BART opening long awaited
Aftermany delays, riders and Fremont residents hope relief is on the way
FREMONT — For BART riders and Fremont residents, the opening of Warm Springs/South Fremont station on Saturday — more than two years after officials had hoped to start service — can’t come soon enough.
“We’ve been watching for a year now, and as they’ve had their delays, it’s like ‘Oh, come on, hurry up and bring it online,’ ” said Fremont resident Ian Venechanos.
Venechanos, like several of his neighbors, has been anxiously anticipating the opening of the new station, which he hopes will alleviate some of the parking backlogs that clog the area around the original Fremont BART station each weekday. The Warm Springs station will feature more than 2,000 new parking spaces, along with 42 electric-vehicle charging stations.
Others are looking forward to cutting a few miles from their daily commute, or paying less to get to or from the Fremont station each day. San Jose State University student and Walnut Creek resident Adrian Santos uses a ride-booking service once a week to commute from his school
to the Fremont station before catching a train home. He thinks using the Warm Springs station will cut down his Uber costs by at least a few dollars each trip.
“I don’t want to keep on spending like 20 bucks to come here every single time,” Santos said. “So, (even) if it cuts it down by two or three dollars or anything, that would help a lot.”
Not everyone is jumping for joy. Fremont resident Parveen Jindal uses BART to commute to San Francisco, but now he’s worried about finding a seat. The agency estimates between 4,700 and 7,200 passengers will board at the new station on weekdays, with ridership building over time. BART plans to add six train cars to the line to accommodate new customers.
“It’s a good development, because people do want connectivity across the Bay Area,” Jindal said. “But, the BART system needs to think about increasing the capacity or the frequency of the trains.”
The station’s opening comes nearly two and a half years behind schedule, but that’s a blip compared with how long it’s been in the planning stages. BART completed the project’s first environmental review in 1992, but a lack of funding and legal challenges from the city of Fremont kept the project from getting off the ground for more than a decade.
“It got contentious,” said former Fremont Mayor Gus Morrison.
At first BART planned to build elevated tracks through the city’s Central Park, which many residents consider to be Fremont’s “crowning jewel.”
“They were trying to do what was cheapest, which they probably should, and we were concerned about the impact on the park, which we thought would be great,” Morrison recalled. “We thought that a train every six minutes riding over our most precious place, Central Park, was wrong.”
The city ultimately sued, and lost. But opponents succeeded in convincing BART to dig a tunnel underneath the park instead, if the city agreed to pay for a proposed Irvington station, said BART Director Thomas Blalock, who represents riders in Fremont. The Irvington station would be located halfway between the Fremont and Warm Springs stations at the southwest corner of Washington Boulevard and Osgood Road.
But that negotiation may not have been possible without a growing awareness about the need to extend BART to San Jose, Blalock said. With the dotcom boom heating up the region’s economy and traffic worsening on interstates 680 and 880, Blalock said it was clear to commuters they needed another alternative.
“BART is the only other activity that can nip the peak off the peak hour,” Blalock said. “It can divert traffic on both 680 and 880 in the morning and evening commutes.”
In 2000, BART and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) collaborated on an extension from Fremont to Milpitas, which would eventually reach Santa Clara via San Jose. The same year, voters approved a sales tax measure in Alameda County to fund the Warm Springs station. It would take another nine years, however, before the project broke ground.
Struggling to find the funding, BART broke the project into two large construction contracts — one to dig out a subway under Central Park and the other to build the station, tracks and related systems. Despite some challenges caused by nesting migratory birds at the work site, and a learning curve associated with a new kind of sealant used for the tunnels, the first contract to build the subway finished on time and within its budget, said Paul Medved, BART’s project manager for the Warm Springs extension.
But the Great Recession hit around the same time shovels were hitting the ground at the subway site in 2009. Although that contract wasn’t affected, BART struggled to close a roughly $100 million funding gap to build the station and tracks, and almost another two years passed before the agency could award the contract. But money wasn’t the only problem.
It took nearly a year and a half longer than expected for the contractors, a joint venture called Warm Springs Constructors, to complete a final design of the new station and track systems. Then problems with the ventilation system in the subway stymied engineers, Medved said, adding that safety and system testing were also way behind schedule.
“The whole year of 2015 was watching this testing phase by the contractor play out in slow motion,” Medved said. “They had a difficult time getting things to work nicely together.”
Then things got worse. There were problems with the two main high-voltage lines that run power to the stations between Union City and Fremont, which kept shorting. By springtime last year, both lines were failing constantly. Without reliable power, the train systems couldn’t be properly tested for safety, leading to a fully crafted station sitting nearly empty for months.
BART flew in specialists from Connecticut to patch the systems but ultimately ended up replacing the cables between June and September. When there were problems integrating the new systems with BART’s older infrastructure, the contractor supplied software patches. The last several months have been focused on getting the train control system to work, Medved said.
Now the kinks have been worked out, and those who’ve watched the station progress from a sketch on a map to a physical station are thrilled. Blalock called it “history in the making” and an environmentally friendly alternative to driving down the “nightmarish” Nimitz Freeway. Morrison said he was “pleased as punch.”
“Son of a gun, it took forever, but it’s almost done,” Morrison said. “It’s a milestone.”