Interstate 680 in Fremont. Courtesy of Caltrans.

The Bay Area’s first high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane, or “express lane,” opens today on southbound Interstate 680 over the Sunol Grade, between Highways 84 and 237 — a 14-mile stretch of freeway that includes 11 miles in Alameda County and 3 miles in Santa Clara County.  Carpools and high-occupancy vehicles on this segment of freeway are now joined by single-occupancy vehicles, who are charged a toll via FasTrak transponders for the privilege of driving in a lane that moves faster than the surrounding freeway.  Tolls will be charged only on weekdays between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.  The price, which is adjusted dynamically in order to maintain a free-flowing lane, will range from a minimum of 30 cents in light traffic to a potential toll of 4-6 dollars in heavy traffic.

Courtesy of ACCMA/ACTC.

This stretch of freeway has been striped to separate the HOT lane from the general purpose lanes.  There are three specific points at which motorists can enter or exit the HOT lane.  Entry points are placed just south of Highway 84, Mission Boulevard, and Auto Mall Parkway.  Exit points are placed just south of Auto Mall Parkway (for drivers exiting at Jacklin Road or points north), south of Jacklin Road (for drivers exiting at Highway 237), and south of Highway 237, where the HOT lane ends.

So how about that toll revenue?  In order to defend the worth of HOT lanes against those who protest induced demand, it’s argued that the HOT lane segments built in a particular corridor will generate a new pot of funding to improve transit in that corridor.  That may need to be seen to be believed — but, depending on how much profit remains after covering operations and maintenance costs, revenue from the I-680 southbound lane could be used to construct a northbound or other facility in the corridor.

The new lane is only the first step toward building the regional HOT lane network planned for the Bay Area.  It’s not yet clear what the full extent of that network will be; once envisioned as consisting of about 800 lane miles, difficulties facing implementation may require that the plan be downsized.  In any case, the I-680 HOT lane will be joined next year by another facility in the Tri-Valley, located between Hacienda Road and Greenville Road on eastbound Interstate 580.

VTA seeks a $900 million federal contribution toward the $2.1 billion Berryessa extension.  The ROD qualifies VTA to move forward in the process, and the next step is to execute a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) in February 2011, which would allow VTA to obtain the federal funding it needs to build the project.  Construction could begin in 2012, and revenue service could commence in 2018.

Ideally, the role of a planning commission is not to rubber stamp, but to review, refine, and scrutinize — in order to ensure that the projects that earn its approval are of high quality.  The commission should also ensure consistency with applicable General Plan policies.  In San Francisco, that includes the City’s policy to encourage the development of housing accessible to a spectrum of incomes; to expand a robust and successful city economy; and to make land use decisions that discourage dependence on the automobile, in part by limiting parking for projects near convenient transit options.

When it comes to implementing these general policies in the context of specific projects, the San Francisco Planning Commission has disappointed on more than one occasion.  But particularly with respect to parking, one cannot help but notice how Michael Antonini — a Republican originally appointed to the Commission in 2002 by Willie Brown, and then later reappointed by Gavin Newsom — has often singled himself out as the epitome of this phenomenon on the Commission.

As long as as the proposed project meets the bare minimum test of adding any housing or retail to a parcel where none existed before, Commissioner Antonini will probably stand ready to cast his approving vote — unless, of course, the amount of suggested parking seems somehow “inadequate.”  In that case, he has cause to object.  And so much the better if the project includes larger family-sized units, because then the Commission has the opportunity to bend over backward by signing off on the inclusion of extra parking.  It’s a knee-jerk reaction premised on this assumption: the probability that a family will get around town without a car ranges anywhere from unlikely to inconceivable.

Rendering of the Santa Clara 49ers stadium proposal.

It’s not too surprising, then, to find that Commissioner Antonini offered this little gem to the Examiner regarding Santa Clara’s proposal for a new 49ers stadium, which will be put to the test when Santa Clara citizens evaluate Measure J in the June election:

“[The Santa Clara site] is so small and there’s no place to park,” Antonini said. “It would be a circus to have a Super Bowl there.”

