Part I
The organizational audit for the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) presents a picture neither unexpected nor unwarranted. It clearly exposes that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but he may not even be the emperor.
For a good number of years, the insiders, narcissists and clumsy administrators have been plotting their own version of the Big Dig, doling out goodies to local supervisors like gifts to Duke Cunningham from a defense contractor who owns an antique shop. Decisions were made on where to apportion certain transit and bus routes with the most callous and politically-tainted reasoning.
The bureaucratic and political leadership must be held accountable for this betrayal of public trust; hell, they choreographed it. Remember, great trust was placed in this group when the citizens of this county voted in favor of what they thought was an initiative to bring BART to San Jose. That was seven years ago. Today the ones prospering are not commuters, rail advocates, or small business interests, but the people controlling the internal bureaucracy that feeds on itself, answers to no one, and caters to the political winds that blow ill in all directions.
Supervisors Don Gage and Liz Kniss have maintained that they “must” represent their districts. Such rationales are more appropriate to the pork barrel confines of Washington. Local government hopes for much better. Such shenanigans on spending are analogous to the City of San Jose deploying police resources according to the whims of ten district council members instead of the professional judgment of the chief. (In other words, put as many police officers in Almaden as downtown. It’s laughable, right?)
Welcome to the world of the VTA. Mr. Gage and Ms. Kniss should recognize their culpability in this sorry story, beg forgiveness, and then correct the abuses. Their actions, and those of the VTA Board, may well have doomed the legitimate dreams of transit in our region.
Part II follows on Monday: Burns, Guardino and some hope for the future.
Where to begin? The BART project, as currently designed, uses the wrong route and misses the employment area of North San Jose, you know, the area that they want to “upzone.” Transit advocates, such as Bay Rail alliance and VTA bus riders union have written extensively about the BART project, for example here:
http://www.vtaridersunion.org/bartsjx/
and they’ve put foreward a much better alternative here:
http://www.bayrailalliance.org/caltrain_metro_east
Yet despite this, idiots like Carl Guardino keep pushing this needlessly expensive, misrouted white elephant on Santa Clara County. You’d think they would learn something from BART to SFO and last year’s sales tax defeat, but no, they keep on going like the Energizer Bunny.
You misfire a bit with focusing on Kniss and Gage. They both voted no part of the time.
Most others on the board did not.
While I was disappointed in many of their votes, I can’t see why you would focus on Gage and Kniss, but give a free ride to others such as Sandoval, Chu, Williams, and Campos.
Chu, for example, chaired the committee that wrote the expenditure plan blasted in the audit. He also made the motion for its passage.
Most of the board made minimal or no effort to correct things. There’s blame here for a lot more than two people.
Greg Perry
A map comparing Caltrain Metro East and BART-SJ can be seen at http://sfcityscape.com/maps/caltrain_metro_east.html# . Don’t miss clicking on “About this map” on the upper left corner of the page.
Building and operating BART-SJ will result in a financial black hole that will dwarf the waste of running empty buses. We are lucky that local transit advocates have developed the Caltrain Metro East rapid transit concept. Higher ridership, faster, cheaper: pick all three. It is a brilliant idea that has been so far ignored by VTA. Now is the time for that to change.
#3 Seems to be much closer to the mark. Under San Jose’s “leadership” of Gonzales and Chavez and aided by the “followship” of the mutes from San Jose, VTA allowed it self to sink into its current morass. Hopefully Tom will address the additional culprits in this debacle in Part 2. San Jose misused its block of votes because of the bullying tactics of our disgraced former mayor and some of the guilty are still members of the VTA Board. It is time for them to go. Until VTA cleans up it act the voters should not reward it with a single penny more when they come shaking their cup for a new tax.
Just privatize public transportation already. Companies don’t like to lose money. That’s for governments to do.
Why not bart to spartan stadium. that way the thousands of fictious soccer fans can the join the thousands of fictious bart riders!
Check out this website for the Grand Jury Report 2003-2004 – it’s deja vue all over again.
http://www.sccsuperiorcourt.org/jury/GJreports/2004/BoardStructureFinancialMgmtVTA.pdf
Part II: “Guardino and some hope for the future”!!!??
Good God!
How many times can one person be _proven_ a transportation ignoramus
and fiscal charlatan and still have anybody
pay him the slightest attention?
