The BART-SJ extension includes a redundant station at Santa Clara, duplicating the existing Caltrain service. At last month’s VTA Board meeting, Director Bob Rennie asked staff the following:
Rennie: We’ve had a number of people come to our Board meeting and ask why are we spending the extra money to extend to Santa Clara? I’ve never seen a trade-off of other options. If we have not done a trade-off analysis, are we going to do a trade-off analysis? Can we do a wider station at Diridon instead?
VTA Staff (Dennis Radcliffe): Many of those things were considered, but generally we are not exploring any of those…The Santa Clara station provides parking that we’re not providing at the downtown station.
I know this is pointing out the obvious but….if VTA wants to provide more parking at that location they can build a new garage at the Santa Clara Caltrain station and have those riders board Caltrain.
[…] VTA says it needs a BART station at Santa Clara to provide parking (Systemic Failure) […]
one seat ride is still important to entice park and riders. they’re building the maintenance facility a stone’s throw away so the line’s already being built basically that far anyway, and the station will be useful should any real links to the airport materialize in the future.
@JM the BART yard (not maintenance facility) could’ve and should’ve been built over in the industrial area near the Berryessa station.
Further: many, many years ago an airport link to the Santa Clara train station was considered … and rejected. The city of San Jose and the Diridon Station Area planners are wisely assuming (and planning for) an airport link to Diridon station instead. It’s about the same distance as going around the runways to the Santa Clara station … so it makes no sense to go to lonely Santa Clara station instead of multi-modal Diridon.
The Caltrain-redundant, low ridership, dead-end “pigtail” beyond Diridon to Santa Clara represents about 40% of the unfunded Phase II of SJ BART extension (everything beyond Berryessa) distance. Indefensible and insane not to re-evaluate that portion which might have made a tiny bit more sense in the days when it was planned and HSR and Caltrain’s future (let alone electrification with plans for BART-level service and high-performance, state-of-the-art Swiss EMUs and level boarding) was uncertain.
Park n’ ride is not so important in well-connected & served urban areas such as Diridon will be.
If all they’re after is parking, why not go West to Westfield mall? Build a station and new parking structure there, which would actually be a useful new connection. Design it to eventually continue along Steven’s Creek Blvd all the way to Cupertino, once that city’s council is eventually overthrown.
A great comment on all fronts. Along with all the existing shopping, the area around Santana Row is emerging as a reasonably serious office area, and more is under construction on the old Century parking lot. There would be far more riders to just that station than to a Santa Clara BART station, and the shopping would ensure it wasn’t just weekday commuters.
Stevens Creek Blvd is one of the easiest upzoning opportunities in the entire area, all the way from San Jose to De Anza College. With a serious transit spine, it would be an easy sell.
When Vallco’s replacement turns out to be a big draw, the Cupertino NIMBYs will be unmistakably shown to be out of touch. In any event, they can’t unilaterally block anything outside their little town, and they won’t stay in power forever.