At Least Santa Clara Measure A Failed...

[kevin_standlee]

Yesterday was a primary election that had look-alike candidates and (to me) no compelling issues, and in which I, a person who has voted on every single election for which I've been eligible to vote, was feeling quite apathetic. A sign of that is that the issue I most wanted to hear about was Santa Clara County Measure A, and I live in Alameda County. I am relieved to see that Measure A failed, 42% Yes, 58% No.

Santa Clara Measure A, for those of you who aren't local or weren't paying attention, would have raised the county sales tax by 0.5% as a "general tax" -- that is, the money would have gone into the county's general fund. However, there was a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" agreement in place that would have had the county spend the money on hospitals and transportation. How can I oppose that, you ask? Well, the hospitals issue was okay with me, and had I been there, I think I could have tolerated the originally-proposed quarter-point general tax increase. But "Transportation" in this case means BART, BART, and more BART, no matter what people like Carl Guardino of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group claimed. The "official claim" has always been "a balanced transit spending strategy," but anyone with any sense realizes that this means "starve the entire rest of the county and pour it all into a Fremont to San Jose BART extension."

But aren't you a train and transit buff, Kevin? Wouldn't you want to see more BART? Heck, you live in Fremont, so wouldn't this be of use to you personally?

I'm an enthusiast for trains and rail transit. I think BART works okay, and use it myself when it's practical to do so. But what I am not is a "foamer" who loves any new rail build, not matter how foolish or inefficient it is. And make no mistake, nearly any BART extension is a loser in my book. (I could probably work up enthusiasm for a Geary Street subway in San Francisco, but I doubt that will every happen.) I'm a transportation logistics engineer, and I'm a fan of things that work. In my job, I wouldn't dispatch a shipment by overnight air freight if sending it by surface truckload would get it where it needed to go when it needed to be there. And BART is very nearly the ultimate case of wrong-mode thinking.

BART is a heavy-rail subway or "metro." Such systems, like the New York subway and the London Underground, are absolutely vital for the health of the heavily-urbanized cities they serve. I have no doubt that San Francisco would not have thrived without BART to feed tens of thousands of workers into and out of the City each day. But using metros as medium-distance commuter trains is madness. BART already sprawls -- although it has relatively few lines, it covers a lot of ground. See this map of transit systems shown at the same scale to see what I mean. BART is more spread out than the New York subway, and almost more than the London Underground.

Metros are the wrong mode of transportation for long commutes through sprawling suburbs. Such commutes are much better served by "conventional rail" systems such as the Bay Area's Caltrain commuter rail that connects San Jose and San Francisco. Extending BART to San Jose (and the more wild-eyed extensions I've heard, like Stockton or even Sacramento) makes as much sense as extending the New York Subway to Boston or the London Underground to Birmingham.

In the case of the South Bay (including southern Alameda County), I believe that the best thing we could do would be to spend a fraction of the money that a BART line would cost to rebuild and expand the conventional rail lines already in place and establish a commuter rail system connecting San Jose with Southern Alameda County, coming at least as far as an intermodal station (where people could transfer from/to BART if necessary) at Union City. Land is already set aside for this station. Union City wants to build it. Santa Clara County Valley Transportation Agency already owns the right of way -- they bought it from Union Pacific for the BART line. Such a service ideally should be integrated with the Dumbarton Bridge rail service restoration, and I think the whole thing should be run by Caltrain.

Now I have no great love for Caltrain. During my three years as a member of its Citizens Advisory Committee when I lived in Santa Clara County, I could see how badly managed it was. However, the only way we can be somewhat sure that such a new commuter-rail service would properly integrate with the existing rail system would be for it to be under a single agency. In this Balkan States of transit, the last thing I want to propose is yet another independent transit agency.

Actually, the more radical proposal -- unlikely to ever happen -- would be for BART to take over Caltrain, repaint the trains, and figure out some way to integrate the systems' fare structures and schedules. BART the train-running agency is not the same thing as BART the custom-built-incompatible-with-anything-else metro technology. BART already operates the Capitol Corridor trains (which are all but commuter trains between Sacramento and the Bay Area), and runs them reasonably well. They actually do know how to run a railroad.

Santa Clara County has already dedicated a lot of money to transit. Much of it has been poured down a BART-to-San Jose rathole. We could have already had a conventional rail service connecting the Fremont-Union City area to San Jose years ago. The equipment had been ordered, even. But the BART-blinkered politicians stopped the order and diverted all the resources to "BART someday."

