☆ Overton window shifting on San Jose BART extension
Image by Wikimedia Commons
Until recently, it appeared virtually certain that VTA staff would control the information flow and scope of the six-mile BART extension through SJ to Santa Clara. But recent stories in the Merc and the tone of a January 19 oversight committee meeting suggest that alternative outcomes are now possible: the project will certainly receive more external scrutiny, which could yield a much-needed downsizing of the $12.2 bn (!) extension. Cato Institute's Marc Joffe explains in this Opp Now exclusive.
When the oversight committee first met in November 2023, it seemed that members would dwell on station design and other ancillary issues rather than seriously question staff’s decisions on core matters.
But circumstances changed in the wake of a new report issued by the VTA’s Auditor General. As The Mercury News reported on January 18, the auditor found that staff failed to properly disclose cost overruns to the agency’s governing board and the general public. Quoting from the Auditor General’s report:
While VTA informed the board at monthly meetings that they were re-baselining costs and schedule estimates were increasing, there was little detail, and untimely notification, regarding the significance and detail of the increases. For example, no detailed budget and cost estimate, schedule, and risk updates were reported to the Board for almost a year and a half, between April 2021 and October 2022. Within that same timeframe, cost estimates increased from $6.9B to $9.3B, or approximately 34 percent. Eleven months later, project cost estimates jumped another 33 percent, for a total of a 76 percent increase, to $12.2B.
One easy way to keep stakeholders appraised of a megaproject’s cost trajectory and risks is to publish periodic reports from the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA’s) Project Management Oversight Contractor (PMOC). The PMOC is a firm hired by the FTA to provide an independent perspective on federally funded projects.
A July 2021 POMC report estimated the BART extension’s cost at $9.1 billion, while VTA staff were still clinging to their $6.9 billion figure. Had that report been made available in real time, the governing board and general public would have had a better understanding of the project’s real cost. VTA did not publish the POMC report, but the FTA released it in March 2022.
Going forward, these reports should be made public upon release. VTA’s Auditor General only recommended publishing the executive summary of each report, but some members of the Oversight Committee recognized the need to make the entire report public. Placing the full text of PMOC reports in the public domain promptly not only aligns with government transparency best practices, but it also enables the community of retired engineers and other knowledgeable observers who monitor local transit projects to give VTA board members informed feedback in real time.
Next, The Mercury News published an interview with former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, in which the longtime project champion suggested terminating the extension at San Jose Diridon Station rather than at Santa Clara, chopping over two miles from the six-mile extension. Liccardo’s new position places him closer to that of another former Mayor, Tom McEnery, who has written skeptically about the overall project.
The idea of truncating the project is not new, having been previously advanced by this author, the nonprofit Friends of Caltrain, and blogger Clem Tillier. It is worth quoting Tillier’s 2017 blog post at length, given that he is both an engineer and advocate of publicly funded passenger rail transportation:
From a transportation perspective, it makes no sense to spend ~$1.5 billion of scarce transit dollars (pro-rated from the $6 billion cost of the entire Phase II project) on a 9000-foot tunnel leading to a huge Santa Clara station complex just to provide a third way to ride between San Jose Diridon and Santa Clara, two locations already well-linked by Caltrain and VTA's 522 express bus.
The main argument against truncating the BART extension revolves around a new 69-acre maintenance facility planned at Newhall Yard in Santa Clara. BART argues that Santa Clara and downtown San Jose are too far away from the nearest existing maintenance and storage facility, BART's main Hayward Maintenance Complex, to be operated efficiently. The HMC is about 21 miles from Santa Clara, requiring long non-revenue runs to stage trains to/from the end of the San Jose extension. While this is admittedly an operationally inefficient arrangement, BART appears to have no qualms operating Phase I (to Berryessa) out of the HMC, over a distance of 14 miles. Cutting back the 2.5 miles from Diridon/Arena to Santa Clara would place the end of the line less than 19 miles from HMC, not so much further from the HMC than Berryessa already is. … Trains could also be stored overnight at Diridon/Arena, to avoid long non-revenue runs at the start and end of the day. The bottom line: the argument that a Newhall shop is a non-negotiable, vital component of the BART to Silicon Valley project is technically unfounded and rests on a stay-the-course-at-all-costs logic that fails to appreciate the opportunity costs of blowing $1.5 billion on a train parking lot.
Since Tillier wrote this post, the incremental cost of the Santa Clara to Diridon segment has increased, probably to $3 billion or more given the cost escalation of the overall project. Projected ridership of the overall extension has also declined due to stagnating population and reduced propensity to use transit in the wake of COVID-19 (a fact that VTA has failed to disclose).
Now that Tillier’s thoughts are being echoed by a high-profile former official, it appears that they have entered the Overton window, which brackets the politically feasible outcomes for this project. It would be wonderful if the window shifted further in the direction of financial sanity to include the option of further shrinking the project.
Terminating at 28th & Portugal would eliminate the need to tunnel under downtown. But, given the project’s momentum, that might be a bridge too far.
That said, it is still worth embracing the opportunity to downsize the project from four stations to three. And it is also worth embracing the idea of publicly releasing PMOC reports in real time. If these reports were routinely available, skeptics and disinterested observers would have a better opportunity to review a broad range of federally funded projects that too often go well over budget and way beyond scheduled completion dates.
Marc Joffe is a state and federalism policy analyst at Cato Institute. He’ll be discussing Bay Area Transit on Thursday, February 8th at 6pm in San Francisco. Details here.
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