Merc op-ed demolishes arguments for extending BART to downtown SJ

 

Photo by Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

The South Bay Progressive Alliance, in a smartly argued Merc editorial, says VTA can't justify ballooning costs when newer technologies offer faster, cleaner, and more flexible alternatives

If you were on the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority board, would you double down on a $12.75 billion, 6-mile underground BART extension that won’t be completed until 2037 at the earliest — or pivot to a smarter, more affordable and more flexible alternative?

The current plan calls for digging a massive tunnel from East San Jose’s Berryessa BART station to Diridon Station — an effort projected to take more than a decade and, if history is any guide, likely to suffer from major cost overruns.

Plus, there’s another looming challenge: Federal funding is in doubt. A $5 billion grant from the Federal Transit Administration, initially awarded under the Biden administration, now faces real risk. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has threatened that states not cooperating with federal immigration enforcement may be left out of future infrastructure support — although he faces a legal challenge to linking the two issues.

The South Bay Progressive Alliance has crunched the numbers. Solutions like bus rapid transit, light rail and personal rapid transit deliver better return on investment at significantly lower cost.

Importantly, VTA already has the legal authority — under Measure B, passed by voters in 2016 — to revise its plans when circumstances change. With declining sales tax revenue, dramatically high construction costs and federal funding unlikely, circumstances have clearly changed.

Yes, walking away from 25 years of planning and investment is difficult. But it’s even harder to justify ballooning costs when newer technologies now offer faster, cleaner and more flexible alternatives.

BART is a 50-year-old system that relies on heavy rail corridors — expensive to build, costly to maintain and increasingly out of step with the region’s needs. Instead of digging deeper, VTA should explore promising options like bus rapid transit, which can be deployed quickly and adaptively, or direct personal rapid transit — elevated electric “podcars” that provide private, non-stop, point-to-point service — from Berryessa to downtown.

Read the whole thing here.

More on SBPA here.

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