In April the Sonoma Marin Area Rail District Board (SMART) considered performance measures for its commuter rail operations. introduced by SMART’s recently hired CFO, Heather McKillop; it was the first time the SMART Board has focused on measuring its performance since the startup of rail service in August of 2017.

Staff recommended the Board adopt seven measures:

1. Operating Expense per Vehicle Revenue Mile
2. Operating Expense per Passenger Mile
3. Passenger Trips per Vehicle Revenue Mile
4. Average Fare per Passenger
5. Bike/Ped Pathway Usage
6. On-Time Performance
7. Customer Satisfaction

The first four performance measures are readily available from the annual National Transit Database, (FY19/20 NTD statistics are shown in graphic form below). Measures five through 7 are not currently produced or available and will require additional data collection and presentation effort.

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Assembly Bill 1091 (Mark Berman) proposes to address a problem that has detracted from the Santa Clara VTA’s effectiveness for decades. In the last 17 years three successive grand juries have called attention to the VTA’s management, operational and capital improvement practices and recommended ways of improving the situation. These recommendations have been largely ignored.

Assembly Bill 455 (Rob Bonta) tries to address the long-standing need to increase transbay bus ridership by calling for a dedicated bus lane on the Bay Bridge, beginning with a plan to be completed by January 1, 2023. Even before COVID, ridership on transbay buses was dismally low. For instance in 2019 AC Transit’s transbay ridership with its 27 separate transbay bus lines was only 13,000 riders a day. 

AB 455 is unfortunately based upon the false premise that improving bus flow on just the bridge and its approaches is all that’s needed to give transbay bus ridership a major boost. We seriously doubt this.

For almost a year BATWG has struggled to find the transportation logic behind the frantic effort to push the $3,000,000,000 + Valley Link proposal to the front of the line for federal funding.

Background:  Valley Link is a proposed 42-mile commuter rail service with a significant portion to be operated in both directions on a single track. The line would run from the East Dublin BART station via the north edge of Livermore and Tracy to North Lathrop in San Joaquin County. On 9.24.20, $400,000,000 in Alameda County sales tax funds were unaccountably diverted from their voter-approved intent of improving transit connections between BART and the Tri-Valley to the Valley Link proposal (hereinafter VL.)

On 12.2.20 the Draft Environment Impact Report (DEIR), estimated to be at least 5,000 pages long was finally released, with public comment due by 1.21.21. During the ensuing 40 days BATWG critiqued the document which we believe fails to meet CEQA, Alameda County Measure BB and AB758 requirements in a number of significant ways. Our critiques were submitted to the sponsoring agency before the deadline. Here is part of what we found.

Project Alternatives:  CEQA requires that major infrastructure projects include viable alternatives to compare against the “preferred alternative”. Not a single one of the some 30 so-called “alternatives” listed in the DEIR come anywhere close to meeting this CEQA requirement. There were and are other options available. Here are two, either of which could serve local and regional travel needs better than VL would. Both have so far been ignored:

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