Battle Brewing over BART Extension to Livermore
Clash reflects deep disagreement about whether funds should be used for expansion or maintenance
John McPartland, the new president of the transit agency’s elected board of directors, has made it his mission to extend BART to this East Bay suburb of 80,000, which is home to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
“That was the condition of employment very clearly stated by my constituents, that ‘if you don’t get BART to Livermore, we’re certainly not going to vote for you,’” McPartland said. “I’ve committed myself to that.”
McPartland, a military man who drives a pickup truck and lives in suburban Castro Valley, has ambitions that clash directly with those of Tom Radulovich, the board’s vice president. Radulovich runs Livable City, a nonprofit group that advocates for public transit and pedestrians. He lives in San Francisco’s lively Mission district, and his only vehicle is a bicycle.
“It’s just not the best use of a billion and a half dollars, especially with our capital needs,” said Radulovich. “Some of it’ll end up coming out of funds that otherwise would have gone to the maintenance and rehab, system capacity, seismic safety and car replacement.”
Proponents put the cost of the proposed extension at $1.2 billion. It is more than a rift between the suburban mouse and the city mouse. It is a fundamental disagreement over how scarce funds for public transit should be spent: expanding the 104-mile BART system or maintaining what already exists. The transit agency needs $7 billion over the next 25 years for track maintenance, station upgrades and a fleet of new train cars, BART officials say.
“That’s an internal struggle that we’re just going to have to deal with,” said McPartland. “I’m hoping that we’ll both be able to get what we need in the long run.”
Injecting a sense of urgency into the debate is a plan by Alameda County officials to put a sales tax proposal on the ballot in November that would raise $7.7 billion for county transportation projects over the next 30 years. A total of $400 million is slated for the Livermore extension in a draft of how the money would be spent, that the Alameda County Transportation Commission could complete on Jan. 26.
If voters approve the 1 percent sales tax, that could effectively force BART into building the extension, to the dismay of Radulovich and other critics who believe that system will fall into disrepair if more money is spent on what he called boondoggles.
“When you’ve got a house where the roof is failing, you don’t take out your savings and build an addition,” said Jeff Hobson, deputy director for TransForm, a transit advocacy group. “We feel like it’s nutty to go ahead and plan for more multi-billion-dollar extensions.”
But supporters from Livermore say that BART owes them an extension, because they have been paying taxes to support the agency since its inception.
“The citizens feel that they paid for it and it’s only fair that they get it now,” Linda Jeffery Sailors, the former mayor of Dublin, said.
Sailors, who now lives in Livermore, led a successful campaign to alter the extension plan chosen by BART. A study by the agency in 2010 recommended an 11-mile, $3.8 billion extension with a stop in downtown Livermore and another outside town. But the concerns raised by Sailors and other citizens about property acquisition issues and years of construction led Livermore leaders to favor a version of the plan that the study rejected: a 5-mile, $1.2 billion extension with just one stop, on the median of the 580 freeway on the outskirts of town.
Support for that plan has thrown the exact scope and cost of the project into uncertainty.
McPartland said he supported the extension along the freeway and was set to introduce a proposal to finance a new study of the project.
But Radulovich called the freeway station an anachronism from an era when BART catered to commuters driving from the suburbs to catch the train. Downtown stations encourage housing to be built nearby, requiring less car use, he said.
“We have all this logic of prior commitments and it’s predicated on this sprawling pattern of growth,” he said. “That’s not the way the region is growing anymore, so why are we building these extensions as if it were?”
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
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Patrick Mitchell
So, the plan is for a "$1.2 billion extension with just one stop, on the median of the 580 freeway on the outskirts of town." In other words, a location to which people must drive their cars.
So the good people of Livermore have been paying for it all these years and now they deserve it? $1.2 billion divided by a population of 80,000 = $15,000 per person. I highly doubt that they've each man, woman and child has contributed that, so pony up Livermore or drive to Dublin instead - you'll already be in your cars.
Carter Lavin
If BART is going to spend $1.2B on a ~10 mile extension anywhere it should be going from Fremont to Milpitas. It cuts the distance between the end of the BART line and San Jose by half, and it would encourage infill rather than sprawl. The BART is coming to San Jose, the sooner it does that- the better.
tele graph
Livermorians are asking for this way too late. They, like I, enjoyed the suburban living arrangement of cheaply driving (practically for free) to and fro for decades, free of urban "issues."
Now Livermore people plumb out of savings and credit from burning it all into the atmosphere on gasoline and new car leases every few years, want a BART line to be able to compete with me (living in an older inner-ring suburb than theirss AKA Oakland) to work/play in SF and save on gas money, while also attracting potential customers to their shops and real estate. I can't blame them for asking now that they are desperate. But it's a bit late. And their smarter young people will reverse flight back to urban centers ALREADY STRADDLING BART LINES as I have.
Both extension options have pros/cons. (man, it's almost like comparing a toupe to a weave!)
Downtown Livermore BART option: closest to its users. Priciest. But if you do anything at all, you may as well do it right. $4 billion is what 30,000 Livermore commuters pay for $6 gas for 30 years, if they all drive 12,000 miles per year. Right? No, it turns out to be only $2 billion. What did the livermore metropolitan area contribute (haha, tribute) in taxes for BART the previous 40 years? No idea.
