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Fall 2010

Award of Merit:
Mike Rosenberg and the Bay Area News Group
Track Transit’s Troubles in Five-Part Series

Mike Rosenberg marshaled a team to crunch tons of data and conduct dozens of interviews for a five-part series on transit’s woes. (Photo: Noah Berger)

Working the transportation beat for the San Mateo County Times in 2009, Mike Rosenberg reported on the financial strains facing SamTrans and Caltrain as they struggled to cope with the effects of a severe recession. Falling ridership and declining revenues were playing havoc with the budgets of the Peninsula’s two principal transit agencies. Midway through the year, he realized that his colleagues at other Bay Area News Group newspapers were writing similar stories about BART, Muni, AC Transit and other transit operators.

“I noticed that we were all doing stories on different transit operators’ financial problems, and they all seemed to lead to service cuts and fare hikes.” His journalistic curiosity piqued, Rosenberg decided “to compile all of them together and look at this from a Bay Area-wide perspective.”

This launched Rosenberg on what would ultimately become a five-month-long, in-depth journalistic investigation. The end result — a five-part series titled “Running on Empty: Bay Area Transit in Trouble” — ran concurrently, from January 10 to 14, 2010, in Rosenberg’s San Mateo County Times as well as in other Bay Area News Group papers, including the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times. Drawing on dozens of interviews with Bay Area commuters, transit officials, advocates and others — and synthesizing data from published reports and their own number-crunching — Rosenberg and his colleagues painted an unsettling portrait of a transit system that is vital to the environment and the economic life of the region, but which is nonetheless fighting for its life.

“Rising costs, vanishing state subsidies and declining tax revenues” are the main financial problems afflicting the region’s transit operators, Rosenberg wrote in the opening article of the series. Rosenberg and seven colleagues personally tried out four commutes in different locations around the region; in each case one staffer drove and the other took transit to compare time and cost. The team found that while the transit trips were usually cheaper, the driving trips were usually quicker. They ascribed this latter finding, in part, to lighter-than-normal roadway traffic due to the recession — which only adds to transit’s difficulty in attracting new riders.

The print editions of the “Running on Empty” series were supplemented with additional online material — including interactive maps and live online chats with representatives of BART, MTC and MTC’s 511 traveler information service. The Bay Area News Group also partnered with ABC7 on broadcast stories.

“Mike was the lead reporter,” said Glenn Rabinowitz, executive editor of the San Mateo County Times. “He brought together all the information and reached the key conclusions. But all together, I’d say at least 20 to 25 people were involved in this project.”

At a time when the newspaper business is confronting some major financial challenges of its own, the decision by the Bay Area News Group to undertake an investigative effort of this magnitude was noteworthy.

“I really want to commend Mike and the Bay Area News Group for putting the resources into this,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association), and a close watcher of Bay Area transit. “It’s tough in this day and age for a newspaper to do this kind of in-depth coverage. To allow a reporter the freedom to explore a topic in this much depth is just great.”
— Joe Curley

Video Profile: Mike Rosenberg

Transactions Fall 2010 Issue: Contents