Candlestick Park, which seats about 70,000 attendees, has parking capacity for 8,800 vehicles.  Santa Clara’s proposed stadium, which is comparably sized, would seat 68,500 attendees, with an option to expand to 75,000 seats for the Super Bowl.  Although fewer than 3,500 parking spots would be made available in a proposed structure and parking lots immediately adjacent to the stadium site, as many as about 38,000 existing parking spots located within a 20-minute walk of the stadium could be leveraged for use on event days.  Although it’s not yet clear just how much of that parking will be available on a given game day, it’s smart practice to recycle parking spots for different uses at different times of day, rather than build an independent parking supply dedicated to each use.  And that parking total even far exceeds the need, if travel patterns to the Santa Clara stadium resemble travel patterns to Candlestick.

But in advocating to keep the 49ers in San Francisco, is Commissioner Antonini really mocking Santa Clara for trying to manage transportation demand (both by taking advantage of existing parking supply and emphasizing the various transit options near the stadium site)?  And is he really implying that a Hunters Point stadium would be superior to the Santa Clara stadium because it could provide more parking?

How refreshing it is that decision-makers in this transit-first city are so eager to set a fine example for the benefit of our suburban neighbors.

Caltrain, unlike other transit operators that have been deprived of State Transit Assistance funds, does not enjoy a dedicated revenue source.  Rather, its operations depend mostly on farebox revenue and contributions from San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, the three member agencies that make up the Joint Powers Board.  It’s no small problem, then, that San Mateo has suggested it may reduce its contribution by 70%, which would trigger corresponding reductions from San Francisco and Santa Clara.  The end result, if that were to happen?  A roughly $30 million budget deficit off of a $97 million budget.  Caltrain has indicated that balancing the budget under those circumstances might require cutting all off-peak service — midday, nights, and weekends — by no later than June 2011.

It hardly needs to be said that this would be a fundamental change for the worst.  It would reduce rail service on this corridor to bare commuter operations, while decimating the utility of Caltrain for transit-dependent and recreational off-peak riders.  If such a deep service cut were approved, it would be a giant leap backwards, in the exact opposite direction from where Caltrain should be headed as it moves toward electrification.

It is not yet clear whether the situation will actually turn out to be that bad.  So far, all we have had to go on  is Mike Scanlon’s initial doomsday pronouncement at the April 1 JPB meeting.  Clearly, though, there will be an important discussion in the near future about Caltrain’s upcoming budget and the viability of its service.  In some sense, Caltrain has so far held on surprisingly well under the circumstances, since it was able to deflect an unpopular cut to weekend service when closing a $10.1 million budget deficit for this fiscal year.  But ridership has decreased as compared to last year, so there is reluctance to further depress ridership by increasing fares — and even a steep fare hike would not be nearly enough to close a $30 million deficit.  State funding, restored by the gas tax swap legislation, would also not be enough, providing Caltrain with just $5.1 million for this fiscal year and $4.5 million in FY12.  With the JPB’s three member agencies threatening to turn inward and reduce their financial support to Caltrain in these tough economic times, there are limited options available under the current governance scheme that would ensure Caltrain’s long-term financial sustainability.

Passenger rail on the Peninsula was almost laid to rest in the 1970s, but was ultimately saved.  It could be saved again (though the threat now does not look that severe).  But is there the political will to make the necessary changes?  Caltrain has come a long way even with minimal means, but it has been subject to the whimsy of its member agencies, who have other priorities.  Meanwhile, the progress that has been made on electrification has been sluggish, even though electrification points the way toward the promise of the future.  Since introducing Baby Bullet service, Caltrain has assumed a more prominent role in the Bay Area’s regional rail network, but it has outgrown its existing, primitive method of financing.  It is worthy of a three-county special district, along the lines of the BART district.  By reconstituting as a special district, Caltrain would be granted valuable taxing authority and dedicated funding.  Making this change will not be easy, because it requires enactment at the State level — but doing so would give Caltrain access to tax revenue, while ensuring the security of future service.

