Shift BART to back burner Shift BART to back burner (March 26, 2004)

In less than a month, the Valley Transportation Authority will adopt a spending plan for $3.8 billion that will come from Measure A over the next 25 years.

Unfortunately for Mountain View and other North County cities, it appears that virtually all the money in sight now will be dedicated to building BART to San Jose and Santa Clara, paying for countywide VTA operations and building an East San Jose light rail link.

That leaves Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto with virtually no funds for any significant transit projects during this time, despite promises made during the 2000 Measure A election that there would be. The BART commitment was made when voters were pumped up by the dot com boom and high-powered rhetoric from San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales, who continues to be a fervent believer in the rapid transit dream, at the expense of providing any support for other county projects.

The BART project is scheduled to be completed in 2015, but without passage of an additional half-cent sales tax, it would not be rolling until 2026, more than 20 years from now. Without the new tax, most of the Measure A traffic improvements in the South Bay, other than BART, would grind to a halt. North County officials, including Mountain View Mayor Matt Pear and Palo Alto City Counciwoman Yoriko Kishimoto, are promoting a wide range of Measure A projects that serve all communities. Instead of only BART, they urge the board to include smaller, more cost-effective ideas to the Metropolitan

Transportation Commission April 23. Caltrain improvements, bus rapid transit, Dumbarton rail and the people-mover at the airport are just a few of the many options that could easily be developed with money to spare if BART was reduced in size or fazed out of the picture.

The VTA board members should not forget the drastic shrinkage in ridership that has forced the authority to curtail lightrail and bus service and siphon bond money to pay operating expenses. No one knows what lies 10 years ahead, but in today's extremely soft economy, it is simply not prudent to forge ahead now with one $4-billion-plus transit project at the expense of virtually all other options.

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