Oh wait. I forgot about Rod Diridon.
As for Michael Burns, he’s doing what he’s paid to do.
VTA’s a highly-compensated walk in the park part-timme job compared to Muni.
All he has to do is like about BART costs and revenues and ridership
once in a while and he’s set for a few hundred k a year.
Nice work if you can get it. I don’t blame him.
Barf: The soccer fans exist as much as the desperation among SJ politicians to feel important in the Bay Area. At least you were half right.
Hey, hey, Napper, I don’t care if the ridership on the rail or buses is low. They must provide the bus services 24/7 and very, very often. That might suade people to rely on mass transit. Dump this Bart proposal nonsense and focus providing bus and rail services. They’re inadequate at this time. Mr. Burns got to go!
VTA and its predecessor name operator of public transit have been a black hole for $$ for the 30 years I’ve been here. We have the lowest % of total revenue from the fare box of any public transit system in NORTH AMERICA, for chrissakes!
At the other end of the spectrum—different political body—we have the most expensive municipal building ever built in NORTH AMERICA. HHMM, do these people talk to each other, or is it in their DNA?
I never understood why VTA needs to run the same big busses on every route, regardless of ridership, or lack thereof; or why all routes must run all day, instead of just during commute hours. What’s wrong with using smaller, more efficient vehicles for low ridership routes, like the ones Downtown DASH uses, or even 10 passenger vans like you take to the Norman WHY??? Mineta Intergalactic airport? Why a huge empty bus; and don’t even get me started on the empty trolleys who trip the lights @ San Carlos and Almaden, making 100 or more cars wait up to 3 minutes @ 5:00 p.m., since the lights don’t start back where they left off, but start at the beginning of the designated cycle.
Why is it taking 3-5 months per station to re-do the trolley stops dowtown. It looks to me like three days of demo and ten days of repouring the concrete and setting the granite, or whatever they use. But people who work on government projects just seem to work slower, even if they are employees of private companies.
Just go look at the guys working their butts off pouring concrete for the CIM condo building @ 3rd & San Fernando, and compare them to the snail-paced workers re-doing trolley stations or the CalTRans slugs oozing ever so slowly widening 87.
Then there’s the platforms themselves. For the cost of rebuilding them for the ten disabled people who may ever ride the trolley, you could get a paratransit vehicle and driver 24/7 for every disabled person in the county.
And just how many riders per month use the trolley, anyway? I work dowtown, walk dowtown a lot, and have NEVER in 33 years seen a disabled person boarding or leaving a trolley or bus. Maybe VTA can publish the number of people served by the trolleys.
And these are the people who are going to bring us BART, and then run it?
BART to downtown is a waste of time and money. We need to build a transit system that serves the places people work and live (they should be able to shop in one of those places). This means BART to Milpitas might be OK, with a light rail connector to downtown, north San Jose, east San Jose etc.
With heavy rail already in place where the land has been bought for BART, we should use the rail that is there, not rip it up to put in something else. Also, with ACE and Capitol Corridor trains already running from the east Bay to Diridon Station, BART would duplicate existing services, a true waste of money.
Tom,
Right on point. When I see buses with one or two passengers on a route that runs every fifteen or twenty minutes or a light rail running the same way I know that the schedule needs to be revised. I remember reading that the VTA is only 22 or 23 percent ridership supported while some in the USA are 80 percent ridership supported. That is such a heavy drain on the local taxpayer. We must, as taxpayers learn to vote NO on bond issues that are just not high priority….And remove managers that do not have our best interest at heart.
Tom,
BART to San Jose, or Santa Clara County for that matter, just doesn’t bode well for those who will pay for it – County taxpayers. Do the math and you’ll see that commuters from other counties will likely amount to 80% or more of ridership. Few in our County will routinely take advantage of BART.
I continue to believe that the distant commuters and Carl Guardino’s constituents should pony up and pay the bill for the BART extension. After all, they will be the major beneficiaries; commuters will save dearly on transportation costs and Carl’s folks will have the benefit of a much larger labor pool.
There is a pack of elephants in the corner that nobody ever talks about in the BART discussion: Most people do not ride public transit even if it’s available. We prefer the technology that allows us to go out to the driveway, get in a vehicle and drive directly to our destination.
