Gilroy
– County residents will have four chances this month to comment
on a draft environmental report on plans to extend light rail
service from Fremont to San Jose.
Gilroy – County residents will have four chances this month to comment on a draft environmental report on plans to extend light rail service from Fremont to San Jose.
The so-called supplemental environmental impact report represents an update of preliminary engineering designs for the $4.7-billion extension. Among the more noteworthy changes are plans to consolidate two downtown San Jose stations, to eliminate a parking structure at the Diridon transit hub in San Jose, and to expand parking lots at stations in Milpitas, San Jose, and Santa Clara.
“A lot of the changes are things that people already knew about, but they hadn’t been incorporated into the actual document,” said Jayme Kunz, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. “As you go through the prelim engineering process, you encounter unforeseen issues, you realize there were alternative options to construction or design, so you start updating your environmental document based on your new findings.”
The latest series of meetings afford the public a chance to comment on the updated designs, she explained. The meetings will take place in the cities slated for new stations along the 16-mile light-rail extension – Milpitas, Santa Clara and San Jose. VTA officials did not plan any meetings in South County, where many taxpayers grumble about footing the bill for a project that offers few benefits to residents south of San Jose.
“The (environmental report) talks about what the construction impacts and mitigations are for people who are going to live through the project,” Kunz said. “Certainly anyone in Gilroy would be welcome to attend these meetings, but they’re not the target audience for an environmental impact meeting.”
The BART to Silicon Valley Project is a 16.1-mile extension from just south of the future BART Warm Springs Station in Fremont to the cities of Milpitas, Santa Clara and San Jose. The alignment would include six stations plus one future station, a maintenance facility and vehicle storage yard, as well as a 5-mile tunnel through downtown San Jose. The new extension is expected to add 104,000 average weekday boardings to the existing BART system by 2030. Construction is expected to begin in 2009 with service starting in 2016.
