The Rhetoric of Transit Planning

A great deal of transportation planning is based in rhetoric–BART to SFO sounds good, BART to San Jose sounds logical, the Oakland Airport Connector sounds necessary.  Too often, good projects don’t gain any momentum because they just don’t sound interesting enough to BART’s suburban constituency–a 30th & Mission sounds completely random and unnecessary when BART already has two other stations with “& Mission” in it.  In the comments on my last post, Mike Fogel brought up an interesting idea of rebranding BART projects to sound more attractive to suburbanites

BART’s suburban majority will keep focusing on projects that serve the suburbs… if they don’t they’ll just be voted out and replaced by someone who will.

But, that doesn’t mean that all urban projects are necessarily out. They just needed to be billed in a light that’s more attractive to the suburban BART rider/voter.

So, when we talk about expanding BART in the urban areas we should talk about it in terms of what it would provide as a destination of a trip rather than as a source. For example, rather than ‘BART on geary’, how about ‘BART to golden gate park!’ Or not ‘a second transbay tube’ but rather ‘BART to the ball park’. etc.

Expanding upon this idea, below are some potential rebrandings for good but boring projects to increase their suburban appeal, accompanied by the reactions of an average suburbanite:

Geary BART: “Sounds boring.  Isn’t Geary near all the drug addicts in the Tenderloin? No way, give us BART to Tracy!!!”

BART to Golden Gate Park: “OMG that would be so great! I never go to Golden Gate Park on weekends because it takes me two hours to drive there, but now I can just hop on in Lafayette and be there in no time! DeYoung here I come!”

San Antonio Station: “Where is San Antonio? Texas? Oh it’s in Oakland? Sounds like a place I wouldn’t want to go, since it’s not the airport, the coliseum, or Emeryville.”

Estuary Station: “Ooooo sounds environmental! Will I get to see sea otters and whales?”

Albany Station: “Well, I guess.”

Solano Ave/Albany: “How North Berkeley! I’ve read about it in the Chronicle’s ‘Yuppie’ section!”

Caltrain: “Ew”

pBart: “BART’s on the Peninsula??? And they built it overnight for free??? Awesome!”

98th Ave Station: well… can’t really think of a way to dress this one up.

Can San Jose Really Handle 400,000 New Residents by 2035?

San Jose is projected to add 412,000 new residents by 2035.

ABAG recently released its new population growth estimates for the region, and not surprisingly, San Jose is projected to add the most people out of any city in the Bay Area over the next 25 years.  However, while San Jose’s low density and extensive land area makes it a logical place for infill growth, the amount that the city is slated to gain compared with other Bay Area cities–412,000 new residents, compared with 159,000 new residents in San Francisco and 141,000 new residents in Oakland–raises a bunch of red flags when you consider the current state and future prospects of San Jose’s transportation infrastructure.

There isn’t a whole lot of good things that you can currently say about transportation in and around San Jose.  VTA has put hundreds of millions into light rail over the past two or three decades (often at the expense of its bus system), yet its system is among the worst performing in the nation (its system-wide ridership is lower than many individual Muni lines).  Caltrain provides a decent but underdeveloped commuter service, but it’s primarily oriented toward the Peninsula and only two full-time stations in San Jose.  Capitol Corridor and ACE also provide intercity service, but their overall mode shares are very small.  Even driving doesn’t work that well–the vast majority of trips in San Jose are taken by car, causing gridlock to permeate throughout its extensive network of freeways, expressways, and boulevards.

So how do you turn a sprawling city into a transit-oriented metropolis? San Jose seems to think that Bart will completely transform the city, in spite of the project’s limited scope.  And, because of ballooning costs, the 6.2+ billion dollar extension will not even be completed until 2025 at the earliest.  As I’ve discussed before, VTA is placing all of its eggs in one basket with Bart to San Jose, coming at the expense of light rail and bus rapid transit projects that would tie together more of the city at a fraction of the cost.  Moreover, if/when Bart to San Jose doesn’t meet some of the extraordinary ridership projections that VTA has generated, and if/when Bart to San Jose doesn’t generate a surplus and actually causes VTA to lose tons of money as occurred to SamTrans in the SFO extension, VTA could be in big financial trouble for decades to come.  Even if Bart to San Jose works perfectly and I am completely proved wrong, San Jose will likely have already added 250,000 of the 412,000 new residents by 2025 anyway, with most of these additions occurring out of reach of the Bart line.

There is some hope.  High speed rail and Caltrain electrification will transform the area around Diridon and Taimen stations, and Downtown San Jose still has a lot of potential to become a vibrant dense urban environment.  In spite of financial woes with Bart to San Jose, VTA appears to remain comitted about implementing 30 miles of BRT on three major corridors in the next eight years, which will dramatically improve transit for a reasonable cost of $575 million (will these funds be subject to a Bart funding swap as occurred with Dumbarton Rail? We’ll see.).  In spite of these projects, San Jose is still essentially looking at adding another Oakland’s worth of population over the next 25 years.  Without a new comprehensive transit strategy that plans for widespread improvements across the city, San Jose could turn into a real mess.