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.