This story is also available in Spanish here.
Venancia Cruz Villalobos begins her workday long before she steps onto the Blue Line trolley at San Ysidro. Five days a week, the 42‑year‑old crosses the border from Tijuana and boards the Trolley that takes her to downtown San Diego.
“I pay 72 dollars a month for my Trolley pass,” she said. Aguilar earns 18 dollars an hour working at a restaurant. “I used to live in National City, but I couldn’t afford it anymore, so I had to move to Tijuana.”
With an annual income of about $23,400 —she only works five hours a day— Cruz Villalobos mirrors the typical Blue Line rider. And now, she’s one of the thousands who could feel the ripple effects of a $528 million budget deficit looming over San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System in the next three fiscal years.
Faced with that daunting shortfall, the agency is weighing two courses of action: Raise fares but maintain service levels, or cut — in some cases eliminate — weekend service.
Neither choice is pretty for Cruz Villalobos, or riders like her.
Taking the pulse of riders
To understand what its riders think, MTS is surveying riders and hosting workshops across the region. The latest, in National City, had interpreters and Spanish flyers ready —but not a single Spanish-speaking attendee.
After the workshop at the Palomar Station, Santiago Alvarez, a 62‑year‑old San Ysidro resident who takes the trolley every day, said he didn’t go to the workshop because he never heard a word about it.
“A workshop for what? I didn’t hear anything about it,” Alvarez said. “If I had known, I would’ve told them to look for other ways to fix the problem—maybe a different fare for low‑income riders. Most of us who take the trolley earn very little.”
Reaching a Spanish-speaking audience is not a minor issue for MTS. Nearly 50% of MTS riders primarily speak Spanish, according to Brian Lane, a senior regional planner with SANDAG.
For Cruz Villalobos, a fare increase from $72 for a monthly pass to as high as $100 feels impossible to swallow.
“I already make very little,” she said. “If they raise it that much, I’d basically have to work two whole days just to pay for transportation.”
That jump would represent an increase of up to 39% —a big hit for riders who rely on the system daily.
Even so, Lane said the agency keeps hearing the same thing when it asks how to handle their budget shortfall.
“Riders consistently tell us they’d rather see a moderate fare increase than lose weekend service or experience a decline in service quality,” he said.
Weekend cuts would have consequences.
Internal MTS estimates show that nearly 20% of Blue Line trips happen on Saturdays and Sundays, much of it tied to hospitality and healthcare workers, or cross-border travel. Losing those runs would hit some of the county’s lowest‑income riders hardest.
But riders care about more than just weekend service and fares. Safety routinely ranks among riders’ top concerns, too.
More than two years ago, MTS beefed up its security spending to combat rider perception that stations, buses and trolleys were unsafe. MTS officials say safety incidents have gone down, but many riders don’t feel that improvement.
Braulio Acosta, 19, from Chula Vista, rides the Blue Line every day to get to school and work. A fare hike would sting, he said, but safety is what worries him most.
“You run into people who get aggressive or start yelling, and there’s no one around to help,” he said
A $528 million hole, but reason for hope
Mark Olson, MTS’s director of marketing and communications, said several forces collided to put the agency’s budget in peril.
A tighter labor market pushed the agency to raise operator wages. Rising costs of materials and equipment from inflation raised costs. Revenues flatlined, along with ridership, for years after the pandemic. And most importantly, the agency lacks a stable local funding source dedicated to transit operations.
MTS receives just an eighth of a cent from the countywide sales tax, TransNet, for its operations. Los Angeles, by comparison, dedicates two cents of every dollar in sales taxes to transit and San Francisco transit takes 1.5 cents of every sales tax dollar. That leaves San Diego overly reliant on uncertain state and federal sources.
But transit in San Diego isn’t all gloomy despite the financial storm.
MTS currently ranks second nationwide in ridership growth, and has the second busiest light-rail system in the country. It has seen a 71% increase in youth ridership — a rare bright spot for transit agencies nationwide.
For Villalobos, whatever decision they make—raising fares or cutting service days—will directly affect her, since she works Thursday through Monday and her salary hasn’t gone up.
“I wish I’d had the chance to tell them how those changes could affect me, but I didn’t even know that meeting was happening,” she said as she turned to catch the train home.