But like the Ugly Duckling, this story also looks like it will have a happy ending. For high-speed rail will soon sweep into the region, transforming and re-energizing interest in the ex-SP corridor. BART’s gauge, unlike Caltrain’s, is incompatible with high-speed rail; so, when all is said and done, BART’s once-futuristic technology will be exposed as the dinosaur, while the ugly duckling Caltrain will at last transform into the swan.

Creating swans out of ducklings of course requires money, but money is almost certainly on the way. Fast on the heels of the Workplan released by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has released its draft plan for the Bay Area’s high-speed rail stimulus application, which has been dubbed the Peninsula Corridor Investment Strategy.

MTC envisions a two-phase strategy. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has already prepared a programmatic EIR/EIS, which examined the environmental impacts and benefits of the high-speed rail project at a broader level. CHSRA is now preparing more detailed environmental documents that will assess environmental impacts and mitigation measures on individual segments of the HSR route, for example, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor. This will probably be completed sometime in the next couple of years and will shed light on various other HSR-related infrastructure projects, including: Caltrain stations that will need to be redesigned to accommodate high-speed rail, and various tunneled and elevated segments of track needed to separate the many grade crossings along the Caltrain corridor. These projects are deferred to Phase II. They are not ready to be constructed; indeed, it’s not even clear how much they will cost to build, so we will not pursue ARRA stimulus funds for them.

So what will we seek federal funds for? For specific projects that have already passed through or are exempt from thorough environmental review, or which will be cleared within a couple of years. These projects will be ready for construction, pending detailed design work. The funding allocations are as follows:

Transbay Transit Center, San Francisco: Constructing the above-ground portion of the Transbay Transit Center facility will cost $1.19 billion, and building the subway station box in the first phase of construction will require $400 million extra upfront, but TJPA projects this move will save $100 million over the course of the project. As such, the Bay Area will request $400 million of ARRA money to fast-track the train box. Moreover, $52 million will be requested for design of the 1.3-mile downtown rail extension (DTX), and an additional $205 million toward lengthening the platforms at the Transbay Transit Center, in response to the CHSRA’s demand for 1,312 feet of fully tangent platform (see schematic below, which shows the curvature on the western side of the platforms, and the platform extension eastward). The 250-foot extension increases station length to about 1,750 feet, so it is curious that this relatively short extension generates the need for a disproportionately high amount of additional funding (over half the total to excavate the rest of the train box).  This amounts to a total of $657 million ARRA money requested for Transbay/DTX.

Courtesy of MTC/TJPA.

4th & King, San Francisco: Pending alteration of the DTX track layout to allow trains to move efficiently in and out of Transbay, the platform track allocated to high-speed rail would provide sufficient capacity; but some Caltrain or high-speed runs may terminate at 4th and King as necessary. In any case, $98 million will be requested toward funding a $100 million reconfiguration of the existing Caltrain terminal at 4th & King.

San Bruno: $212 million (out of $275 million) will be requested to construct grade separations at San Bruno Station.

Corridor-wide Improvements: $230 million (out of $231 million) to be requested for positive train control, which, by federal mandate, must be implemented by 2015. $301 million (out of $785 million) will be requested for Caltrain electrification.

San Jose Diridon: This is a high-speed rail station that we have spent noticeably less time on than Transbay. $149 million (out of $150 million) will be requested to expand and reconfigure Cahill Str… ahem, San Jose Diridon Station, which will be served by high-speed rail, Caltrain, Capitols, ACE, Coast Starlight, VTA light rail, and maybe even BART one day. As we discussed several months ago when 2008 Measure B passed, the City of San Jose and SVLG are positively salivating at the idea of creating a Grand Central in the Bay Area, because it would place San Jose in conscious competition with San Francisco (which for years has informally referred to its planned Transbay Transit Center as the region’s approximation of Grand Central). The City of San Jose has partnered (PDF) with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to reimagine “the premier transportation hub of northern California.” The question is: which station, Transbay or Diridon, will be grander?

