Americans are notably ambivalent, or sometimes broadly inconsistent, about a whole range of public policy questions. We want lower taxes but grow angry when we lose programs those taxes finance. Millions defend unrestricted ownership of guns even though they decry the massive number of deaths and injuries for which those guns are responsible.

And even more millions avoid taking public transportation to work even when it's convenient for them. Surveys have shown that only somewhere between about 5 and 10 percent of us use public transportation on a daily or weekly basis. Yet when we are presented with a ballot measure to spend more money on transit, we usually vote for it.

Not always. After Oregon Democratic lawmakers passed a 6-cent increase in the gas tax last year to keep the state's transportation system solvent, voters went to the polls this spring and rejected it decisively in a referendum. But that was an outlier. Of 39 transit spending increases that went to a public vote in the first 10 months of 2026, 34 of them won public approval. On Nov. 3, it was 22 of 27. That's an 85 percent approval rate for the year.

Transit funding measures went to voters in 11 states this November, and most of them passed by relatively comfortable margins. In Denver and San Francisco, the two most closely watched transit measures in the country were headed for fairly easy passage.

The ballot measure in San Francisco and surrounding counties may have had the most national implications. It was designed to bail out the region's struggling Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, which has been facing an annual structural deficit of $350 million-$400 million. To deal with that problem, local leaders placed on the November ballot a 14-year 1 percent tax increase for San Francisco residents, and half a cent for several of the nearby counties that also used the system. It was estimated that the tax increase would generate nearly a billion dollars over its lifetime.

The potential consequences if the measure failed were dire. BART managers and transit supporters projected that in the event of a defeat, BART would likely have to close 15 stations, cut service by 70 percent and slow down train frequencies to one departure every 30 minutes.

The reasons for BART's money problems were not hard to identify. The rise of work-at-home schedules had deprived it of riders and farebox revenue. As in most of the country, ridership has not returned to the levels it recorded before COVID-19. Cutbacks in service now would force a large number of the system's remaining riders out of public transportation and into their cars, worsening traffic across the region.

Equally important, defeat of the Connect Bay Area initiative would have sent a signal to cities across the country that voters were simply unwilling to pump more money into their transit systems. In the words of pessimistic transit guru Jarrett Walker, the consequence would be more of what we're seeing now across the U.S.: "massive, ruinous cuts in transit service, done in many cities without even asking the voters if this is what they want."

The California initiative drew support from most of the Bay Area's political leadership, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Scott Wiener, the most influential urbanist in the California Legislature, and other powerful interests, including the Service Employees International Union. But it also generated a whole array of ad-hoc opposition groups, many of them taxpayer-based coalitions located in the suburbs and inclined to see the measure as a San Francisco bailout. Nervous about whether the initiative would attract the support it needed, its sponsors arranged the voting so that the measure would need only a simple majority to pass, rather than the supermajority common in citizen referenda. The result surprised both sides in the dispute. With nearly all the votes counted, it had drawn more than 60 percent of the votes cast.

On the same day the Bay Area voted, residents of the Denver area and its outlying counties decided on a passenger rail referendum called the Colorado Connector, one that would impose a third-of-a-cent sales tax increase to support enhanced rail transit service from Pueblo in the southern part of the state to Fort Collins in the north. Supporters of the referendum argued that the region had been divided by the presence of Interstate 25 and that expanded transit would help to solve that problem. The voters mostly bought that argument. They chose to give the initiative a 57 percent majority.

Meanwhile, Seattle voters were weighing in on the doubling of a sales tax to improve bus service and expand the transit system as a whole. Proponents claimed that if the measure, Proposition 1, went down, 180,000 bus trips could disappear. It didn't go down. As of election night, Proposition 1 was garnering more than 70 percent of the ballots.

The most significant setback for pro-transit forces came in the Phoenix area, in the suburb of Tempe, Ariz., whose residents voted on a 0.5 percent sales tax increase, with the funds going toward transit as well as public safety and childhood education. Voters in Tempe weren't as generous as those in California and Colorado. They sent the proposal down to a resounding defeat. But the overall picture, puzzling in many ways, is one of most urban voters willing to pay more for better transit systems, whether or not they are frequent users themselves.

Meanwhile, something is happening on the transit front that may possess as much long-term significance as what voters did at the polls on Nov. 3. In metropolitan Chicago, the regional Metra transit system has unveiled a $9.1 billion proposal to reduce its train intervals to as little as 15 minutes on some routes and connect southern and western suburbs directly to O'Hare Airport. Downtown service would run tracks through the center of Union Station.

The money isn't there yet, which may be a bit of an understatement: The state has provided $1.5 billion for daily operations, but not for new infrastructure. The Union Station project alone could cost upward of half a billion. But Metra insists it is all doable, with relatively little new investment. Not all of this is going to happen. But enough of it may happen for public transportation to enter a new era of service through the Chicago area.

At the same time, in Atlanta, the MARTA transit system is launching construction on an arterial transit corridor along some of the system's busiest bus routes. Waiting times will be shortened to 15-20 minutes. There will be fewer stops, and traffic signal coordination to enhance speed. However these projects work out in the long run, it's fair to say that a new public transit environment is coming to Atlanta, as it is to Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle, slowly and surely.

The evidence isn't totally consistent, but the willingness of voters in large cities to pay for better transit seems hard to dispute. So the question recurs: When will people start riding on the trains they are paying for? The answer may not be that complicated: when there are faster trains and buses, more frequent service, and comfortable and well-maintained vehicles that are pleasant to use. Maybe that's what those yes votes are all about.

Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.

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