A group calling themselves A Committee for a Better Sacramento is sponsoring a citizen-initiated ballot measure for the November election, titled “Sacramento County Transportation Maintenance, Safety, and Congestion Relief Act of 2022—Retail Transactions and Use Tax”. (Note: Some people are referring to this as Measure A, but measure letters are assigned by county elections, not by the sponsors. I’ll continue to refer to it as Measure 2022, for now.)

As your parents no doubt told you, words have meaning. So what are the words used in the proposed measure?

• congestion (in the context of congestion relief) = 24 occurrences
• greenhouse gas = 6
• climate = 3
• low-income = 3
• community engagement (only in Exhibit B ITOC) = 1
• equity = 0

A major purpose of this measure is to fund capacity expansion, in an effort to provide congestion relief. But it is well documented and uncontroversial (except among greenfield developers and engineers whose jobs depend on expansion) that attempts to relieve congestion through expansion actually induce new traffic that fills every bit of added capacity. The sponsors of this measure do not believe that. They refuse to believe that. This is a 1970s version of transportation investment, that time when the only issue was building infrastructure that would allow cars to go further and faster. Walking, bicycling, and transit was either an afterthought, or actively discriminated against. We don’t live in those times any more, but the sponsors still do.

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