Not sure how this will pan out; it smells like unfunded pension liabilities and social security when the ponzi pyramid is revealed. Energy and capital scarcity wasn't built into BART's forward-looking assumptions. Indeed, everyone's. But it's an irrefutable fact and trend of our future. Higher prices every year here on out. We are living our grandparents' lives in reverse: easy in the beginning, hard in the end.
The downtown option pans out without excessive tax contributions from outside of livermore if my calculations are correct below. These are all MEDIAN (not average) assumed values over the 30 year period 2012-2042:
Median Livermore metro commuters: 30,000 (assumes pop growth)
Median miles per year driven: 10,000 (assumes fewer miles)
Median MPG: 26 (assumes slightly higher fleet average + motorbikes)
Median gas price 2012-2042: $8.50/gal (depletion + inflation)
Median Gas money per year for the LM metro: $102,000,000.00
Lifetime to amortize bart extension capex: 30
Extension lifetime gas money avoided: $2,942,307,692.31
Changing any of the above values in my simpleton model can alter the avoided gas cost wildly. It also does not take into consideration future revenue for the LM metro from a downtown core economic boost. I don't think gas prices will get so high; there will just be shortages. Or maybe they will go that "high." (What many in Europe currently pay.)
580 Freeway extension version:
$2 billion (cost understatements and overruns in construction and politics are "legendary")
$600 million (streetcar from downtown to freeway bart station)
Definitely cheaper... somewhat. Haha!
What we're all doing is playing SimCity. But Director Radulavich is right: BART needs to take care of its core system which is super duper falling apart. Maintenance is less sexy than new construction, but far more needed!!! (Just imagine if BART had used standard guage rail, that alone would save them cost on buying a new fleet of custom sized train cars. Or maybe this is unfair and there are worse BART engineering abuses such as using third rail instead of overhead lines)
Guess who else expended more effort building ever larger new things than maintaining what they had? Easter Islanders. They should have taken care of whatever core problem they had instead of building more of the status SUVs and McMansions of their day (moai statues). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island#Moai_.28statues.29 Don't get me started on Rome.
Livermore didn't want BART for 30+ years. Sorry mate. You guys are a farm town anyway, so why not embrace it? You'll have the food when cities go hungry. Seems not a bad trade-off. You can't have it all, whatever your new politician says...
I'm not against Livermore having BART. I'm for it. But Livermore getting BART is like a homeless guy obtaining a new $100 cowboy hat from the Hat Guys. If there's a brand new hat for Mr. BART, while all of Mr. BART's other clothes and shoes have fallen off and rotted away and he stinks to high heaven, what's the point? Cheaper to get a bath and go thrifting... the transpo version being to start up a local jitney service complete with tuk-tuk feeders...
Tom Ontis
The Dublin station, which serves Livermore is a nightmare. Some good industrial engineering did not set it up right. From the outer parking lots, it seems it is about a quarter mile walk to the trains. I was using it a couple of years ago when I was on crutches and even though I was using the 'Park-N-Ride from Livermore, I was deposited way away from the trains. Returning in the late afternoon, I was deposited a ways away from the bus back to my car. The employees were not helpful either: The bus driver (AC) nearly pulled away as was hobbling towards her.
Patrick Mitchell
While I realize you were on crutches and you may have extenuating circumstances, BART is public transportation. If people want to be able to ride a powered vehicle from 10 feet from their home to 10 feet from their destination that's what cars are for.
Bernard Thomas
While I live in San Francisco, I think Tom Radulovich needs to understand that the long term future of BART may depend on the breadth and depth of its support throughout the Bay Area, and the more people who are served by and depend on it, the wider and deeper that support will be. There's also the question of how much of the money for various purposes will have to come from local sources. The federal and state governments support new transit construction. Do they support maintenance to the same degree (I don't think so)? So how much of the cost of building an extension to Dublin will we locals really have to pay and how much if we do $1.2 billion worth of maintenance and replacement?
MotherLodeBeth
People in Livermore and the surrounding areas of Alameda County have been paying taxes for BART for over thirty years, and its about time they get a BART stop. We have driven to Dublin from Tracy and now Jackson CA to take BART and there are never any parking spots available, and no area to expand the parking areas.
So instead of taking BART people clog the highways, which creates more pollution. So its not just folks in Livermore who would be using the BART station but tens of thousands of folks from the central valley, who can car pool to Livermore, park and take BART to work through out the San Francisco bay area.
David D.
BART to Livermore would be an astounding waste of money. The revised plan, as it currently stands, does NOTHING to take people out of their cars. Why bother spending $1.2 billion (likely $2+ billion when all is said and done) to create an expensive park-and-ride lot?
Just because Livermore has been "paying" into BART doesn't mean it deserves anything out of it. BART has no plans to extend service to Brentwood, San Ramon, etc. Have these communities paid into BART? yes. Do these communities deserve BART? No. They have not made appropriate land use decisions for decades and don't deserve the sympathies of anybody in the Bay Area.
If there is any community that deserves BART, it's Albany. They've had BART running through town since the beginning, but there is no station there. Let's have an infill station at Solano Avenue before we even consider expensive, wasteful extensions into suburbs that love the car and hate public transit.
Jerry Day
MotherLodeBeth is correct: focusing on the population of Livermore misses the point. Thousands of people who live east of the Altamont Pass work in the Bay Area. The quite-large parking lots in Pleasanton fill up completely each day, causing many to make the full trek in their cars. The demand is there, and if the concern is getting people out of their cars in the Bay Area then you want those commuters to drop them in Livermore.