The Merc had an article last week entitled
"Affordable transitt will help close gap between rich, poor in South Bay." I think that title may be a bit misleading since it is actually a proposal to completely change the plan for BART to Silicon Valley - Phase 2. Instead of spending $4 billion to tunnel underneath Downtown San Jose, the article points out that running BART west from Milpitas to the San Jose Airport and then Diridon above ground would only cost $1.6 billion. However, that is not the interesting part. The real fascinating proposal is not building the BART extension at all and instead building using $1.6 billion to build a 100 station Automated Transit Network (PRT system) that would blanket a huge portion of San Jose and be placed above roadways.
While I am a huge advocate for BART Downtown, I strongly believe that automated systems will be the ideal transportation of the future and would be willing to sacrifice BART for it if given a choice. Check out the article
over here and let us know what your thoughts are.
Many thanks to Francisco Gonzalez for sending this in!
Berryessa Station is already being built, I'm afraid. And I agree that BART should have gone to North San Jose and to Diridon. The future section that serves the "East Side" is not even in "East Side".
ReplyDeleteAt this point, is there an alternative to re-routing the future BART routes/stations? The future routes/stations is just very unimaginative to me, and won't serve much of our population, except obviously to provide a bedroom community for job centers in Oakland and SF.
It's bad enough that we have a Caltrain system separate from the rest of the BART infrastructure. It's lunacy to build yet another separate mass transit system. Why did we build light rail then? The point of BART to SJ was to tie and better integrate the South Bay to the rest of the region!
ReplyDeleteThe issue is having connectivity across the length and breadth of SF bay area. I would still go with BART extension since that connects us with the BART system. A wild suggestion would be to join Santa Clara BART with millbrae and we would have a ring route of BART. But knowing our love for public transport especially the hypocrite tree huggers in peninsula, I don't see that happening
ReplyDeleteRunning ptn rails all over san Jose would only cost 1.6 billion? According to who? And that tritrak system looks like vaporware to me. Their last news update is from 2013.
ReplyDeletePrt is not quite ready for prime time in my view. And its sweet spot seems to be small regular areas like airports. Not as a replacement for metropolitan or mass transit. Just because it's "New technology" doesn't automatically make it better at everything!
PRT is definitely not ready for primetime. SJC looked into as an alternative to a people mover and the result of the study was that the technology was not developed enough for the scale of the project and even if it were it would face a ton of regulatory hurdles.
DeleteSan Jose should be a trailblazer here, PRT will be an innovation that will help define travel for this century. Some systems like Skytran are close to primetime, so we should really be on the groundfloor when they are ready for pilot deployments.
ReplyDeleteCapital of Innovation! We innovate by not quite finishing the job: we innovated a solution to homelessness by bulldozing a huge camp and not having adequate replacement housing or shelter, and by golly we can innovatively bring BART to San Jose by either not building BART at all, or by building something that's not light rail nor BART but something entirely different, new and not really real yet. Gateway to the world, people! Once you're fully aboard the bandwagon, it's easier not to see how rickety the wagon is.
ReplyDeleteI don't see any bandwagoning here, I just people trying to think outside the box when it comes to resolving the real issues of urban traffic. Some ideas are far-fetched and are pipe dreams, but we should at least take a look at them. The effort to do so should not be discouraged.
DeleteAnd what's with the babbling about homelessness? Stick to the subject please.
Because taxpayers and transit users, unlike planners and business-association representatives, feel they've been victims of a bait and switch. Two tax measures claiming to bring BART to San Jose (one retroactively relabelled "...to Silicon Valley"), millions in planning and pre-construction money spent, and we're still debating not just a route, but a manner of transport. I understand -- many of the folks dreaming of horizontal elevators at this fairly late stage in the game don't think of it as "real money" or *their* money, and don't care that the changes will cost time and money. Boost at all costs -- especially when you're not paying. Not a surprise, this is a booster site after all, and pragmatism isn't as welcome here as schemes and dreams are.
DeleteYes, this has always been Josh's blog, where he expresses his enthusiasm for his (and our) city of San Jose. It has a generally positive vibe, along with some hard discussions, such as this, from time to time. And seriously, I don't mind a bit of boosterism. There are enough negativity-laden San Jose blogs out there (San Jose Inside comes to mind) so once in a while I'd like to read something that doesn't act like the world is about to come crashing down every 5 minutes.
DeleteOther than that, if you read my first comment, I already said the ship has sailed on the ideas from the author on Josh's link.
At the end of the day, we should encourage more scheming/dreaming, though we will accept pragmatism when we come to that.
It's perfectly OK to be both pragmatic AND dreamy.
This whole BART line is bad planning to begin with. It should have gone through North San Jose, where our city's jobs are, and then head South to the Airport, and to Downtown where it can link up to Caltrain at Diridon. The East Side can be served by extending light rail from Capitol Avenue to Eastridge, and then have Rapid Bus Transit linking Eastridge with Downtown.
BART to Berryessa and now to 24th Street and then to City Hall was just a terrible idea. Whoever came up with that idea was adamant on making North San Jose irrelevant. It is the largest San Jose job center, yet is the only job center that does not have direct access from Caltrain and BART.
Is the VTA involved? Yes? Then it is doomed for failure.
ReplyDelete