2025-120 East Bay Transit Agencies
They Collaborate Consistently but Face Declining Reserves, Slow Ridership Recovery, and Barriers to Consolidation
Published: May 28, 2026
Recommendation to the Legislature
Recommendation 1
To ensure that agencies can comply with CARB’s mandate to make all new bus purchases zero-emission starting in 2029, the Legislature should consider extending this deadline or allocating new funds to the transit agencies to purchase zero-emission buses.
Agency response status:
Pending
Recommendations to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission
Recommendation 2
To improve its effectiveness in managing regionwide projects and mitigate the risk of missing target completion dates for action items, MTC should immediately establish realistic and attainable time frames for each item by setting major milestones and subtasks, along with identifying potential risks and mitigation strategies for delays caused by interdependent activities.
Agency response status:
Pending
Recommendation 3
To guide its decision-making and better measure progress toward completing items in its transit action plan, MTC should, as part of its ongoing effort to analyze the regional network management framework’s progress, build upon the adopted May 2024 performance metrics to include achievable outcomes, such as the increase in new riders on existing routes. MTC should define linkages between these adopted metrics and outcomes when it updates the transit action plan.
Agency response status:
Pending
Recommendation 4
To address the risk that transit agencies may have to reduce services due to rising operational costs, MTC should by January 2027 further identify funding sources, such as federal, state, or locally-generated revenue, that could be obtained and directed to transit agencies at risk of reducing services, such as AC Transit, County Connection, Tri Delta Transit, and WestCAT. MTC should also work with transit agencies to identify operational cost savings.
Agency response status:
Pending
