more commentary BART to SFO a Success!

June 30, 2004; — Santa Clara County's civil grand jury is questioning the need for a BART extension to San Jose. They are focusing on the short-term economic picture in the Bay Area as the basis for their recommendation. But planning for public transportation based on the short-term is short-sighted. Transit projects must be developed and built in the present to provide for a better future.

Santa Clara residents voted resoundingly for the BART extension in 2000 when the high tech, dot-com boom was peaking. They saw the need to prepare for the future today. While we have gone through an economic downturn in the recent past, we are and I predict, will continue to see significant recovery.

No one can dispute that the Bay Area economy is growing again and will continue to grow along with our population. There will always be more people who want to live here, more businesses that want to locate here and more traffic than we know what to do with. How will Silicon Valley businesses survive without BART and the other transit systems planned by the Valley Transportation Authority, which is the agency responsible for building the South Bay BART extension.

Also indisputable is BART's value as a significant part of the alternative to our traffic woes. With trains running every 15 minutes or less during commute hours BART makes hundreds of round trips each business day carrying hundreds of thousands of commuters. Other heavy rail solutions such as the ACE train, Capitol Corridor and Caltrain cannot hope to achieve that kind of frequency or number of round trips. In addition, BART is often one of the only solutions for late night or off-hour travelers.

Additionally, the recent Environmental Impact Report predicts the BART extension will take as many as 84,000 people off our crowded roadways in 2025. Think about it! That’s a significant reduction in the number of vehicles polluting the South Bay’s precious air. Without BART, the South Bay would get the brunt of the pollution caused by those additional trips. That’s because reports show the vast majority of drivers will head to the South Bay to work each morning from their East Bay and San Joaquin Valley homes. And given the traditional wind patterns, the smog they produce will blow down to San Jose, Morgan Hill, San Martin and Gilroy to settle like a dirty blanket.

It takes vision and optimism to plan for a future that seems just a distant dream, but much of what makes the Bay Area special is the tremendous vision of our residents and business and community leaders. Now is the time to support an efficient, effective, environmentally friendly travel alternative like the BART, if we want to give commuters a route around gridlock and help control air quality in the future. We must build now to keep an additional 84,000 people off the roadways. If not, our successors will look back and wonder how we could be so short-sighted.

—Tom Blalock