☆ VTA is two years late submitting required report on Warm Springs to Berryessa BART extension
Image by Wikimedia Commons
As VTA pushes to lock in $6 billion of federal support for Phase II of its Silicon Valley BART extension, a required evaluation of Phase I remains incomplete. Cato Institute’s Marc Joffe provides analysis in this Opp Now exclusive.
Federal transit law requires agencies that receive federal capital funding to submit a “Before and After Study” two years after afederally supported transit project begins service. The report is supposed to compare actual and projected costs and ridership.
Although BART Phase I service between Warm Springs and Berryessa began in June 2020 (24 months late), VTA has yet to submit its final Before and After Study to the Federal Transit Administration.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, the project was supposed to cost $2.33 billion and serve 22,526 weekday riders. While costs appear to have been close to budget, publicly available ridership statistics suggest a huge miss.
Last November, CBS Bay Area reported that ridership of the Phase I extension was almost 90 percent below VTA’s projection. The latest BART ridership data for June 2024, shows that a total of only 2,560 passengers exited at the two new stations, Millbrae and Berryessa, on an average weekday.Without the Before and After study we cannot be sure how VTA will interpret this data, but they may well add 2,557 entrances to the count of exits when report total ridership. That would still produce a ridership total less than one-quarter of the forecast level.
For Phase II, the latest ridership study shows 32,900 riders, but VTA continues to falsely report a forecast of 54,600 riders on its project website, which was the result of an earlier analysis. Sadly, the Mercury News included this misinformation in its latest story on the project.
As VTA and the federal government begin to plunge an estimated $12.75 billion into the six-mile extension through downtown San Jose and into Santa Clara, shouldn’t stakeholders understand why expected ridership did not materialize in the project’s initial phase? Perhaps that way we can get some assurance that the expected riders for Phase II will actually showup.
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