No, scratch that; the real question is, or should be: how are we going to plan, fund, and build a well-coordinated and efficiently-operated rail corridor?  At this point in time, our regional dollars should be directed entirely toward fulfilling this latter concern, because there is no shortage of engineering issues that lie ahead. To the extent that any of the requested Diridon money, if obtained, goes toward designing the functional layout of the station, that’s fine. But note that Caltrain already plans to reconfigure this station with two additional island platforms and four platform tracks, in addition to a fourth track between the station’s north end and CEMOF, Caltrain’s maintenance facility. As is true with certain other transportation projects planned for San Jose, this station seems to be more about glitz than effective transportation, and using stimulus dollars to design an architecturally grand structure is not really at the top of the list of regional priorities. It is, nonetheless, still unsurprising that this piece of the pie will be requested on San Jose’s behalf. The standard rendering and a diagram below:

Top: courtesy of Newlands & Company. Bottom: courtesy of MTC/City of San Jose.

All in all, these projects total to $3.378 billion, but the Peninsula Corridor Investment Strategy recommends that only $1.647 billion (49%) of that be directed to our high-speed rail stimulus grant application. Even so, $1.6 billion is a full 20% of the $8 billion that the stimulus has allocated to high-speed rail nationally, and many other states are naturally interested in pursuing new rail service. So it remains to be seen how much stimulus money we will actually get.

So many freeways and expressways crisscross the auto-oriented sprawl of Silicon Valley, and they contribute to a physical environment that is inhospitable, forming actual and pyschological barriers to those who attempt to get around on foot or a bicycle. But pedestrians and bicyclists alike will be able to enjoy bridges that will provide additional routes of access over otherwise-impenetrable walls of freeway. Two new bridges at Borregas Avenue in Sunnyvale, crossing over both Highway 237 and Highway 101, have finally opened, and they will allow an anticipated 2,000 daily bicyclists and pedestrians to cross over the freeway instead of traveling a couple miles out of their way to the nearest through street. The spans will also ease access to Sunnyvale Baylands Park and the nearby Borregas VTA light rail station. Then, on April 30, a more visually impressive bike-ped crossing over Interstate 280 will also open, connecting the two separated halves of Mary Avenue, between Sunnyvale and Cupertino near the Highway 85 interchange. The Mary Avenue bridge will be the first example in California of a cable stayed bridge crossing over a freeway. Still further bike-ped improvements are due later this summer in Mountain View, Santa Clara, and San Jose. The Borregas corridor and Mary Avenue bridges are just two components of VTA’s rather extensive 25-year Bicycle Expenditure Plan, which represents a considerable investment in livable streets improvements scattered throughout Santa Clara County. Yours truly may prefer walking and transit over bicycling, but we nonetheless look forward to the day when San Francisco’s Bicycle Plan will have completed its wandering journey through environmental review — so that new bicycle infrastructure in San Francisco can catch up to these improvements in the South Bay.