Well, I say we don't spend another dime on BART extensions, and I urged my friends in Santa Clara County to vote no on A, as did most of the actual transit-advocacy groups covering that area. I'm happy to see that the voters of Santa Clara County have said, "Not this time."

Meanwhile, on the subject of low voter turnout, have a look at the Santa Clara County Election Results and scroll clear down to the final result:

Non Partisan MEASURE M

Precincts Reporting 2/2 100.00%
BONDS YES 6 60.00%
BONDS NO 4 40.00%
Total 10

Yes, this appears to be an election where only ten people voted on a bond measure for a small school district in Southern Santa Clara County. Ten people! With that small an electorate, why bother having a school board? And in this case, since 55% was required for passage, you can certainly see how every single vote mattered. Had one less person voted Yes, the measure would have failed.

Update, 13:50: Ah, I get it now. According to the district web site for the school district to which Measure M applies, the district is mostly in San Benito County, with a tiny bit in southern Santa Clara County. The results I quoted above are only for the two precincts in Santa Clara County and do not include the San Benito County votes.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I voted for Measure A. I want BART down here in San Jose.

Would it not be more accurate to say that you want a fast, frequent train service that starts in San Jose and ends in downtown San Francisco and Berkeley, and that runs until late at night, preferably after midnight? There is no law of nature that says that BART is the only way to provide this.

For the amount of money already spent on the overbuilt BART extension to SFO (which you'll note is carrying nowhere near as many people as was claimed it would), we could have electrified Caltrain and extended it to downtown San Francisco (connecting to BART there with a walkway between the Transbay Terminal and the Embarcadero BART station), and bought enough equipment to run it every 15-20 minutes from 5 AM to Midnight. Oh, and the trains would probably have swoopy noses on them too. Appearances seem to be very important to many people.

I'm not saying that BART doesn't work well. What I'm saying is that it's like buying a Formula 1 racecar to commute to work -- it's too expensive and temperamental for the service involved. We can get the same or better service for a lot less money and much faster. If San Jose's mayor had not decided that BART was the only thing that he wanted, the South Bay would already have rail connections to the East Bay, and I think the electrification and extension of Caltrain to downtown San Francisco might be under construction right now. Instead, we have "BART sometime in the late 2020s."

It's this perception that BART and only BART is capable of providing the level of service you want over which I despair sometimes. It's not the BART technology that's providing that service, but the dedicated funding that pays for every-20-minute service on the lines.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, based on the way BART works, you'll need to vote for the next half-cent, the half-cent proposed two years after that, the full-cent two years after that, and the property tax increase after that; also, you'll have to agree to destroy all local transit service other than BART. Oh, and you'll need to wait until about 2025, possibly later, to start riding the service.

BART extensions generally cost at least twice (and probably more like four times) what they say they will cost, take around twice as long to build as they claim, and carry a lot fewer passengers than they claim. That is one of the reasons the federal government de-funded any further expansions.

If you actually want a working transit extension in your lifetime, you'd be better off pressuring local politicians to fund electrification of Caltrain and services such as "Caltrain Metro East" as proposed by BayRail Alliance, and by voting against BART extensions that are less about providing transit and much more about providing hefty fees for Bechtel. If the politicians don't hear from voters in their own jurisdiction, they'll continue to be swayed primarily by industry hacks like the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, who promote sales tax increases for you while lobbying for sales tax exemptions for themselves.

As you can tell, I feel pretty strongly about this. This was one reason that during the run-up to ConJose, I did not my name used whenever we were dealing with the Mayor's office or anyone in city officialdom. I thought there was a non-zero chance that San Jose Mayor Gonzales might remember my highly critical comments made before the Valley Transportation Authority while the TV cameras were rolling. (As I recall, I even managed to get quoted on KCBS radio that time, mainly because (a) I was fortunate to be one of the early speakers, so they could file the story in time to make the afternoon feed, and (b) I can carefully arranged my 90 seconds in a series of short sound-bites, suitable for quoting in the media.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

One wonders how we got BART at all.

