These big American cities have destroyed themselves and in their death throes are just driving out the citizens who can afford to move, leaving only the uber-rich and the poor.
From Mass Transit Magazine, November 11:
The agency that operates the Golden Gate Bridge is in crisis: The transit district will run out of federal emergency funds it has been using to pay its employees at the end of this month, officials said Monday.
The agency that operates the Golden Gate Bridge is in crisis: The transit district will run out of federal emergency funds it has been using to pay its employees at the end of this month, officials said Monday.
The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which oversees the bridge, buses and ferries, must cut a quarter of its positions, raise tolls on drivers coming from Marin to San Francisco or a combination of both to avoid spending capital reserves and keep the agency afloat, the agency told its board of directors in a letter Monday. But even those measures won't entirely fill its looming $48 million shortfall this fiscal year, with toll lanes less busy and ferries and buses still mostly empty as North Bay commuters work from home.
"All transit agencies all across the country are struggling, but we're hitting the fiscal cliff much sooner than others," the district's general manager Denis Mulligan said Monday. "For us, it's quite brutal."
Eight months after shelter-in-place orders shuttered the Bay Area, Golden Gate Bridge traffic is still down 30%, bus ridership dropped 75% and ferry ridership plummeted 96%. The transit district has experienced about a $2 million a week drop in tolls and fares, officials said. The district is unique in that tolls are its largest source of revenue to fund bridge, bus and ferry operations, the letter to the board of directors read.
As revenue plummeted, the district received about $52 million in CARES Act federal funding, but it is running out soon, the letter said. At the start of this fiscal year in July, the district faced a budget deficit of $98 million, which it reduced to $48 million by using some of the CARES Act funding, freezing hiring, cutting 75% of weekday and all weekend ferries and ending almost all bus commute trips. Mulligan said he had been "cautiously optimistic" for more federal funds before the election, but as negotiations for a relief bill dragged on between Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and then stopped, hope faded.
There simply isn't enough money to continue to pay employees, including bus drivers who are sometimes sent home, but still paid for an entire shift, because of the low demand for service, Mulligan said. Now with less than a month before the remaining money runs out, the agency has to either cut costs or increase revenue....
....MUCH MORE
If you lived in Sausalito—nice 'hood:
...from our post "Obama Stimulus Slow to Buoy ‘Real Economy’ as Marin Awaits Cash":
Pity poor Marin. Caught between Sonoma and San Francisco.
Scraping by on a median income of $83,870 (highest in Cali.).
The squalor of Sausalito:
tiny small medium large original Image from Geoffrey Mainland
Okay, sarc off....
And formerly crossed the bridge into the city, here's one more reason not to.
