What transportation projects and services will have to be cut
when the BART extension fails to meet its inflated ridership
projections?
The VTA Board of Directors has decided to sink another $135 million into the bad idea of extending BART to San Jose.
That Don Gage, South County’s member of the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors and a member of the VTA board, voted with the majority is a huge disappointment.
Every indicator tells us that extending BART to San Jose is a bad idea.
When BART was extended to the San Francisco International Airport, the project went dramatically over budget.
We should expect the same thing for the 16.1-mile BART-to-San Jose extension that currently bears a $4.7-billion price tag.
When BART was extended to SFO, the line did not meet ridership projections, leading to a budget crunch for the agencies involved in that extension.
We should expect the same thing for the BART-to-San Jose extension, whose ridership projections the VTA keeps increasing in an effort to make the project pencil out. What transportation projects and services will have to be cut when the BART extension fails to meet its inflated ridership projections? We bet the cutting will start in the less-densely populated South County.
The VTA’s own projections showed that it could not afford to build the BART-to-San Jose extension. Those projections also showed that it could not afford to operate the BART-to-San Jose extension.
The BART-to-San Jose extension’s financial future is so bleak that federal transportation officials refuse to endorse putting any federal funds into it. And that was during the tenure of San Jose native Norman Mineta as the Secretary of Transportation.
A Santa Clara County civil grand jury told VTA officials to forget extending BART to San Jose. Why? Because the VTA board “has not reacted to the present budget problems with diligence,” and because it is “too large, too political, too dependent on staff, too inexperienced in some cases and too removed from the financial and operational performance of VTA,” and because it fails to have “frank and open discussions on important matters of policy.”
None of that sounds like a board or an agency that can handle a project of this magnitude.
Spending another $135 million on this doomed project is a triumph of political correctness and politics over common sense and the best interests of constituents.
We have every right to expect better from our leaders.