Regular readers may recall our previous discussion of Transportation 2035, the latest update to MTC’s ongoing efforts on the Regional Transportation Plan. Earlier this year, we wrote a special feature that describes the multifaceted plan, fleshing out how MTC has proposed to allocate $226 billion of local, state, and federal transportation funding that was expected to become available to the Bay Area over the next quarter century. However, changes in the economy and funding climate have necessitated that MTC revise a few aspects of the RTP. The State of California yanked away STA money that funds transit operations; in the Bay Area, this means that local transit operators will lose access to over $55 million that they were relying upon for the remainder of this fiscal year, and no STA funding at all will be provided in upcoming years. Assuming that the state reinstates STA funding in five years, the Bay Area will have lost $1.2 billion of STA and spillover funds in the interim; MTC also projected a $4.5 billion loss in TDA revenue over the 25-year RTP timeline. Another change is VTA’s recent announcement that it can only afford to build the BART extension to San Jose as far as Berryessa Station, postponing the construction of the downtown subway alignment. This, in turn, is connected to the issue of declining transportation sales tax revenue; this is potentially problematic throughout the region, not just in Santa Clara County, although it is not yet clear just how problematic. Considering the new forecasts for transit revenue, the region’s transit operation shortfall will increase from $3.2 to $8.5 billion. This includes a $283 million shortfall for AC Transit, a $442 million shortfall for Golden Gate Transit, a $1.6 billion shortfall for SamTrans, a $1.9 billion shortfall for Muni, and a whopping $3.2 billion shortfall for VTA, which is the worst operation shortfall in the region. Meanwhile, the transit capital shortfall will increase from $16.1 to $17.1 billion. It also takes into consideration that the cost of the BART extension to San Jose has increased from $6.1 billion to $7.6 billion (year of expenditure). Overall, the $226 billion plan has been reduced in size to a $218 billion plan. The plan adds $1.3 billion of revenue: about $280 million in connection with AC Transit’s Measure VV parcel tax, and $1 billion of VTA joint development revenue. It also anticipates $3 billion of funds for high-speed rail, with half coming from Proposition 1A, and the other half coming from the federal stimulus package’s $8 billion allocation to high-speed rail.

Update: For more details about the MTC meeting at which these numbers were revealed, please also see SF Streetsblog’s great write-up.

When Is Transit Service Redundant?

The numbers are grim, and they confirm that properly funding transit in the Bay Area will be a serious issue in the future, as operators struggle to produce a balanced budget each year. But looking beyond the latest set of numbers, the revised RTP does not constitute a substantial change in methodology. It does include a few new recommendations, but we believe that these recommendations — like many aspects of the RTP itself — fall short. In light of the regional shortfalls, MTC says we must investigate “transit sustainability,” carrying the implication that transit service must be cut until it attains a level that is “sustainable.” MTC suggests that such trimming is most natural in places that already enjoy “redundant” transit service. The Bay Area’s approach to transit operation and management has resulted in certain service inefficiencies on the regional level, in that each operator resembles an independent kingdom that cooperates only occasionally and reluctantly with neighboring kingdoms. Some areas receive too little service, while other areas receive more robust service than is arguably necessary. Sometimes, transit services do not quite connect; other times, they awkwardly overlap. At first blush, the idea of regarding the Bay Area’s many transit agencies as components of a larger network, in order to promote efficiency throughout the region, has underlying merit — particularly if it addresses uncoordinated fare policies. Then again, if MTC is so interested in investing money efficiently, then how are we to explain the agency’s longstanding commitment to projects like BART to San Jose and the Oakland Airport Connector? And if MTC is so interested in avoiding redundancy, perhaps it could also have guided us toward a superior regional vision in the first place, instead of scrambling to correct mistakes after the fact when the redundant infrastructure has already been built.

MTC has provided little in the way of precise detail about its regional study — but it did suggest a few initial examples of “redundant” inefficient transit service that it intends to scrutinize. The corridors that the agency has chosen as exemplars of “redundant” service are themselves a cause for concern, in that they either overlook or misunderstand the different roles fulfilled by various transit services. For example, MTC suggests that the Peninsula currently enjoys “redundant” service because SamTrans, Caltrain, and BART all operate in this area. BART and Caltrain between Millbrae and San Francisco do not serve identical corridors, but if you were going to make a redundancy argument on the Peninsula, that would be the place to start. But the purpose and reach of SamTrans bus service should not be perceived as being redundant to BART and Caltrain, which both function as commuter rail on the Peninsula. Even long-distance bus routes that parallel the rail corridors and feed into rail stations carry short haul trips that give those routes a fundamentally different purpose and ridership than the rail corridor they ostensibly duplicate.

