February 2, 2007
BART Extensions
We may occasionally bag on BART, but we have to say that in the most cases, we are more than happy with it. Mainly because it's not MUNI but that's a whole other story. We also think everyone else feels the same way because they keep on talking about extending it all over the area. Just look at those BART maps in stations-- there's all sorts of dotted lines representing proposed lines. Well, one of those proposed lines is getting closer to happening as a whole bunch of money was thrown BART's way to extend BART to Santa Clara and San Jose. Like $364 million dollars worth of money.
The money comes from the California Transportation Commission and is more than half the $700 million that the Valley Transportation Authority needs to do the engineering on it. In fact, the engineering has already begun and so some of the money will be used to reimburse everyone. Also buy a bunch of sheet cakes for after work parties. You can't work on public transportation projects without yummy cookies, after all. We're not China fer crissakes.
The engineering is planned to be done by 2008 and construction will start in 2009 and finished by 2012. Expect it to be done by 2020 when we won't need it because we'll all be flying solar powered hover crafts. That is, of course, if it even gets that far as the total tag for all of this is upwards of $4.7 billion and they barely have the $700 million to do the engineering. $4.7 billion dollars just doesn't grow on trees, you know, and if it did cold somebody please let us know where? And if it did, would a bunch of hippies climb it to protect people from trying to get at the bucks? So far a ballot measure calling for a sales tax to fund this thing failed and the U.S. Department of Transportation has resisted calls to help in the funding.
The planned route will take BART from it's current end point, Millbrae Fremont, and have it to go to Santa Clara with stops in Milpitas and Downtown San Jose. That sounds great, of course, but considering not enough people are taking BART to Millbrae, one wonders how an extension to San Jose would go over.
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Uh, guys, you really should read those BART maps more. It will go from Fremont to San Jose, not from Millbrae. Also, Milpitas is not between Santa Clara and San Jose.
And, the whole reason the sales tax measure failed was because the people in Palo Alto and Mountain View were bitter that they weren't getting BART or anything else.
It's true that this post does make a rather unfortunate geographical error by stating that the BART line will continue past Millbrae to San Jose, when the proposed extension is actually down the eastern side of the Bay, from Fremont.
The point about lower-than-predicted ridership holds in any case, though, since there have been outlandish claims about the number of people that will be riding this extension. And since this is a BART project, there will be huge cost overruns. It's a complete shame to spend all this money on a single, very expensive BART line to Santa Clara. San Jose would get far better transit service for much less money if resources were instead allocated towards expanding the current VTA light rail network.
VTA ridership is embarrassing as well.
Bart extensions are totally ineffective and wasteful
The land use patterns in San Jose make tranist difficult. I think far more worthy porjects are electrifying CalTrain and bringing to to downtown SF
Remember the original plan was to go down 101 from The City all the way to Palo Alto, but San Mateo County didn't want to pay the 1/2 cent sales tax, so they dropped out of the BART district. I hear that suburban "white flight" fears that poor people might use BART to travel to their bucolic communities also played some factor in the decision, but that is strictly hearsay.
We are all still suffering from that short sighted decision of theirs.
I think BART is great, it is one of the reasons I moved here in fact, but we could get a good rail system from Fremont to San Jose much cheaper by using existing standard grade track.
I think it makes more sense to extend CalTrain. It would cost like 1/4 as much.
BART from SF to Palo Alto would be foolish (and I don't remember ever hearing about it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen). This corridor is already served by Caltrain. Money could be much better spent on other projects. As to the poor people would use it to get to their communities argument..poor people can use Caltrain today and frankly its cheaper to ride than BART.
There was an original plan for BART to go to Marin County and a similar argument about hippies having an easy way to get to Marin was made at the time.
Well, the original debate was in 1962 and I was not even alive at that time, so I am just repeating what I have read and heard.
San Mateo county ended up joining BART 40 years later, after it was too late to build a line that would get you from Palo Alto to downtown in 20 minutes. Now the line loops all the way out to the ocean and then back. It was designed to pick up extra San Francisco commuters, which were needed to make the ridership numbers work out.
It is nice for me personally, because I have a fast reliable way to get to work, instead of having to rely on the J-Church.
