Randal O'Toole takes issue with local media's softball interview with VTA chief
Thoreau Institute scholar and longtime Opp Now contributor Randal O'Toole provides a critical perspective on the Silicon Valley Business Journal's recent interview with VTA's CEO Carolyn Gonot, and laments a lack of clear-eyed, businesslike perspective on the troubled agency's prospects. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.
The pandemic has devastated Silicon Valley transit ridership, but ridership was declining even before the pandemic. Yet Valley Transportation Authority CEO Carolyn Gonot appears to live in a fantasy world about the future of transit, at least as indicated by a recent interview in the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
In the interview, she says she believes that ridership will increase. Yet she also promises to build more light-rail lines. VTA’s experience of the last two decades indicates that these two goals may well be incompatible.
VTA’s ridership peaked at 57.3 million rides in 2001, just before the dot-com crash. At that time, VTA operated 29 miles of light-rail lines. Over the next eighteen years, VTA expanded its light-rail system to more than 40 miles, yet in 2019 ridership had fallen to 36.4 million rides, a 36 percent drop from 2001.
A major reason for this collapse is that light-rail makes no sense for Silicon Valley and its high cost diverts resources away from buses, which are more flexible as well as more economical. Gonot’s promise to build more light-rail shows she really doesn’t care about increasing ridership.
VTA ridership declined in every year from 2015 to 2020, years in which the agency was pouring billions of dollars into extending BART to San Jose. The introduction to the Business Journal interview mentions that this project has led to “controversies over the high costs of its operations as well as the delays, cost increases and design challenges.” For much of that time, the person in charge of the project was Carolyn Gonot, yet the interviewer failed to ask any questions about why VTA is spending so much money on one line while the rest of its transit system is failing.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, VTA carried only 12.1 million trips in its fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. As of May 2022, ridership was still well below 60 percent of May 2019 levels. Due to large numbers of people working at home, ridership is unlikely to ever again reach even half of 2001 numbers.
The problem with transit agencies such as VTA is that they are focused on bringing people from dense suburbs into denser downtowns. Silicon Valley has neither dense suburbs nor a dense downtown. Before the pandemic, downtown San Jose had fewer than 30,000 jobs, compared with more than 370,000 in downtown San Francisco.
The private bus fleets operated by Apple, Google, and other high-tech employers should have given VTA a clue that its current business model isn’t working. Instead, it blithely continued to build light-rail and the BART line, even though such fixed systems don’t serve most residents of the region.
The pandemic should have awoken anyone who wasn’t aware before that VTA’s business model was broken. Yet Gonot is still talking about building more light-rail.
It appears that VTA is no longer in the business of moving people. Instead, its primary goal is to transfer money from the pockets of taxpayers into the pockets of rail contractors and union workers. It is time for taxpayers to revolt against that goal and demand that VTA either be reformed or eliminated.
Read the whole Biz Journal interview here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Image by Wikimedia Commons