MTC also considered the Bay Bridge/Transbay corridor, pointing out that BART, AC Transit’s Transbay buses, and ferries all provide redundant service between San Francisco and the inner East Bay. The Transbay corridor is the highest demand transit corridor in the Bay Area, capturing transit share that well exceeds the regional average. This is not surprising, in light of short headways, and the fact that BART’s Transbay Tube is one of very few places in the Bay Area where a transit trip is legitimately faster than its equivalent trip by automobile. The high demand means that “redundant” service is actually advantageous. We should remark that BART and the Transbay buses are not precisely duplicative, because AC Transit serves many East Bay neighborhoods that are distant from any BART station, thus allowing residents of those neighborhoods to travel to and from San Francisco via transit without driving and without suffering the time and fare penalty associated with transferring to BART. To the extent that BART and AC Transit actually do provide duplicate service in the literal Bay Bridge corridor, the duplicate service is an advantage. AC Transit provides additional seats that supplement BART’s strained capacity at peak commute hours, and many riders actually prefer the bus over BART for its comfort and wireless Internet connection. The services are complementary, rather than competitive. Particularly because the design of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge precludes reintroducing surface rail on the bridge itself, the portfolio of Transbay bus service is one that we would ideally grow, or at least maintain at its current levels — not cut, based on a cursory perception that the service it provides is redundant to BART.

The BART to San Jose Fund

In this sense, MTC’s standard methodology, which prioritizes big-ticket suburban BART extensions above more cost-effective solutions, has not changed. MTC posits that the Bay Area must trim “redundant” transit service. This almost certainly refers to bus routes, which are crucial lifelines for the the transit-dependent — rather than, for instance, underutilized midday BART runs to Pittsburg/Bay Point and Millbrae. One of the great ironies of MTC’s redundancy analysis is that the revised RTP is in part geared toward providing additional funding for BART to San Jose — a project that itself involves constructing grade-separated BART infrastructure that directly duplicates miles of existing standard gauge track through Fremont, Milpitas, and San Jose. Santa Clara County projects a $2 billion shortfall in 2000 Measure A funds. How should this shortfall be filled? The proposal is to use $2 billion of revenue gathered from MTC’s planned network of High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes (click here and scroll down to read more about the HOT network). This is a problematic suggestion on its face, because it is unclear that the HOT lanes will even generate the revenue that MTC has alleged.

Furthermore, applying HOT revenue to fill the Measure A shortfall would constitute a rather startling reversal of policy. MTC itself has articulated an equitable principle that should guide funding choices for HOT revenue: the money that comes from toll lanes in a given corridor should be applied toward transit and other related improvements within that same corridor. For instance, HOT revenues could potentially fund better transit or bicycle/street improvements parallel to the freeway corridor from which those revenues were collected. It could also fill the transit operating shortfalls, which MTC has suggested could be reduced by cutting redundant service. However, many of the HOT lanes planned for Santa Clara County are not in the corridor of the proposed BART extension — for example, the lanes on Highways 85, 87, and 101 (south of Interstate 280 and Downtown San Jose). So there is a danger that HOT lane tolls collected on freeways that are distant from the BART alignment will nonetheless be appropriated in order to deliver the $2 billion necessary to fill the Measure A shortfall, which VTA has devoted primarily to BART. It is not enough, then, that VTA plans to either downscale or indefinitely delay on its promises to construct a full portfolio of transit improvements, all in the name of bringing BART to the South Bay. Now, even HOT revenues — which could nicely supplement efforts to remake the greater Valley into a more transit-oriented place, by investing in local transit and streetscape improvements — have now instead been proposed to shore up Measure A and the BART extension.

MTC has given the public a two-week window in which to comment on its proposed revisions to the Transportation 2035 plan. Comments will be received until 4:00 pm on Thursday, April 8, 2009. You can send a comment via mail to 101 Eighth Street, Oakland, CA 94607, Attn: Public Information; via E-mail to info@mtc.ca.gov; or via fax to 510.817.5848, Attn: Public Information.

