San Mateo County voters will see a 30-year, half-cent sales tax measure on the November ballot that would “invest approximately $2.4 billion” into relieving traffic and improving transit countywide, according to SamTrans.
On Tuesday, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved placing the “San Mateo County Congestion Relief Plan” on the November ballot.
The plan would dedicate 50-percent of proceeds toward maintaining and enhancing bus, paratransit, rail and other countywide mobility services; 22.5-percent for countywide highway congestion improvement aiming to improve throughput and travel times; 12.5-percent for local safety, pothole and congestion relief improvements, including efforts to separate the rail corridor from local roads and improve traffic flow in congested areas; 5-percent toward bicycle and pedestrian improvements; and 10-percent toward regional transit connections with neighboring counties.
The plan derived from the Get Us Moving San Mateo County community engagement initiative, a nine-month outreach process that gathered feedback from more than 16,000 county residents, not including hundreds-of-thousands more via mail, online surveys, social media town halls and over 100 presentations countywide, the county says. Get Us Moving was led by the San Mateo County Transit District and Board of Supervisors.
“San Mateo County residents are tired of the transportation gridlock in our region,” Dave Pine, president of the Board of Supervisors, said in a statement Tuesday.
Passage of the measure, which requires two-thirds approval from voters, will enable the county “to invest in a wide variety of transportation solutions that will reduce traffic congestion and provide a diversity of transit options for residents and visitors alike,” Pine added.
Rosanne Foust, President and CEO of the San Mateo County Economic Development Association (SAMCEDA), supports the measure.
“SAMCEDA applauds today’s final approval of the Congestion Relief Plan so we can get moving on reducing traffic, improving Caltrain and SamTrans, making streets safer, and leveraging technology and electric vehicles to modernize mobility,” she said in the statement.
Get Us Moving came to be following Assemblymember Kevin Mullin’s (D-South San Francisco) legislation allowing the Transit District Board of Directors and Board of Supervisors to ask voters to consider transportation investment revenue options.