The real public policy crime was that they destroyed an existing transit system in the 1950s that had to be replaced, at vastly higher expense, by BART. You may not be aware of it, but there used to be an electric train system that crossed the bay (on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge), with trains arriving in downtown San Francisco every thirty seconds (a headway that BART is incapable of matching; I can explain why if you want to know). You used to be able to get on an electric train in downtown SF and ride it all the way to Chico. BART actually uses part of the old right-of-way out in the Concord area. And while this is old news, it's indicative of the kind of thinking that goes into that system. Never improve an existing system: replace it with a gold-plated system at ten times the expense.

1) more frequent service including regular BART-like evening service;

This is likely, even without additional funding, because the operating costs of electrified service are lower than the current service and because the trains can run faster. (Even if you don't increase the current 79MPH top speed, the average speed will go up because electric trains can accelerate/decelerate faster.) So what, you ask? Well, if you can run the trains quicker, you can get more "turns" out of the same number of train sets and train crews. That, by the way, is why there are more trains running on Caltrain nowadays than there were a few years ago; funding wasn't increased, but the speeds were increased, so they're getting more trains with the same money.

2) plugging of the gap between the downtown SF train and BART stations;

This is part of the Caltrain electrification and the replacement of the Transbay Terminal, and it's also tied up with the California High Speed Rail project. (This, BTW, is why I'm also irritated that the HSR bond vote keeps getting postponed.) Caltrain would extend to the Transbay Terminal, with an underground walkway connecting it to the Embarcadero BART station.

3) an equal-to-#1 level of service along the Capital Corridor at least as far as the Fremont station;

This can be purchased for a small fraction of the cost of BART, and be running sooner. The equipment for the first stage was on order but was canceled by Gonzales. Yes, the initial service would not have been that every-20-minute service you want, but it would have been running now and improvements in the service could be purchased incrementally. Or are you saying "I want only a good solution twenty years from now, or no solution at all"? Because that's what holding out for BART-or-nothing is going to do.

4) plugging of the gap between that station and the Fremont BART station.

This is part of a proposal that Union City has been plugging away at (no thanks to Fremont residents who oppose it) to re-route the Capitols route just past the Centerville station onto the former Western Pacific tracks, allowing them to build an intermodal station at Union City BART. Forget Fremont; this would be a joint station between BART and the Capitol Corridor (and Dumbarton Rail, and ACE) similar to how the Capitols and BART share a station at Richmond (and a little bit like how the two services are close to each other at Colliseum; however, the connection at Colliseum involves a long walk, unlike Richmond, where the platforms are pretty close to each other).

Anyway, my point is that pieces of all of the things you want have been moving along, albeit slowly. And the thing that has slowed them down most of all has been that BART sucks away funding for everything else. If it hadn't been for the massive money-magnet operating at Lake Merrit, many of the improvements you'd like to see would already be running.

However, your attitude is similar to that of a large chunk of the electorate. I don't blame you for feeling the way you do. I used to think that way, too, until I started studying it and realized what a mess BART is.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

0) This makes it sound as if the electric train system (of whose existence I was aware, thanks) was destroyed for the purpose of eventually replacing it with BART. I do not believe this was the case.

I do not meant to imply this. What I mean is that incredible short-sightedness of public officials is nothing new. If they had invested a small fraction of the money in improving the existing system, we would have had a better, faster, system that served more places.

Electric train systems blanketing the neighborhoods were fine (though they caused more traffic congestion than buses, one of the reasons they were shut down),

I'm not talking about streetcar systems, which is what you seem to be talking about, but electrified interurbans that mostly ran on reserved rights of way and made fairly decent speeds, especially between cities. But I'm not surprised if you think I mean dinky Toonerville Trolley-streetcars, as most people have no idea what I'm talking about. And entire transportation infrastructure was completely destroyed, to the extent that only a few people like me -- who are treated as cranks -- even know it existed.

but

pace Roger Rabbit, their disappearance came for more complex reasons that the sinister machinations of evil rubber villains.Yes, it was more complicated than that; however, the "streetcar conspiracy" was in fact proved true in a court of law. Unfortunately, under the law, the penalties were minor -- small fines -- and thus the companies found guilty of conspiring to destroy our transportation infrastructure could simply absorb the fines as a cost of doing business.

In my opinion, besides the deliberate attempts to destroy the existing systems, public opinion was for it because the old systems were dilapidated and were perceived to be old-fashioned, and people had got it into their heads that "if we just pave everything in sight, we'll bring on Utopia." Eventually we learned that was wrong -- although there are clearly people today who still think that is so -- but by then it was too late.