Posted in AC Transit, BART, BART to San Jose, Caltrain, Ferries, Freeways, Golden Gate Transit, High-Speed Rail, MTC, Muni / SFMTA, Peninsula, Regional Rail, Regional Transportation Plan, SamTrans, South Bay, Transit Funding, VTA ]]> http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/26/shifting-funds-shifty-priorities/feed/ 8 transbay http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/20/preliminary-injunction-against-warm-springs-denied/ http://transbayblog.com/2009/03/20/preliminary-injunction-against-warm-springs-denied/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:29:26 +0000 Eric http://transbayblog.com/?p=3402 Continue reading »]]> This morning, Judge Frank Roesch (of Alameda County Superior Court) heard arguments in the Lewis v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission case we discussed two weeks ago. The petitioners (former BART directors Lewis and Nakadegawa, and TRANSDEF) sought a preliminary injunction of MTC’s and ACTIA’s total allocation of about $315 million to the BART extension to Warm Springs, seeking to have those discretionary actions reversed as an illegal expenditure of public funds. However, Judge Roesch denied the preliminary injunction and took the case under submission, so none of the funding for BART to Warm Springs has been disturbed. In order to grant a preliminary injunction, Judge Roesch considered the irreparable harm that would be incurred by both parties by granting or not granting the injunction — and he appeared to be sympathetic to MTC’s and ACTIA’s arguments that the irreparable harm to them (by delaying and increasing the cost of the project) exceeded, or at least balanced, the irreparable harm to petitioners by proceeding with the project. Although BART was not listed as a party to the lawsuit, BART was also present and defended the project as being an important source of construction jobs. That said, if money is improperly allocated to a project, declaring the status of that project as shovel-ready is rather beside the point.

Each side also addressed its likelihood of success with respect to the underlying claim. As described in this earlier post, there is a separate argument for each agency. MTC’s $91 million shift from Dumbarton Rail to Warm Springs was permitted if the shift was between projects that are “in the same corridor.” MTC justified its decision to move the funds on the ground that I mentioned at the end of this post — namely, that the legislation governing Regional Measure 2 funds could interpret the phrase “in the same corridor” quite broadly, as relieving congestion in a certain corridor, rather than being physically placed within that corridor. The legislature was interested in decreasing bridge congestion and increasing regional connectivity. Of course, it is very much the case that Dumbarton Rail — which would link numerous disconnected rail operators in the South Bay and is parallel to a bridge — is a superior match to this intention than the BART extension. But the more broadly you interpret the language, the easier it is to argue that MTC’s decision was legitimate.

In the case of ACTIA, the discussion concerned allocation of 2000 Measure B money funds. ACTIA did not have the discretion to allocate money to Warm Springs until full funding was assured for a BART extension into Santa Clara County. The intention has of course been that this would be the full extension through Milpitas and Downtown San Jose, with a terminus in the City of Santa Clara. However, the ballot language indicated an extension into the county was what was needed — implying that only a portion of the extension, as long as it reached Santa Clara County, would satisfy the “full funding assured” requirement. A VTA staff memo  from Carolyn Gonot (PDF) has surfaced indicating that VTA can indeed fund the $1.7 billion extension to Milpitas without the $750 million of New Starts federal funding that the FTA has not yet approved. In other words, the federal grant would be applied just to the next segment of the line, from Milpitas to Berryessa. VTA must also secure the federal grant in order to trigger the flow of funds from 2008 Measure B. (Note, however, that the lawyer on the petitioner’s side conceded that the funding to Milpitas was assured, even though the VTA staff memo was merely that — a memo — but not actually approved by the VTA Board.) Although an extension to Milpitas would include merely one of the six planned stations, it still qualifies as a fully funded extension into Santa Clara County. And that suffices to bolster ACTIA’s discretionary allocation of $224 million to Warm Springs.  Weighing the discussion on both sides about these points, Judge Roesch denied the preliminary injunction.

The Warm Springs challenge is based on two primary arguments. One argument centers on ACTIA’s obligation under Alameda County’s 2000 Measure B. In particular, ACTIA’s Expenditure Plan states that construction funds for Warm Springs may not be used “until full funding for the rail connection to Santa Clara County is assured.” As we reported earlier this week, VTA will apply this year for $750 million of New Starts money from the Federal Transit Administration, in order to build the segment from Warm Springs to Berryessa. These federal dollars account for almost one-third of the cost of the Berryessa extension, and so the complaint filed by TRANSDEF argues that this chunk of money should not be deemed to be “assured” until the federal government actually commits to providing it. Firm financial commitment from the federal government would occur only later, upon execution of a Full Funding Grant Agreement.

