San Jose
– When Caltrain cuts service to Gilroy this summer, Bruce Akagi
will have to take a bus to his job in San Jose. Jeff Shulman will
have to get to the station 20 minutes earlier each day to make it
to his job in Sunnyvale on time.
San Jose – When Caltrain cuts service to Gilroy this summer, Bruce Akagi will have to take a bus to his job in San Jose. Jeff Shulman will have to get to the station 20 minutes earlier each day to make it to his job in Sunnyvale on time.
These are tough times for transit in South County. Caltrain ridership is dwindling, and the struggling economy isn’t generating enough sales tax revenue to support expanded bus service. But for people who depend on Caltrain, the system is no less important than it was during the tech boom. And as the economy recovers, as jobs return to the valley, as the populations of Gilroy and Morgan Hill mushroom, as Coyote Valley is developed, Caltrain could reclaim the more than 50 percent of its ridership that it’s lost since 2002.
It might seem odd then that in a recent poll, South County voters said bringing BART to downtown San Jose, at a cost of at least $4.3 billion, is their biggest transit priority. This according to the poll’s main sponsor, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which also happens to be a major proponent of bringing BART to San Jose.
According to the poll, 57 percent of voters in South County ranked BART as a high priority. Fifty-six percent of all respondents said the VTA should invest its limited funds in BART even if the project is 20 years away. To the pollsters, South County included Los Gatos and the eastern foothills of San Jose, but the SVLG says that voters in Gilroy and Morgan Hill consider BART to be as important as Caltrain when it comes to spending revenue from 2000’s Measure A sales tax increase that takes affect next year.
“I think a lot of folks in the county who won’t have BART coming to their doorstep recognize it will be a service that will benefit the entire region,” said Laura Stuchinsky, director of transportation and land use for SVLG. “If we don’t address transportation issues, home values will go down. It’s in people’s self-interest to ensure that the valley remains a viable place to do business.”
Stuart Cohen, the executive director of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, a Bay Area advocacy group with headquarters in Oakland, called the SVLG poll “absurd” because it asked voters to compare BART to other single projects rather than a group of projects that could be completed with $4 billion.
“The poll was incredibly bogus,” Cohen said. “The analogy is asking someone whether they want a Mercedes or a Buick, when the fact is that someone would be able to have nine other vehicles for price of that Mercedes. That’s where the poll is totally ridiculous and invalid. What the South Bay needs is a comprehensive rail and bus system and they won’t get it if all the money is put into one project.”
The poll was taken earlier this year to gauge support for a 2006 ballot measure to raise sales tax by either a quarter- or half-cent to fund the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. One thousand voters were asked to rank the importance of transit projects in the county, and questioned about how much time and money they’re willing to invest in bringing BART to the South Bay.
Passed in a thriving economy, Measure A promised BART and a host of road and transit projects throughout the county in exchange for a 30-year sales tax hike. Pollsters asked respondents to measure BART against other projects listed in Measure A, taken one at a time, and BART won each time. A large majority of respondents said they voted in favor of Measure A and bringing BART to San Jose.
“That shows there’s no buyer’s remorse,” Carl Guardino, president of the SVLG, said. “When people in hindsight think something is bad, they usually assume they opposed it.”
But an unscientific poll taken at Gilroy’s Caltrain station earlier this week had decidedly different results.
“I couldn’t care less about BART,” Shulman said at the end of his ride home from Sunnyvale Wednesday afternoon. “I’m annoyed that the last train [I can take] out of Gilroy will be leaving earlier.”
Shulman is also unhappy about the constant delays he endures because Caltrain runs on tracks owned by Union Pacific Railroad. And Akagi, who doesn’t own a car, said he’s living at the mercy of service cuts to Caltrain and VTA bus service.
“I won’t be able to ride Caltrain when they change the schedule,” said Akagi, who works at the Santa Clara Valley Water District. “There’s only one bus I can take on the weekends, and I can’t go grocery shopping after work anymore because I don’t have any way to get home. I don’t want BART. They would be better off using the money for Caltrain.”
Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage, who also sits on the VTA board, said Thursday that the support for BART in South County is curious but real.
“The thing that’s interesting is that when they originally had Measure A people thought BART was coming to Gilroy, but BART will do nothing for us down here,” Gage said. “If that’s what people want, that’s fine, but a lot of other projects will be deleted.”
Gage said he believes most people don’t appreciate the consequences of building BART because they don’t have a personal connection to most of the projects planned for South County, which include Caltrain electrification and a number of roadway improvements. He said South County projects are in jeopardy even if voters approve a new tax.
“They need the quarter-cent just to maintain current service levels,” Gage said. “What will happen is that they will take money from Measure A and fund BART and all of the other projects will have to wait for the economy to get better. The VTA will be in pretty bad shape.”
But Guardino said that Gage’s analysis presents voters with a “false choice.”
“We think it’s false choice to say ‘it’s either or’ when,” Guardino said, “if you look at the math of the improvements called for in Measure A, you can save billions without eliminating projects.”
Guardino said that light rail improvements budgeted at $1 billion could be accomplished for $250 million if done efficiently.
“That’s three-quarters of a billion dollars right there and you still meet the mandate of the voters,” he said. “That’s the type of simplistic thing people want from the VTA to provide traffic congestion relief.”
Estimated cost of projects
In the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s capital improvement plan:
• BART to San Jose: $4.3 billion
• 36 South County projects: $1.5 billion
Proposed South County projects:
• Caltrain upgrades $171 million
• U.S. 101 expansion from State Route 25 to San Benito County line $140 million
• U.S. 101 expansion between Cochrane Road and Monterey Highway $164 million
• Gilroy traffic signal upgrades $3.9 million
