Getting outdoors in the Bay Area often means taking lots of different agencies, including small ones with different rules and different fare structures. If you live in San Francisco, you might not know how Marin Transit fares work, and if you live in Berkeley, you might not know how County Connection fares work. In the Bay Area, people have been paying for transit with their Clipper cards for years.
A sales tax increase to fund the Bay Area's struggling transit systems appears to be headed to the ballot in November 2026. The California Legislature up against its deadline to pass bills last Friday approved SB 63, which allows a ballot measure to move forward, ending a multiyear political debate over how to make up for pandemic revenue loss across systems like BART, Muni, and Caltrain - and who should pay for it.
With just days remaining until the end of the legislative session, the Governor's Department of Finance informed lawmakers it will not be finalizing a critical bridge loan to prevent serious service cuts to BART, Muni, AC Transit, and other Bay Area public transit operators next year. Not authorizing the loan now could lead to quick service cuts by major Bay Area transit systems. Senators Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Jesse Arreguin (D-Oakland) have been working for months to try to finalize loan terms.