The second argument concerns the level of flexibility that MTC has to shift bridge toll revenue between projects. Both Warm Springs and Dumbarton Rail are projects within the Regional Traffic Relief Plan, and thus both are eligible to receive RM2 funds. In addition, MTC is authorized to shift funding between RM2 projects if it determines that a certain project is unrealistic. However, if such funding is shifted, it must be shifted to another project “within the same corridor.” In this case, funding was shifted from Dumbarton, a legitimate transbay corridor, to Warm Springs, which does not lie along a bridge corridor. The two projects serve different purposes. Dumbarton Rail would add an additional east-west transbay rail link; along with a planned intermodal rail/bus hub in Union City, Dumbarton Rail would enhance connectivity for several regional rail services (BART, Caltrain, Amtrak, and ACE) that currently operate in a disjointed fashion in the South Bay. Warm Springs, on the other hand, is a single-station north-south stub extension that would exacerbate BART’s current difficulty with transbay capacity, but without the benefit of enhanced regional connectivity.

Dumbarton Rail alignment; courtesy of BayRail Alliance.

Warm Springs and Dumbarton are in the same general region within the Bay Area, but the relevant question to ask is whether they are “within the same corridor.” If they are, then MTC acted within its discretion by shifting $91 million from Dumbarton to Warm Springs. These two projects will clearly have different effects on transit effectiveness in the region. But a nuance here is that the objective of collecting RM2 bridge toll revenue in the first place was to implement projects that would relieve traffic congestion. It seems then that a reasonable interpretation of “same corridor” boils down to asking whether a certain transit project would have the effect of relieving congestion within the “same corridor” as another transit project. Seen in that light, the correct question to ask is not necessarily whether Warm Springs and Dumbarton are themselves positioned within the same corridor, but rather, whether they would both mitigate congestion in the same corridor. A strictly literal reading of the language “same corridor” seems to suggest that MTC acted in error by transferring the funds; but the latter interpretation weighs more favorably on the side of MTC.

The relief sought in this challenge is an injunction, to withdraw the funding allocations to the Warm Springs extension.

Rendering of Berryessa BART station. Courtesy of VTA.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has already removed $91 million of Regional Measure 2 money that was slated for Dumbarton Rail (thus pulling the plug on that project at least for a couple decades) and reallocated it to fill the funding gap in the Warm Springs BART extension. The cost of the stub line to Berryessa is $2.1 billion; combined with the Warm Springs extension, some $3 billion will be spent to extend BART from its current Fremont terminal even further into the depths of Bay Area suburbia. VTA plans to use the rest of this year to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement while applying for section 5309 New Starts funding from the Federal Transit Administration. It anticipates an FTA Record of Decision in January 2010, and subsequent financial commitment from the federal government (in the form of an executed Full Funding Grant Agreement) is required to trigger the flow of 2008 Measure B sales tax money.

VTA marches forward with the truncated BART extension, but in light of current economic conditions, the budget is unsurprisingly grim — calling into question the agency’s sense of reality: even in these tough times it prioritizes a gold-plated rail extension, when it ought to focus on maintaining and improving the bus, light rail, and commuter rail service upon which the residents and workers of Santa Clara County currently rely. It is not yet clear to what extent this core service will be cut, or by how much fares will be increased, to set the budget right. Sales tax revenue for this fiscal year has been projected to decrease 6.76% from last year, followed by a 5% decrease in FY09-10, and a 3% decrease in FY10-11. VTA will lose over $6 million of State Transit Assistance funds for the latter half of this fiscal year, and as we have remarked before, STA funds are eliminated for subsequent years. VTA projects a $53.1 million shortfall in operating revenue by FY11-12, by which time a $50.1 million operating reserve will have vanished into thin air.