California Transit Association

On Board With… State Senator Scott Wiener

Elected in November 2016, Senator Scott Wiener represents District 11 in the California State Senate. District 11 includes all of San Francisco, Broadmoor, Colma, and Daly City, as well as portions of South San Francisco. In the Senate, Senator Wiener works to make housing more affordable, invest in our transportation systems, increase access to healthcare, support working families, meaningfully address climate change and the impacts of wildfires, reform our criminal justice system, reduce gun violence, reduce California’s high poverty rate, and safeguard and expand the rights of all communities, including immigrants and the LGBTQ community. Senator Wiener has authored 42 bills that have been signed into law.

Senator Wiener is the immediate past chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, and serves as the Chair of the Senate Mental Health Caucus. He also serves as Chair of the Senate Housing Committee and the Senate Committee on Legislative Ethics, and is a member of the Public Safety Committee, Judiciary Committee, Governance and Finance Committee, Health Committee and Select Committee on Mental Health. He serves as Vice Chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and as the Senate’s Assistant Majority Whip. He is immediate past Chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus.

Before his election to the Senate, Senator Wiener served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representing the district previously represented by Supervisor Harvey Milk. During his time on the Board of Supervisors, Senator Wiener authored a number of first-in-the-nation laws. He focused extensively on housing and public transportation, authoring laws to streamline approvals of affordable housing, to legalize new in-law units, and to tie public transportation funding to population growth.

Before his election to the Board of Supervisors, Senator Wiener spent 15 years practicing law. Senator Wiener grew up in New Jersey, the son of a small business owner and a teacher, and attended public school. He received a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He has lived in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood since 1997.

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Transit California: 
Improving public transportation was a major focus of yours as a county supervisor, and has remained one of your top priorities as a state legislator. How did this become a major focus for you, and why is it something you are passionate about?

Sen. Wiener: 
Transit is a huge passion for me. My first exposure to transit was not as a user, actually. I grew up in a middle-class white community in suburban New Jersey that was very car-centric. When I was in High School, I worked at Burger King. A bunch of my co-workers were from Camden, which is 15 minutes away and a majority low-income African American community. They all took the bus to work. They didn’t have cars, so they relied on the New Jersey Transit bus, and that was the first exposure I had to transit, which is unfortunate—now when I look at my nephews who are growing up in Manhattan, for them taking the bus or the subway is second nature, and I think all kids should have that exposure to transit because it teaches you that we’re part of a community and we’re not just living in little bubbles in a car.

When I was in law school, I would take the subway in Boston. After law school, I was living in Philadelphia clerking for a judge in Trenton, New Jersey, and I took the regional rail every day. Those were my first experiences relying on transit and not having a car. Then, of course, I moved to San Francisco, which is a very transit-rich city. Despite all the regular complaints by San Franciscans about how terrible MUNI is, MUNI is actually a really amazing system that enables you to get anywhere in the city without using a car. For 25 years, MUNI has been my primary way of getting around San Francisco. When I was a supervisor, I gave up my parking space because I didn’t need it. For my own personal life, I’ve seen the extreme benefits of transit, and of course, I represent a community that is extremely reliant on transit. I represent a huge number of constituents who don’t own cars and who need transit to get around, whether it’s by economic necessity or simply by choice. So it’s a real passion for me, and if we’re serious about climate action we need dramatically more transit.

Transit California: 
You serve as Chair of the Senate Housing Committee. How do you see housing and transportation challenges as relating to one another, and how can policy in these areas work together to accomplish shared goals?

Sen. Wiener: 
You can’t talk about housing without transportation, and you can’t talk about transportation without talking about housing, which is why it’s unfortunate that the Senate split the Transportation and Housing Committee into two committees, because it’s always good to view them through the same lens, as they’re really two sides of the same coin. So many of the objections that we hear to adding more housing and more housing density are, “Oh, it’s just going to create traffic. It’s going to strain public transportation, and people aren’t going to be able to get around.” It’s so critical that as we build more housing, we’re also beefing up our transit systems to support that housing. And if you build public transportation systems without housing density, it’s really hard to generate the ridership. In general, having a sustainable housing policy means concentrating housing and having a public transportation system that allows people to get around without a car.

Transit California: 
The Association is excited to work with you this year on advancing SB 922, a bill that extends and expands a series of statutory CEQA exemptions for clean transportation projects that were first instituted by your SB 288 (2020). From your perspective, why is this measure so important right now? What do you hope it will accomplish?

Sen. Wiener: 
I think it’s critically important because—and this gets into the broader debates that the UC Berkeley trainwreck has highlighted with CEQA—fundamentally, CEQA is not climate law. It’s a very outdated 1960s/70s environmental law from back when the environmental movement was dominated by the belief that people are pollution and population growth is our main environmental problem. We now know that’s not the problem. The problem is carbon emissions, and you can have a lot of people living very efficiently and not generating significant carbon emissions, and it’s very sustainable. We see CEQA unfortunately being misused to undermine environmentally sustainable projects, whether it’s putting more student housing on campus, or creating a bike lane, or a bus only lane, a light rail, or pedestrian infrastructure, so we need to make sure CEQA is not undermining environmentally sustainable projects.

SB 288 and 922 simply create an exemption for those types of projects. We also need a lot more of those projects as a priority to make it easier for people to get around by public transit and make it easier and safer for people to bike and walk in their communities. SB 922 will continue to allow us to make those improvements. In addition, we are finally seeing increased investment in transit from the federal infrastructure package but also from state, local, and regional investments, and we need to get that money on the ground quickly. It’s very frustrating if you have the money but you have to spend years doing environmental review for a project that we know will reduce carbon emissions. That’s why the bill is important.