If these things are put on a ballot, I'll vote for them. If they're not put on a ballot, I'll vote for what is put there.

You're not getting it. The reason you're not getting sensible proposals like I mentioned is because your elected officials aren't letting you do so. The failure is not of the proposals, but of bone-headed politicians who are picking the technically worst proposals before you.

The solution to this is not to vote for bad proposals when they're placed in front of you, but to lobby your elected officials for better proposals. Without lots of people telling these idiots that they want good proposals, the politicians are probably going to proposal the things that the well-funded lobbyists from Bechtel and the Silicon Valley "Leadership" Group (Their motto: "Taxes for thee but not for me") tell them to do. The politicians may still made dumb decisions, and we may still end up with gold-plated systems that cost too much and don't do as much as they should, but if we don't tell the officials anything different, they'll definitely pick the bad solutions.

More or less, you're saying, "I'll only buy a Ferrari because the dealer won't sell me anything else," while I'm saying, "If nobody buys the Ferrari, the dealer will get smarter and offer more affordable options that get the job done just as well." Or possibly, "I buy bad formula fantasy books because that's the only thing the publishers print, and there's nothing I can do about it," rather than, "I won't buy a bad product, even if it's the only thing being offered, but instead I tell publishers, 'If you were to publish X, Y, and Z, I'd buy it.'"

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

If these politicians are so "bone-headed," then lobbying them will not produce more sensible proposals.

If enough people do so -- enough to convince them that staying in office depends upon it -- then they'll change their minds. If instead an insignificant number of people say anything, all the politicians hear are a few well-paid lobbyists. In that case, it's no wonder they pick stupid proposals.

Should I lobby George Bush to get out of Iraq? Will he suddenly have a change of heart and come to his senses because I write him a letter? No, the purpose of lobbying him would be to make me feel virtuous.

No, it's not worthwhile here, because you live in a jurisdiction that he's already written off. But, to continue your thought, if a huge number of Republican voters living in states that actually matter to him were to make it clear though their actions (particularly polling numbers) that he'd lost his political base, then he might change his actions. More importantly, since he can't be re-elected, the important thing would be to frighten every Republican senator and represenative into thinking that their President is going to ruin their re-election chances. For the moment, the President cannot rule by decree, and the Congress could order the troops home -- after all, they (for now) still control the purse strings.

However, the opinions of people in states that he'll never control and congressional districts that will always vote Democratic are meaningless.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Similarly, if these politicians are so wedded to BART, you're not going to change their minds.

If enough of the people who actually vote in their jurisdiction who can make a difference make it known, then they'll change their minds or they won't get re-elected.

(This is less effective for lame ducks; however, I note in passing that the voters of San Mateo County sensibly did not vote for Mike Nevin, who as much as any other San Mateo County politician managed to saddle that county with a BART extension that (predictably) cost far more than planned, took longer, and doesn't provide very good service. It also destroyed a good, inexpensive connection between Caltrain and the airport. It also is doing everything it can to wreck the rest of San Mateo County's transit system, as it sucks away all of the rest of the county's transportation funding. Oh, and hardly anyone rides it, either, which is why it's costing so much money. BART doesn't really care; the sweetheart deal they signed allows them to simply charge San Mateo for all of the cost overruns.)

Instead, you cower in fear that Ron Gonzales will find out you're running a convention in his city.

I cannot help that individual elected officials act unethically, or at least may be suspected of unethical behavior.

If you're so well-versed on this, you run for office. Or find someone who shares your views who will. Or start a campaign for an initiative proposal. Or something. Whatever it is, I'll vote for it.

You know, I've seriously considered it. However, I don't have enough money or connections, and moreover, I would certainly have to completely drop all of my other activities, including SF fandom, because such work would completely absorb me. As it is, when I lived in Santa Clara County, I served a term on the Caltrain Citizens' Advisory Committee -- although I knew I wouldn't be re-appointed because I criticized the elected board and railroad staff and didn't act like a good little foamer the way they expected when they appointed me. I'm a member of BayRail Alliance, one of the groups that attempts to lobby for more sensible rail and transit solutions in the Bay Area, and keep sending in my dues to help fund this. I've appeared before public boards from time to time and made my opinion known. But since I now live in Alameda County, my voice is less meaningful to San Mateo and Santa Clara County, so all I can do is pay dues to groups that do support causes I support and lobby my own local politicians on local issues, like the rebuilding of the tracks in Fremont-Union City to support the Union City intermodal station.

