It was a landmark decision last week. For the first time in Bay Area history — if not nationwide — a rail transit agency decided not to build more rail. And it was a smart decision that will benefit rail transit going forward.
As I blogged about, the BART extension to outlying Livermore would have been costly and attracted just a few riders. It also would have pulled resources away from the core system, exacerbating its reliability problems. Instead, a bus rapid transit line would deliver all the benefits of BART at a fraction of the cost and build time.
In recognition of the fiscal pressures, BART’s elected board made the sensible — and one-vote margin — call last week to ditch the gold-plated option. Unfortunately, Livermore officials don’t want the bus rapid transit line as an alternative, as they apparently hold out hope that some other agency will build the BART extension (an idea that has precedence but would still be irresponsible). So for now they’re left with nothing.
But rail proponents should recognize that heavy-rail options like BART are only suitable for high-density areas. Bus rapid transit may not sound as nice to the public at first glance, but it can be a high performer in practice.
As if on cue, BART opened the same week a new “mini BART” line to exurban Antioch, using cheaper biodiesel-powered trains as a cost-savings and right-sizing measure. While not bus rapid transit, it’s a recognition of the fiscal and ridership realities of serving the low-density region with mass transit.
Meanwhile, here were the votes on the Livermore proposal:
Against the extension:
Bevan Dufty
Nick Josefowitz
Rebecca Saltzman
Lateefah Simon
Robert Raburn
For the extension:
John McPartland
Debora Allen
Joel Keller
Tom Blalock
Congratulations to the BART board on a smart move, and to all BART riders who care about the system’s long-term sustainability.
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.
