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.

Riding the VTA

Now that I'm in Silicon Valley, and temporarily bikeless, my main form of transportation is the VTA. While the buses and light rail are nice, and there's at least some service in most of the area, the system as a whole is just too slow, infrequent, and doesn't go where you want it to. For example, there is no bus that goes from downtown Mountain View to Google. Likewise, there's no bus that goes from where I am to downtown Sunnyvale: I have to take the light rail two stops and then transfer, waiting another 10 minutes in the process, and making a 3.5 mile trip take over half an hour in the best case. Another example: my friend wanted to go to a rollerskating rink in southern San Jose from Mountain View. This rink is conveniently not far from a light rail station, and Mountain View has light rail too, so one might naively think that this is one of those rare trips that is well served by transit. But no, it takes 1h40 from station to station, versus about 40 minutes by car. Taking Caltrain from Mountain View to Tamien and transferring there is generally much better, taking 53 minutes station to station, but that means you have to catch one of the few Caltrains that actually stop at both Mountain View and Tamien, and on the way back, Caltrain is no longer an option, as the last one leaves Tamien at 9:23, and the last train from San Jose is at 10:30 pm. It's just not practical: you can do it, but you'll feel like you're fighting the system the whole way. But I think there's some hope for the VTA, and maybe one day I'll explain what I think needs to be done.