There are other elephants in the corner. If given an alternative between BART or a car how many people will volunteer to be crammed into a mass transit vehicle 5 days a week during morning and afternoon rush hour? How many will choose to wait at a bus/rail stop at night in the rain? A used Toyota will solve those problems in a big hurry!
There is also the indisputable fact that most Santa Clara County residents do not live, work or shop within miles of the proposed BART line. Who will ride these trains? People in Almaden? Cambrian? Sunnyvale, Palo Alto or Morgan Hill? Will Mr. Guardino ride BART from his home in Los Gatos to his office in San Jose? Nope, BART won’t go there either. Yet the entire County is being asked to build and fund a system in perpetuity that will likely benefit an extremely small percentage of our population.
Now there’s talk of another tax to support BART. Sorry, no sale. There are just too many elephants piled up in the corner.
Perhaps those millions of BART dollars could be better spent building more freeway lanes on roads that people will continue use if BART is built. In the long run it would seem to be a better investment.
Are any of the readers regular, long distance commuters? I work in SF, live in downtown SJ and regularly ride Caltrain. Yes, I’ve ridden BART, and have to say Caltrain is far better! I’ve found BART to be dirty, crowded, and expensive. And it has to stop at every stop, unlike Caltrain’s baby bullet.
I hope alternatives to BART are explored. It is important we have reliable and affordable public transit options to desired locations. Maybe then folks will consider keeping the car in the garage and using public transit.
The other day, KPFA 94.1 FM had Eugene Bradley, founder of the Santa Clara VTA Riders Union, Jamie Kunz, VTA spokesperson and Stuart Cohen, Executive Director of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition (TALC) talking about VTA, BART and the recent audit.
You can find it archived here:
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=19387
Many of the points made here are valid. However, how many of you have ever spoken at a VTA Board of Directors meeting? Many people I’ve talked to do not know that VTA is managed by a Board, and do not know who represents them in public transit-making decisions. Even those that drive, from who I have talked to, do not think the issue affects them. This is what ultimately breeds dysfunctional, taxpayer-funded agencies like VTA.
One hidden fact every county resident (and those who purchase goods in the county) pays three (3!) sales taxes to fund VTA’s operations and projects:
http://www.vtaridersunion.org/ffa/taxme.html
From reading that audit, it validiated every criticism of VTA out there ever made by the general public, in newspaper editorials, by the Grand Jury in 2004, and by county voters last year thru defeat of Measure A.
It is well past time for every concerned citizen in the Valley to demand reform at VTA. One way to do that is by contacting the VTA Board and other locally-elected officials directly:
http://www.vtaridersunion.org/DIY/
To that end, please join me and my group at next Thursday’s VTA Board meeting at 5:30pm at the County Supervisors’ Chambers at 70 W. Hedding Street in San Jose. We need to make sure VTA actually does everything the audit says. Be warned: Silence will be seen as continued acceptance of our schizoid transit agency.
VTA is a schizophrenic agency. On one side they build and provide public transportation, and on the other, they construct extensive capital roadway projects, the very type of project that causes ridership of public transportation to decline as congestion is eased, and commute times lessen.
The board of directors at VTA is also dis-functional and should be restructured. Board Members should be elected not appointed, as is the current practice. There is a lack of accountability in the board structure, including both past and present members. If not changed, and with billions of $$$ at stake, projects will continue to be built, and decisions will be based, on the political needs of the board-members and by the cities they represent, not the more important need of efficient, economical transportation for the valley.
Has anyone done a VTA global warming audit of empty trolleys and buses versus passenger cars and ParaTransit?
Can you imagine if the inconvenient truth were revealed?
Here’s an inner voice transcript of a garden variety south bay Gore-bot.
“plastic bags bad, paper bags good”
“mass transit good”
“global warming bad”
“VTA mass transit causes more Co2 emissions?”
“!…”
“must.. find… happy… place”
“plastic bags bad, paper bags good”
“plastic bags bad, paper bags good”
“plastic bags bad, paper bags good”
#9 – Peter Giles and Gary Burke were effective and respected leaders of the Manufacturers Group. Carl, on the other hand, is arrogant, uses his position as his own “bloody pulpit”, and has been a real embarrassment to the organization. Isn’t it time for their Board to review his performance and take some action?