1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Transit Signal Priority (TPS) is the kind of smart, low-risk, high-reward initiative San Diego needs—and your administration can champion as both good policy and good politics. TPS benefits transit riders, improves conditions for drivers, reduces maintenance costs, and creates a communications opportunity to highlight your leadership on equity, innovation, and common-sense improvements. Let’s be blunt: you need wins that work across audiences. TPS offers exactly that. • For the public, it makes transit faster and more reliable. • For drivers, it helps traffic flow more smoothly and opens up parking. • For the city, it cuts infrastructure costs by getting more people out of cars and reducing wear on roads. • For your administration, it’s a policy win with few opponents and many ways to message it—as a tech upgrade, a transit equity investment, a driver convenience measure, or a climate tool. Even frustrated drivers benefit. Right now, slow buses stuck in traffic are seen like cyclists on car-dominated roads—good for the city, but frustrating. To the average driver, being stuck behind a crawling bus feels like punishment. But imagine if that changed: if drivers noticed that when they’re behind a bus, they catch every green light. That simple shift could transform daily annoyance into preference, reframing the role of transit in the public mind—not as an obstacle, but as a path to faster commutes for everyone. TPS does that. San Diego also has a strategic advantage: thousands of AI-capable traffic signal cameras recently installed across the city. Traditional TPS requires strobe emitters on buses and receivers at intersections—effective, but costly. Instead, San Diego could pioneer a camera-based TPS system that uses software to recognize allowed vehicle types—buses, trolleys, shuttles—and gives them signal priority without new hardware. This approach is: • Cost-effective, avoiding retrofits on vehicles and intersections. • Scalable, with software updates instead of physical installs. • Flexible, recognizing various high-occupancy vehicles, not just city buses. • Politically attractive, allowing you to pitch it as pro-transit, pro-driver, and pro-efficiency all at once. If technical barriers prevent immediate software-based TPS, the city can still move forward with a slow, strategic rollout of conventional hardware: • Install TPS on new buses and trolleys, • Integrate it during major maintenance, • Prioritize Rapid lines where reliability gaps are greatest. As the system expands, you’ll get increasing returns: faster buses lead to higher ridership, which means fewer cars, which reduces congestion, emissions, and road costs. That, in turn, frees up funds to reinvest in public services. TPS isn’t just a tool for transit—it’s a tool for managing our streets better. San Diego has the infrastructure. It has the need. It has the leadership. All it needs now is the decision to act.