Proponents of a massive, five-county sales tax hike in the Bay Area want you to think their money grab is needed to save transit and prevent congestion.
But the activists working hardest to pass the levy have a bigger agenda.
They want you to drive much less, or not at all.
They want fewer driving lanes, less parking, more tolls, traffic calming, bike lanes and streets redesigned to discourage driving.
They are not hiding it.
The car-haters at Streetsblog, for instance, called one East Bay Area arterial a “traffic sewer” with “too many lanes of fast-moving traffic” and cheered protected bike lanes that give cars less space.
Other major arterial roads have been singled out for “traffic calming.” That phrase sounds nice, but it’s really anything but.
Anti-car interest groups are phone-banking for the sales tax plan, known as Measure RTM; they’re promoting a “more bike-friendly Bay Area” and declaring that “biking is political.”
Indeed, much of the sales-tax-hike money will flow to county transportation agencies that devote much of their energies to complicating driving.
Do taxpayers really want to shell out more money to make traffic worse?
Although the new sales tax funds are mostly said to support transit, we know that money is fungible — and the agencies collecting the cash are committed to projects that slow cars, reallocate roadway space away from motorists and elevate bicycling over driving, even when impractical.
The anti-car crowd can only hope that frustrated drivers will give up and take the bus or train.
This approach is a problem throughout California.
Los Angeles’ Measure HLA generally requires the city to install Mobility Plan bike, bus and pedestrian projects whenever it resurfaces a qualifying stretch of street.
That means hundreds of miles of lane reallocation can be baked into standard repaving work — leaving even less space to drive in congested LA.
San Diego’s City Council in 2025 adopted a Mobility Master Plan ranking hundreds of projects whose shared goal, as one report put it, is encouraging people to stop commuting by car.
The city is now pairing lower speed limits with traffic calming and street redesign.
Southern California is running the same playbook: Take space from cars, slow what remains and call it safety or climate rescue.
This war on cars started in the Bay Area, and has been running for decades.
The Metropolitan Transit Commission says its Active Transportation Program exists so that “more people can make more trips without using a car.”
San Francisco has poured tens of millions from its ride-hailing tax into Vision Zero quick-builds and residential traffic-calming. But Vision Zero spectacularly failed to eliminate traffic deaths by its 2024 target.
Government planners increasingly treat changing how people travel as part of the job.
At the same time, the rationale for the entire anti-car crusade has crashed and burned.
Modern gasoline cars emit 98% to 99% less of most conventional tailpipe pollutants than vehicles of the late 1960s. Electric vehicles eliminate tailpipe pollution entirely.
Cars are also far safer for their occupants. The US traffic fatality rate was 1.19 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2024, far below rates of several decades ago when the anti-car movement rolled out.
Also: More shopping and meals come to the door, more meetings happen on Zoom, and hybrid work has replaced five-day-a-week commuting for a large share of office workers.
The automobile is not swallowing California, as hysterics once anticipated. If anything, its footprint is shrinking.
Yet the war on cars rolls on.
The five-county sales tax hike on the November ballot would raise roughly $1 billion a year for 14 years.
Adding 0.50% to 1% onto the things people need to buy will make the Bay Area even less affordable.
All of this serves a movement whose traditional case against cars has faded.
Yes, mass transit is struggling, in large part thanks to its own decisions, including an unwillingness to control labor costs and failures to ensure safety and sanitation on systems such as BART.
But such problems can be addressed without a vast new tax steered to bureaucrats who want you to stop driving.
Marc Joffe is the treasurer of the Committee for Affordable Bay Area Transit, No on Measure RTM, Sponsored by Contra Costa Taxpayers Association. He is also a visiting fellow at California Policy Center.
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