But it sucks for all the poor people stuck trying to go back and forth between Mt. View and downtown SF. I am not sure which one is a bigger job center these days, but it sure would be nice if there was a fast and efficient way to get from the South Bay to The City and visa versa. Caltrain -> Millbrae and then BART -> downtown just doesn't cut it. I guess the tunnel from 3rd and Townsend to the new Trans-Bay terminal would be nice, but I kind of despair of it ever getting built. I think they have been talking about it since 1962, too.
Maybe they could set aside a billion or so for more bike racks on Caltrain.
Just a quick note: supposedly, what BART people say about the low ridership in the Millbrae line is that trains coming from Millbrae to SFO are required by contract to take a 10 minute break at SFO. The logics then goes that people got fed up with that and decided not to use the BART service from Millbrae. I heard this at a quarterly PAR meeting.
Ever since the day I first took Caltrain to the city, and saw that it ran 500 yards from the airport, I've wondered why they extended BART instead of electrifying Caltrain and put in the new transbay terminal. Could have done it for the same cost as the airport extension. My understanding that had something to do with the BART union and the construction/development lobby. Was Bechtel the prime contractor? Nancy, Nancy, love that you're Speaker and my personal representative, but I think this was a bad way to solve this particular transportation issue.
Now, as for the extension into San Jose for travelers from the East Bay: there is no good public transit alternative (although it would be interesting to see the numbers on the Capital Corridor Amtrak run in the past couple of years; haven't looked), and the 880/Mission Blvd/680/237 corridor has been a traffic nightmare since 880 was still highway 17, 237 had a light at every intersection, and McCarthy ranch was still a ranch with a decrepit fruit stand at the corner of 237 and 17 20 years ago. That commute (from Fremont to Santa Clara in 1983) is why I'm such a big fan of public transportation for commuting. Hated sitting in traffic. Don't see why people live that way.
I agree that BART is the most expensive possible way to do it. However, given that the freight use of railroads along the existing rights-of-way is way up, having a dedicated line makes a lot of sense. Although it appears that they're using those for this project. Hmm...
The real problem with the SJ extension is that the commercial development in SJ (i.e. where the jobs are), more than development along the Caltrain right-of-way, is nowhere near where the BART extension runs (which is mostly residential). And the VTA lightrail and/or bus system, which would be the connector over, makes Muni look like the Paris metro. The low density of industrial development practically demands car use, because you're completely isolated at the corporate park sites, so it's not really conducive to being served by public transit.
The engineering costs are so high because the Hayward fault essentially runs either parallel or under the proposed right of way through Fremont (one of the reasons BART was never extended to the Santa Clara county line in the first place). Since BART is new construction, the earthquake hardening costs will be considerable.
Living in Pleasanton, I can say a lot of people out here definitely would rather take BART down to San Jose to work if it were possible. I believe it would be much more useful than the line to millbrae. What would really help is a line that would go from Walnut Creek to Pleasanton to Fremont and down to San Jose. That would be optimal for public transportation needs of the Bay Area.
The issue with Bart is simple...given the geography of the bay area, any mass transit system MUST circle the bay. Since Bart is the closest to completing that loop, it makes sense to finally extend it. Citing current ridership to Millbrae is irrelavent as it is currently the end of the line. what if I live in Santa Clara and work in Fremont? out of luck. What if live in pleasanton, but work in San Jose. A mass transit system that reaches 70% of a major metro area isn't viable. period. and as far as the cost, yes it will be expensive, but what is the true cost of millions of people every day sitting in traffic? What is the true cost to businesses when hundreds of thousands of people are late to work because ONE car was in an accident? ask a transit engineer how much it would cost to add an extra lane to 101, 280, 880 and 680? and i doubt that cure all the traffic problems.
sf_engineer certainly there is more to it than geography.
In the whole of the "silicon valley" where do people work? Where do people live? Unless you literally cover the area with dozens of fixed transit lines how will people get from their house, which is likley not within walking distance to the transit stop, to their job which is more than likely not going to be anywhere near the end of line?
With the exception of parts of SF and a few others small areas in the Bay fixed rail transit can't work with our land use pattern