Tonight the BART board of directors will be deciding on whether to break the bank on a costly, low-ridership heavy rail extension to Livermore or go with a much more cost-effective bus rapid transit option. At issue is what do to extend the system 5.5 miles on the Dublin-Pleasanton line to the historically suburban Livermore.

The gold-plated heavy rail option is estimated to cost $1.6 billion, with about $500 million already committed, and scheduled to take 10-15 years to build. Meanwhile, all that money and time would benefit just 13,400 riders per day by 2040, despite plans for new office and housing developments near the future station.

A much better option would be to extend a bus rapid transit line in a separate right-of-way. As BART director Nick Josefowitz points out in a compelling op-ed today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The good news is that there is a more cost-effective transportation project on the table that would deliver equivalent travel times for Livermore residents and cost less than one-quarter of the extension proposal. Express buses initially would run from the Dublin-Pleasanton BART station along the recently built I-580 express lanes to downtown Livermore, the Livermore national laboratories, Las Positas College and elsewhere.

The express-bus project could be paid for out of existing funds and require no new taxes. Extension advocates may argue that Livermore has been paying taxes to BART since 1959 and is entitled to a station, but the total Livermore has paid to the BART system over that period (adjusting for inflation) is $436 million — not nearly enough to fund the extension. The express-bus project is fully funded. Construction could start quickly and deliver immediate relief.

Josefowitz’s vision for the Bay Area is sensible: a ring of express buses traveling on dedicated rights-of-way, providing fast, convenient, and cheap transit service to beat traffic. Otherwise, there simply isn’t enough money to build and subsidize heavy rail to all corners of the region.

Ultimately, the real problem here is that decisions like these are left to elected directors on the BART board. What BART (and all transit agencies) needs is rigorous performance standards to ensure that expensive heavy-rail investments are never an option for low-ridership projects. These performance standards would weed out bad projects based on ridership and other key metrics before they’d even get to the board in the first place.

But until those standards are in place, we’ll have to hope the board makes the right call tonight.