The insanity that is VTA

The closer I look at the VTA (the local transit authority), the less I like it. The VTA seems singularly focused on wasting money in the most gratuitous way possible, getting the least bang for the most buck.

The epitome of this wastefulness is the BART extension project, which just never seems to go away. It's one of those things that seems like a good idea... until you think about it and realize that it's $6 billion and a 20 year delay for a subway from Fremont to San Jose,
through the middle of mostly nowhere. It's the same cost as LA's Subway to the Sea, and for two orders of magnitude less money, the VTA could have been running a commuter rail to Fremont or even Oakland, and in fact the VTA almost did before the BART project came along. But BART is still in the future, and only a relatively small amount of planning money has been spent on it.

The VTA has already wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided projects, such as the light rail system. They sold their 15 year old fleet of 50 high-platform cars and bought a brand new fleet of 100 low-floor cars, despite needing at most 61 of them for peak service. And to allow level boarding with these new cars, they have had to raise the platforms at every single station in the system, at great expense, not to mention inconvenience to passengers when the
stations are closed.

And the design of the light rail system as a whole just seems wasteful: it doesn't really go where people want to go, and it takes a long time getting there. Just look at the absurd shape of the line from Downtown to Alum Rock via Milpitas. Or the long, scenic, and slow windings of the Mountain View line through office-park-land. Or the sidewalk running through Downtown at 10 mph, which makes trips through San Jose infeasibly slow. Or how the single busiest transit corridor in the county, along Santa Clara St and Alum Rock Ave, still doesn't
have light rail service.