No Light Rail in Vancouver!

San Jose BART Will Not Relieve Congestion

May 29

2007

In preparation for my lecture in San Jose last week, I took a look at the environmental impact report for the proposed BART extension to San Jose. Even though rail advocates are telling people BART will take two freeway lanes’ worth of people off the roads, I was not surprised to find that, in fact, BART will do absolutely nothing to relieve peak-hour congestion.

Chapter 4.2 of the environmental impact report compares peak-hour traffic in 2030 with and without BART on all major freeways in the region. Without BART, these freeways are expected to carry an average of nearly 10,000 cars per hour. If BART is built, the report projects that it will take an average of 59 cars per hour off the freeways.

That’s right, just 59 cars, or less than two-thirds of a percent. To be precise, the report found that BART would increase traffic by an average of about 1.3 percent (119 cars per hour) on about 40 percent of the freeway segments studied, and reduce traffic by an average of about 2.0 percent (176 cars) on the other 60 percent. On one segment, planners estimated that BART would reduce traffic by a whopping 7 percent, but most were much less.

Even a 7 percent reduction is not enough to relieve congestion. The report projected freeway speeds on each of 96 different freeway segments with and without BART. In every single case, the speed with BART was exactly the same — not a single mile per hour more — as without BART.

So why does anyone want to build BART? As with the streetcar mania that is being spread by former Portland city commissioner Charles Hales, the real goal for BART seems to be economic development. San Jose is already rezoning planned BART stations for much higher densities — as much as 100,000 people per square mile (by comparison, Manhattan is only about 60,000 people per square mile). The city doesn’t seem to have considered whether anyone would want to live at such densities in a state that is nearly 95 percent rural open space.

In any case, anyone who says that building a BART line to San Jose will reduce peak-hour congestion is lying. Until last week, few people knew that because hardly anyone seems to have actually read the environmental impact report. I hope my visit will begin to change that.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner