Valley rail connection examined by MTC
The Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission voted Wednesday to spend $10 million on an environmental study for a new rail line to ferry commuters from the San Joaquin Valley to the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station, which supporters see as a solution to soul-grinding car trips that clog freeways.
But the commissioners also directed their staff to draft a policy that would set criteria for funding projects outside the nine-county region of the Bay Area. Though everyone approved the environmental review, several commissioners raised questions about the cost and merits of the Valley Link train service, which would open for business by 2027.
Valley Link has support from some politicians and businesses whose employees travel from such cities as Stockton, Tracy and Lathrop, yet it’s drawn criticism from observers who say it could increase sprawl, add to congestion and duplicate
an existing rail system.
Some transportation officials ask whether motorists in the ninecounty Bay Area — whose bridge tolls will pay for the environmental study — should be on the hook for a transit line that only serves the commuters in the valley.
“Going forward, this is going to be a $1.8 billion project,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who is also a commissioner. He noted that the Valley Link tracks will “run virtually parallel” to the Altamont Corridor Express, a commuter rail that connects Stockton to San Jose.
State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco was equally skeptical.
“There are good ways of getting the Central Valley to the Bay Area, but there are also problematic ways,” he told The Chronicle, citing fears that the new BART-like transit system would have low ridership, that it wouldn’t produce dense housing and that the inner Bay Area would have to pay for everything.
But super-commuters who drive from San Joaquin County to the greater Bay Area each day said they would welcome another option.
“I’m all in, bring the rail,” said Tim Smith, who slogs from his home in Fresno, along the I-5, over the Altamont Pass and on I-580 each day to a sales job in Newark — a trip that swells to two and a half hours if he leaves after 4:30 a.m.
The proposed rail link spurred a lively debate before the commission unanimously approved the environmental study, with some board members seeming reluctant to invest in a new transportation system that would likely require a new agency to run it, rather than building better connections between BART and the existing rail.
Their reticence didn’t faze Vice Chair Scott Haggerty, Valley Link’s main booster. He considers it an alternative to last year’s failed proposal to extend BART to Livermore. The BART board shot that idea down in a 5-4 vote, saying it would rather focus on modernizing the existing system before it builds more extensions.
“This was Plan B,” Haggerty said, pitching the rail line as a tool to ease traffic on Interstate 580, making the crosscounty trip a lot quicker for motorists and for truckers heading to Interstate 5.
“This is about freeing up capacity,” he said. “If we don’t support that, we won’t be able to move our commerce.”
Even so, Commissioner Jeannie Bruins of Santa Clara County pointed out that no one has done an official study to find out how the Valley Link would impact I-580. And no one has figured out how much it will cost to operate the new transit system, or who will pay for it, she noted.
The argument among board members illustrated a larger philosophical debate about how to connect transit services throughout the Bay Area mega region, at a time when people are moving farther away from their jobs, to areas where home prices are cheaper.
Some of those people have drastically long journeys to get to work each day. A person riding mass transit from Stockton to San Francisco might take several hours each way, catching the Altamont Corridor Express Train out of Stockton, arriving in Pleasanton more than an hour later and then taking a bus shuttle to BART, to ride for an additional hour.
“The experience for riders today is a fragmented system,” said Egon Terplan, regional planning director at the urban think tank SPUR. He said the organization envisions a transit system where schedules are coordinated and riders don’t have to wait — “which isn’t what we have now.”
Whether Valley Link will help with that goal is unclear. A bigger worry for some urban planners is that it could lure more people out to the Central Valley, causing sprawl if the transit system isn’t coupled with land use policies that encourage dense development.
It could even have the adverse effect of adding more traffic to freeways.
Backers of Valley Link aren’t swayed by those arguments, and many transportation officials say the current network of BART, shuttles and trains isn’t working for people who live in the rural outskirts.
Commissioner Amy Worth, who represents Contra Costa, pointed to a galling statistic that the commission’s executive director, Steve Heminger, presented at the beginning of the meeting.
Since the end of the recession in 2010, the Bay Area has created 700,000 jobs. But it’s only built 100,000 housing units.
So most of those people are coming from far away, Worth noted. And, she said, Bay Area transportation officials have an obligation to help them.