San Mateo County Transportation Authority gears up for regional transit plan

“We want to make sure how we are communicating progress is easily calculable. The last plan had 40 or 45 metrics, which … can be pretty tedious to update and pretty costly to make sure you’re collecting all that data,” Gilster said during a TA board meeting Feb. 5.

While there are many other tactical infrastructure plans the agency is working on, officials intend for this plan to be more strategic, with hopes of launching more pilot programs, standardizing its definition of what constitutes equity-priority areas and populations, creating clear metrics to gauge transit impacts and strategizing funding, according to a staff report. 

C/CAG Executive Director Sean Charpentier said the county is accelerating the work so it can extend into regional transit and housing efforts, such as Plan Bay Area. 

“This will probably be one of our more aspirational plans, partly because of its linkage to Plan Bay Area but also because we’re at a moment in the county where we have to lay out the vision for the future,” Charpentier told the board. “We are accelerating this so it can feed into the upcoming major Plan Bay Area effort … so this will inform that, both with the project list and the goals.” 

The most recent major projects led by the county’s transit agencies have been increasingly focused on implementing more non-vehicle infrastructure  — like bike lanes, crosswalks and even Caltrain grade separations —  and improving connectivity among Peninsula jurisdictions and public safety projects. Because many of the involved corridors are owned or managed by numerous agencies and jurisdictions, it’s often difficult to make robust transit improvements without regional support. For instance, cities throughout the county have been planning out what improvements they’d like to move along El Camino Real, which stretches throughout the county and is technically under state jurisdiction. San Mateo and South San Francisco officials have discussed moving forward on ECR improvements related to enhanced bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and the latter recently discussed removing a lane of vehicle travel between Hickey Boulevard and the city border to make room for protected bike lanes.

Gilster said that commuting still remains dominated by single-occupant vehicles, with transit, walking and biking lagging behind, however, many trips in the county are short enough that better walking and biking networks could shift demand away from busy corridors. 

The plan, which began last year, is still in the early stages and will return to the board at a future date.