Further VTA folly: Mammoth costs for minor ridership increase

Image by Wikimedia Commons

This week, the VTA Board is expected to greenlight the Eastridge Light-Rail extension despite its nearly unbelievably bad cost-benefit profile. As Cato Institute’s Marc Joffe notes, the paltry number of new estimated riders is only about 1400/day, at a cost of over (Mind the Gap!) half a billion dollars. Opp Now readers can do the cost/new rider calculation on their own.

In Santa Clara County, the Valley Transit Authority (VTA) has raised $530 million to extend a light‐rail line 2.4 miles [to Eastridge] and make related improvements. Projected daily boardings across the three stations served by the station are expected to reach 4,534 by the year 2043. But even this paltry ridership figure is misleading.

As we learn from Table 18 of VTA’s Supplementary Transportation Analysis, there would still be 2,322 boardings at the current terminal station, Alum Rock, if the extension was not built. Further, 896 of the projected light rail boardings would be from bus riders switching to the new transit mode. So, on net, this $530 million light‐rail extension is expected to add only 1,316 daily transit rides.

Finally, these ridership projections were developed before the pandemic and do not appear to have been updated since. Given the sharp decline in VTA light rail ridership since early 2020, an updated forecast would likely show fewer than a thousand added rides daily. A subset of those would replace car trips.

Spending over half a billion dollars to replace just a few hundred car trips per day is an inefficient way to save the planet. Assuming, generously, that the light‐rail extension would replace a thousand car trips daily and that the infrastructure has a useful life of forty years, the capital cost per car trip replaced would be over $36,000, enough to buy everyone an electric vehicle!

[Editor's note: As San Jose Spotlight reported, estimated project costs have now escalated from $530 million to $653 million. Most of the overrun will have to funded by draining VTA’s reserves, leaving the Authority more vulnerable to a financial crisis in the future.]

This article originally appeared in the Cato Institute. Read the whole thing here.

Related:

• Fixing VTA Goes Beyond Governance Reform

• Randal O'Toole takes issue with local media's softball interview with VTA chief

• Expert: VTA Eastridge expansion makes no sense fiscally nor environmentally

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