When it comes to approving ballot measures designed to advance Bay Area transportation capital improvements, voters used have reasonable confidence that for the most part the funds raised would be spent on projects of merit and public usefulness. Unfortunately, that confidence has ebbed away.

A Case in Point:  The 1.3-mile extension of Caltrain has merit because the project would complete the popular and successful 78-mile Caltrain commuter and intercity rail line. This extension into the waiting Salesforce Transit Center would bring together four BART lines, six Muni subway lines, the California cable car line and Caltrain, as well as Muni’s Market Street F streetcar line and roughly 40 bus lines, all in a major employment center that now includes 19 close-by new highrises and tens of thousands of new transit-oriented housing units. For these reasons it should be getting top billing, but it’s not.

What it lacks is a committed, determined and persuasive advocacy by the local and regional officials, and by the influential public and private organizations that could give it the push needed to stay in competition with lesser but more effectively-backed projects.

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On September 20, 2022, BART Link 21 team members updated BATWG on the status of their project. We learned a lot. We learned about the strenuous and costly efforts that the BART team and its five consultants under the leadership of BART Project Director Sadie Graham have made to try to explain their project to stakeholders around the Region. And we also learned about the difficulty they were having in trying to make sense of a new and unpredictable set of circumstances brought on by COVID and its aftermath.

The Link 21 team is clearly struggling to pin down the nature and effect of the oncoming changes in employment, housing and commute practices on general travel patterns, and how these changes would affect Link21’s plans for an ambitious new regional rail system.

Yet without resolving these issues, by October 2022 the Link21 planners had already gone through a total of $60 million, including a mind-boggling $24 million spent on “program management, project controls, consultant management & strategic advice” and another $10 million spent on outreach. Despite September 20th’s thorough and effective presentation, the results of the Link21 effort to date remain cloudy and it remains difficult to understand how and why so much money has been spent and where the project is headed.

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Just Keeps Getting Worse

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s (VTA’s) BART Phase II horror story in San Jose gets more dismal by the week.

In preparation for MTC’s Program and Allocation Committee’s October 12, 2022 meeting, the MTC’s staff, struggling to keep the ever more expensive BART Phase II project as one of its top candidates for State and federal funding, bought into the VTA’s project cost estimate of $9.0 billion, despite the fact that it was $140 million dollars below the year old Federal Transit Administration estimate of $9.14 billion. Despite BATWG’s attempt to warn MTC of both the VTA’s discounted price and the inherently excessive cost of the project, Staff plowed ahead and on October 26^th the MTC Board accepted the VTA’s $90 billion price and placed the project in its Major Project Plan Category 1, Level I category. On November 3^rd, just seven days later, Eliyahu Kasminser’s excellent article on the project in the San Jose Mercury quotes VTA officials as acknowledging that the price of the project was now $9.3 billion, a price that is virtually certain to further increase.

See https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/11/04/subway-experts-endorse-controversial-bart-plan-vta-board-members-raise-serious-concerns

It gets worse.

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Realizing just how costly and controversial the project has become, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, along with other VTA Board members and municipal politicians, recently commissioned a Peer Review Team of “experts” to conduct an independent evaluation of the BART Phase II Project comparing the original twin bore alternative to the current single bore alternative.

BATWG’s response to the resulting Peer Reviewers’ Evaluation is set forth below in a letter to Mayor Liccardo.

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Columnist Joe Eskenazi is the Managing Editor of Mission Local. On September 26^th his vivid critique of the Central Subway Project concluded that the Central Subway is a “grotesquely over-budget and behind schedule rail project…that will bleed Muni for years”.

Here’s how bad it is. At $2 billion the Central Subway, with only 76% of its 1.7 miles actually in subway will come in at $1.2 billion per mile. The table below, which came from a comprehensive ENO study of urban rail project costs in 9 countries throughout the world indicates how this Bay Area subway price compares to similar projects elsewhere.

For the ENO report see: https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/international/

As Mr. Eskenazi notes, this ill-conceived, politically-motivated project will forever hang as a financial load stone around MTA’s neck. Here’s why:

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