To the extent I can do so, I am participating. I admit that I've so far placed my participation on SF fandom as a higher priority than entering mundane politics at the level you propose.

Interesting that you should make a parallel of buying bad fantasy books, because in fact I don't. It doesn't seem to have increased the flow of good books any. Instead, I get editors and writers loudly yelling at me insisting that their lousy books are in fact good.

Okay, you win. It's impossible for anyone to make a difference whatsoever. Why bother voting, anyway? Everyone knows that everything is already decided in advance, the whole game is rigged, everything is controlled by Secret Masters, everything is hopeless, we're all doomed.

Happy, now? You're saying that nobody can possibly make a difference, ever. If that's the case, why bother even having a democracy?

Of course, I think a whole lot of people -- probably a majority of people in this country -- have already reached that conclusion.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Your comments about Bush are quite divorced from reality, for the simple but sad reason that he is quite divorced from reality.

As long as he continues to have a majority in both houses of Congress continue to vote for his spending plans, it doesn't matter how much he is divorced from reality. If he loses the support of a majority, then he won't be able to spend any money, because Congress won't vote the appropriations.

That is unless of course you think he's going to start ruling by decree and ignore Congress entirely and that the country will be too cowed to do anything about it. I'm not saying that's beyond the realm of possibility, but I wasn't really expecting it.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I have news for you. He already has.

And the Congress, which still consists of a majority of his own party, lets him get away with it and continues to fund him. That's not the same as "ruling by decree," because the Congress could stop him if they wanted to do so, by turning off the money. Appropriation bills still have to originate in the House of Representatives, last time I looked.

And apparently the country is cowed, because by standards that would impeach a president for fudging over sex with an intern, this guy and his saturnine veep should both already be so gone we'd forget they ever held office.

And if the President was of the opposite party as the one controlling Congress, you're right that they would have been impeached. They wouldn't have been removed from office, however, as neither party has held the necessary two-thirds majority to do so for a while. It's simply not that easy to remove a President from office; that's why it has never happened. The very fact that the USA is split approximately 50-50 right now makes such action impossible.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Impeachment is not a partisan issue.

It has been all but one time it has been deployed against a president, including the first time a president was impeached.

However, I -- and I'm a registered Democrat, by the way -- objected at the time to the foolishly partisan way in which impeachment was used against Clinton. The somewhat ironic thing is that the presidents who have been impeached have not (in my opinion) committed offenses sufficiently serious to justify removal from office, while the ones who have (Nixon, possibly the current Bush -- yes, I know you're Absolutely Convinced the way I'm certain that further BART extensions are destructive to local transit) have not. Nixon, of course, wasn't stupid (arrogant, foolish, yes; not stupid), could count heads, and realized that he'd lost his own party's support and the minimum one-third he would have needed to survive an impeachment trial, so he bailed and preserved his pension.

If you think I'm defending the current administration, you're mistaken. I'm very unhappy about the harm the current administration has done to this country both internationally and domestically. But I can also count heads in Congress, and as long as at least one-third of the Senate continues to support the President, he will continue to serve out his term.

I'm interested in seeing who the Republicans put up as their next candidate. Politically I think this country is still a coin-flip, split very evenly (the "red-blue" divide), so any given Republican could still beat any given Democrat.

I have not yet given up hope on American democracy. However, I think that a lot of people on both the left and the right have done so.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Do you actually think the failure of Measure A will result in an electrified CalTrain?

Not by itself. Nothing gets solved that easily. But for the first time in years, some pretty self-satisfied politicians and lobbyists have seen that they cannot assume that you can slap "BART" on a proposal and of course everyone will vote for it. Finally, people are starting to see that they're being sold a bill of goods here. And since Gonzales is out and leaving under a cloud, possibly some of his malign influence on local tranit issues will dissipate.

It's not as though everyone in Santa Clara County politics is BART-blinkered. In fact, several supervisors have spoken well of sensible projects, and usually it's only the supervisors in the Milpitas area snd San Jose itself who are BART-and-nothing-else. This is partially because the other supervisors are not completely blind to the fact that their districts will suffer badly as all of the funding gets sucked into a sinkhole underneath downtown San Jose.

