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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BATWG is a non-profit corporation organized in 2012 by a group of experienced transportation professionals and activists. Mostly volunteers, we are dedicated to working with like-minded groups to improve the reliability and appeal of the Bay Area’s passenger rail and bus systems. Recognizing the damage that will occur if California doesn’t become more effective in reducing GHG production, BATWG has recently focused more on the disparity between what agencies write in their reports and what actually gets done on the ground. It’s from this perspective that we have reviewed CARB’s Draft 2022 Progress Report.
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There has been much recent discussion about how to improve rail and bus connections in the Southeast Bay. The list below summarizes how things could be put together in a productive way. Absent some semblance of coordination and unity, the “solutions” to complicated networking problems tend to come one by one, often pursuant to ill-considered “bright ideas”, often promoted parochially by inexperienced people with no understanding or interest in the need for regional connections, or by developers and real estate speculators looking for financial gain. Piecemeal approaches to transportation infrastructure improvements are seldom of transportation benefit to anyone. With their “BART-above-all-else” approach, the original BART planners tried it that way, thereby forcing the connecting transit services to do the adapting and leaving the Region with some unnecessary gaps in service that persist to this day. The Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Board on the other hand in its Capitol Corridor upgrade programs has done an unusually thorough job of taking connection opportunities into account. The following proposals are intended to illustrate part of what a carefully coordinated rail and bus network in the Southeast Bay might look like.

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