center in Meadowview on a recent Tuesday night.
RT wants to know what kind of transit system the public wants. I do, too, so I went.
I took a name tag and was assigned to Table 2. Jenny, who works for the State Board of Equalization, and Monica, a local high school teacher, were already seated, poring over a dream list of transit improvements laid out on a map that covered the table. Our facilitator, RT planner Paul Marx, was there to explain the exercise. Oliver, a recent UC Davis graduate who said he was between jobs, joined us later.
The map of RT's service area was loaded with a rich array of transit options and possible amenities. They ranged from the most expensive (light-rail expansions to the airport, Citrus Heights, Elk Grove and Roseville), to more modest, basic improvements like more frequent bus service, to relatively cheap but desirable upgrades including more frequent vehicle cleaning and graffiti removal.
Our job that night was to identify our top five priorities. Which among all 34 improvements offered did we think most important? It was the equivalent of letting a 5-year-old loose in a transit candy store.
With one exception – me – everyone at my table selected light rail to the airport as one of the top priorities. I chose light rail to Elk Grove. Both Monica and I wanted increased service hours. Monica wants trains and buses to operate around the clock. Oliver selected faster direct bus routes and dedicated bus lanes to beat traffic. Besides the airport, Jenny's priorities included light rail to Elk Grove and Roseville.
We marked our five top priorities with green dots, our second five with yellow and our lowest five priorities with red. By the end of the exercise, the board was covered with dots, and we were drowning in them – too many choices, too much transit candy that night.
Our next task was to pay for it all. Computer terminals arrayed around the room were programmed with a video game that allowed us novice transit planners to add or subtract options. We all started with $7.2 billion, the capital cost of doing everything on RT's wish list. (It seemed to me a backward way to proceed. Why not start with zero and let us rookie planners add the improvements we wanted? But that wasn't an option.)
Right off the bat, I subtracted light rail to the airport and shaved almost $1 billion from the total. By reducing bus frequency at peak hours from five- to 10-minute headways, I subtracted another $364 million. I decided to keep a more robust police presence on light rail, a $40 million item, but saved money by cutting back on landscaping and public art.
In the end, my selections totaled something above $5 billion, a sobering number, I realized. But it was, after all, just a game. The hard part is yet to come. If our region doesn't raise the money to invest in a really viable transit system, it will remain a game.
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