Transit California: 
Beyond SB 922, what additional legislative and/or budget actions are you pursuing this year to improve our transportation network and address climate change? Are there measures pursued by other legislators that you would like to elevate?

Sen. Wiener: 
The good thing is there’s a lot of focus this year on trying to reduce parking minimums, trying to increase and improve bicycle infrastructure—you see bills in both houses—so it’s good that more and more people are focusing on these issues. In the budget, with our surplus, we need to make sure that we are investing in transit. We put some good investments in the budget last year—we need to do it this year. But I will also say we need to not take the bait, and we need to defend the Gas Tax, which provides critical funding to transit.

I understand that people are hurting now with very high gas prices, and I don’t have a problem with potentially providing some tax rebates to help, particularly, lower-income Californians who are struggling, but the Gas Tax was a toxic political football for decades, which is why it wasn’t raised even for inflation for 25 years, to the detriment of our entire transportation system. We finally took that hard step in 2017 with SB 1, and raised the Gas Tax to a more modern level, and then tied it to inflation so we could de-politicize it and just let it do it’s thing to fund our transportation system. One of my colleagues was recalled for that vote, so we need to just leave it alone. I know there is a political temptation, given everything that’s happening, to advocate to have a Gas Tax holiday, and while I respect that perspective, I disagree with it, because it will then create a situation where we’ll have to have a massive increase in the Gas Tax when that holiday is over, and that will create political problems. So we just need to not be tempted, leave the Gas Tax alone, provide help to people in other ways, and continue funding our transportation system.

Transit California: 
The Governor has put forward significant investments for transit in this year’s budget, and the Association is supportive broadly of those investments. That said, we are asking for some additional support for transit operations, recognizing that we are beginning to rebound from the pandemic, but there are still some operational shortfalls that agencies are facing. Is this an issue that you might be prepared to take up in the Senate and pursue to the benefit of agencies across the state?

Sen. Wiener: 
Yes, absolutely. I’m always game to support more funding, both capital and operational, for public transportation. The pandemic has been devastating for transit systems in terms of cratering ridership. That ridership will come back, but it’s going to take time, and we have to make sure that we are supporting these systems in the interim, because the last thing we need is to finally recover from the pandemic, and people are going back to the office, and people need transit, but the systems have become so debilitated for lack of funding that it’s almost impossible to turn that around and rebuild them. So we need to just keep them afloat operationally until we return to more normalcy and ridership returns. Congress, thankfully, provided massive funding over the course of the pandemic, which has been life-saving for these systems, but that’s going to run out soon, and California should step in to support our transit systems as we go through this very painful transition.

Transit California: 
You serve on the Senate Health Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health. How can transportation policy help support improved physical and mental health outcomes?

Sen. Wiener: 
When people have to commute long distances in horrible traffic by themselves, that is not healthy, physically or mentally. It creates mental health challenges, but it’s also bad for your back and can increase your risk for obesity and diabetes. When we give people more options like riding transit, it’s healthier. You’re walking to the transit stop. It’s more active, and you’re around other people, which is healthier. Transit isn’t for everyone, but there are a lot of people who are driving, who, if they had a transit option, they would absolutely use it. Our goal is not to force people onto transit but to make sure that people who want that option have that option.

Transit California: 
Equity, whether it’s for communities of color, the LGBTQ community, or housing affordability, is a central element of the legislation you pursue. How do you see transportation as vital to achieving more equitable outcomes for Californians? 

Sen. Wiener: 
This is where, again, housing policy and transportation policy are so joined at the hip. Right now, increasingly, it’s a privilege to live near where you work, and we’re forcing people who are lower income to commute a very long distance to get to work, and that often means a very long and expensive car commute. Or they take a bus, but because our bus systems in so many parts of the state are not where they need to be, that’s a very long bus commute. And so we have to do more to give people options to live near where they work, and that means building just a lot more housing and a lot more housing density overall, both below market rate and market rate—every kind of housing—to try to loosen up the market so that more people can afford to live near where they work. Beefing up and improving our transit systems is an equity strategy, because for people who are reliant on transit, if the transit is inadequate, they suffer. And having robust transit service will always disproportionately help low-income residents and communities of color.

Transit California: 
At the intersection of housing, transportation and—at times—mental health, is the issue of homelessness. Supported by research conducted by the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies, the Association has endeavored to make progress on addressing homelessness as realized on public transportation. Are there specific strategies you would commend to transit agencies for making progress on this issue?

Sen. Wiener: 
We see this in particular with BART, because in San Francisco, BART is an independent agency that is not backed by the general fund of a wealthy county, like MUNI is. And BART going through San Francisco and Oakland has huge challenges with homelessness. I’ve worked closely with BART to try to get more attention from City Hall in terms of different kinds of services to help people who are in the BART system who are experiencing homelessness. With some state funding, we have been able to help BART reopen more and more of its restrooms. So we’re trying different strategies.

Transit systems are not separate from society at large, so problems that we have in society are going to be amplified on transit. For a lot of homeless people, a transit station, or a bus, or a train is a form of shelter. It might be temporary shelter during the day or overnight. And we need to have more of a partnership between our counties, our safety net agencies and services, and our transit systems. I know in New York they’re dealing with this now, where the Mayor has indicated that they have to clear all the homeless out of the subway for public safety reasons. Although I don’t begrudge New York City trying to make sure that their subways are safe, and unfortunately there have been some horrific, high-profile crimes committed by homeless people, we know that the vast majority of homeless people are not violent, are not causing anyone any problems; they’re just trying to survive. So we need to make sure we are not just clearing people out but really offering people other alternatives where they can go.