July 16, 2022

Theresa Romell, MTC Director of Funding Policy and Programs
Metropolitan Transportation Commission
San Francisco Ca 94105

Subject: Elevating DTX to MTC Tier 1, Level 1

Dear Ms. Romell,

The initiatives taken by MTC in recent months are most encouraging. Your agency appears to be making a concerted effort to ensure that transportation funding goes to the projects with the highest potential for benefiting the region as opposed to perhaps well intentioned agency or local program that fall short in that regard. Equally important is to ensure that agencies, especially those with very large undertakings, administer their projects efficiently. The efforts that you and MTC are making to bring these changes about are supported and appreciated.

Given the more than 40 speakers who spoke at the July 13, 2022 Programs and Allocations Committee meeting, the one minute time limit per speaker was understandable. However it left quite a bit unsaid. As you know, virtually everyone who testified on the 13^th was strongly in favor of placing the Downtown Extension of Caltrain in Level 1. Following are some points we’d like to emphasize:

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The Bay Area has hundreds of independent auto repair and body shops. Walk into any one of them and you will almost always see individuals hard at work on various vehicle repair and restoration tasks. People actually doing things, getting their hands dirty and getting the job done.

But apparently not in the SFMTA’s repair shops. Some of them are enormous. And the official line is that they are so incredibly busy that they must be operated for three shifts a day…with appropriate extra pay for swing and graveyard work of course.

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During its August 26, 2022 presentation to the BART Board, VTA spokesperson Takus Salpeas put the width of the center-loading platform in the downtown San Jose station at 22 feet, about the same width as BART’s existing platforms in places like Castro Valley and Orinda. Under SF’s Market Street the platforms are 35 feet wide.

If a 22-foot platform requires a just-announced 53-foot diameter tunnel (up from the recently established 48-foot diameter tunnel), then a 35-foot platform would presumably require a 65-foot tunnel. Recently the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) put the cost of BART Phase II assuming a 48-foot tunnel at $9.15 billion. So the question becomes, how much would a 53-foot tunnel increase the cost of the project? Or a 65-foot tunnel?

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AB455 seeks to improve bus connections across the Bay Bridge between the East Bay and the Salesforce Transit Center.

BATWG has followed AB455 ever since the bill came to our attention last January and on June 21, 2022 sent Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks and Senator Scott Wiener a letter on the subject. From the outset we have been supportive of its general objective but felt and still feel that the entire East Bay bus service needs work, not just the Bridge. Here are highlights:

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There is no doubt that BART provides a highly popular transportation service and is therefore a key element in providing mobility without people having to drive everywhere they go. For this, BART is of inestimable value to the Bay Area.

But at what cost?

Building BART was an extremely costly undertaking. Expanding it continues to be vastly more costly than it should be, as evidenced by the Federal Transportation Administration’s estimated cost of $9.15 billion for the BART Phase II subway through downtown San Jose. Operating BART is similarly over-priced and the Link 21 project is proceeding as if the sky’s the limit. Here are three separate windows through which a reader can see what’s going on at BART:

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