Councilman Perry of Mountain View has been fighting a good fight against bad projects, and I wish him well. (It makes me wish I still lived in Mountain View so I could vote for him.) He was quoted as being amazed that A went down to defeat, despite the pro-A forces outspending the rag-tag group of transit advocates who opposed it about 100-1. (Yes, you heard me right: most pro-transit lobby groups were opposed to Measure A.)

If not, I see no reason to have voted against Measure A.

Do you think that passing A would have resulted in BART in San Jose? If so, you're fooling yourself. BART will cost a vast amount more than the politicians are telling you -- every BART extension always has. You'd need to spend every bit of that half-cent, and probably a couple of cents more, and possibly slap a property-tax increase on top of that, before you have a chance of actually coming up with the money it will actually cost to build it. (That assumes that people don't change their spending habits based on such a large tax gradient, which is a bad assumption -- raise taxes high enough and people will take their spending elsewhere.) And that doesn't even deal with how much it will cost to operate it. And don't let anyone tell you that "the profits will pay for everything." That's what's destroying San Mateo County's transit district.

Now, I'm not arguing against subsidizing transit -- no transit system in the USA will ever be profitable as long as the roads are so heavily subsidized. What I'm saying is that there are degrees of subsidy, and that you have to draw a line somewhere. A ten or eleven percent sales tax is, in my opinion, too large a price to pay.

I'm curious to see if the voters of Santa Clara County, if presented with the true cost of a BART extension -- not the politically watered-down costs being fed to the newspapers -- would really be willing to tax themselves that much. Somehow, I doubt it.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I am skeptical of the claims that it would be so prohibitively expensive to build and run some BART. If this were true, then this transit system I occasionally ride must be an illusion in my mind that does not actually exist.

I didn't say it was impossible. I said it was horribly expensive, and that it would suck away all of the rest of the transit funding for other projects that are worthy and move more people.

And this is not just theoretical. It's happened recently. It's happening right now in San Mateo County. They committed themselves to the BART-SFO extension. The San Mateo County Transit Authority "loaned" (=gave away; there is no way BART will ever pay back the interest-free load) many millions of dollars to BART. The entire project's books were cooked from the start -- for instance, the planning documents assumed that every single rider on Caltrain would transfer to BART at Millbrae. Instead, relatively few people transfer there; most continue on to 4th & King, even though most of them have to ride a bus or streetcar to their eventual destination, because it's still faster than BART. The sweetheart deal effectively allows BART to decide how much service to run and then send San Mateo County the bill. The TA is facing big trouble now as instead of being able to provide improved local bus service and put more money into services that would serve more people, like Caltrain and the Dumbarton Rail project, they have to keep shoveling more money into keeping BART running.

It's not that you can't build these BART projects. It's that they destroy everything else around them. You're only seeing the complete projects; you're not understanding the opportunity cost. And the relative costs are vast: For just the cost overruns on the BART-SFO project, Caltrain could have been electrified already.

And this doesn't mean I won't ride the system. That's silly; when it's raining soup, grab a bucket. But I know, because I've seen it, what a financial disaster these BART extensions are to the counties that saddle themselves with them.

One of the main reasons that Caltrain electrification (a relatively inexpensive project that pays back some -- not all -- of its construction costs in reduced operating costs) is stalled is that the counties involved have all of the money that could be spent on it tied up in the bottomless BART account.

These opportunity costs are invisible to you because you aren't particularly interested in studying the issues. The reason you see me wringing my hands over this is because I have done the reading, and I have seen the harm done. The reason you see every transit-advocacy group in the area opposing further BART extensions is because they have done so. We know how destructive these things are to every other reasonable project around them. You don't care. What you appear to be saying is, "I don't care if there is any other form of transit in my county. Buses, light rail, whatever, serve Other People Who Are Not Me. The only thing I want is a BART train to Berkeley, and the rest of the people in this county can go jump off a cliff."

And a whole lot of other people around here clearly feel the same way. They don't realize that when you vote for a BART extension, you vote against a bunch of other projects. You can't have them all, no matter what the politicians say. They put together transportation packages that say, "BART, Caltrain, light rail, and bus service," but once the tax is there they say, "Oh, look; there's no money for anything except BART. What a surprise! We never knew! Oh, and there's still not enough money for BART! You need to pass another tax."

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

So do you have opinions on the Denver mass transit plans?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

No, not at this time, for I haven't studied them the way I have those in the Bay Area.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

(One is mildly interested to read your transit rants, if only for revelation of character, but a one-sided debate is hard to make sense of.)