BART Extension
The reason for doing the Warm Springs Extension is the
Fremont station. It is in a horrible location, boxed in by
a hospital and city park, with very poor road access.
The ‘grand compromise’ for going into Santa Clara County
should be to connect with VTA Light Rail at the Milpitas/San Jose
border near the Great Mall (perhaps going one more stop to
Berryessa to give the trains room to turn around). Tunnelling
into downtown San Jose is lunacy, and running parallel to Caltrain,
and not going to the SJ Airport is worse ….

Incidentally, I believe that AC Transit’s farebox recovery on its transbay service is comparable to that of BART even now.

First, his capital cost numbers are not correct. In the last 15 years, the
total investment in the Capitol Corridor line is $297 million, the vast
majority of these funds were to rebuild the line between San Jose and
Sacramento. That’s an average investment of $19.8 million dollars per
year. Those investments have also benefitted the Port of Oakland, as the
freight has grown several fold during that same 15 year period. The
average weekday ridership of 4,000 is correct for the moment , but in the
last 8 years, Capitol Corridor ridership has grown from 463,000 annual
passengers to 1,302,000 annual passengers, each one travelling an average
of 70 miles. The Capitol Corridor now keeps about 100,000,000
vehicle-miles-traveled (VMTs) off of the parallel highways each year.

The annual operating budget (subsidy from the state, if you will) for
operations is about $20.0 million, and this number has been flat for the
past 6 years. In fact, the state operating budget was about $17.5 million
for the 12 train frequency back in 1999. In 2000, we revised the service,
and were able to run 14 trains for the same funding. In 2001, the last
increase in state operating funds, provided $20.0 million to increase the
service to 18 trains. Since then, during the past 6 years, the Capitol
Corridor has self-financed the growth of service, now 32 weekday trains (14
to/from San Jose) and 22 weekend day trains, and not had any increase in state
operating funds. There is no federal money, operating or capital in the state’s intercity rail program. In 1998, the riders paid 29.8% of the cost of the
service. Today the riders pay 50% of the cost of the service, and this is
rising each year.

As for Greyhound, they tried an upscale commuter oriented service from Sacramento,
departing from a plentiful parking lot, and priced it below the Capitol
Corridor fares. This was not a service that existed before the Capitol
Corridor service, and to suggest that the Capitol Corridor put that
Greyhound service out of business is a gross misrepresentation of the
facts. Greyhound started the service new in 2001 or thereabouts. It could
not make money for Greyhound, so they stopped it. Capitol Corridor ridership
changed very little as a result of the demise of the Greyhound service.
The market for the Capitol Corridor is NOT just San Francisco, but also
Sacramento, San Jose, Martinez, Emeryville, and points in between, not even
served by any other intercity bus operation. Frankly, we need all the
travel options for people, and since ridership on the Capitol Corridor
continued to grow regardless of Greyhound’s service, there was never any
competition between the two that I am aware of. Yes, Greyhound solicited
rail riders, but there are only so many amenities and ‘space per passenger’
that a bus can offer versus a train, and riders who travel longer distances
simply have more room and more amenities on the train. It is too bad that
Greyhound withdrew the service because they could not generate the riders
to sustain it, even though that service operated over a publicly built and
maintained highway (free to Greyhound, except for the small contribution of
their fuel tax).

As for the state’s intercity rail program (the Pacific Surfliner route, the
Capitol Corridor route, and the San Joaquin route) they were built and
operated because the voters of California, back in 1990, said they wanted
them, and approved the money specifically to build what we have today. And
what do we have today? We have a travel choice for many people who had no
such choice 15 years ago. We have the second (Pacific Surfliner), third
(Capitol Corridor) and fifth (San Joaquin) busiest Amtrak routes in the
country in California. 20% of ALL Amtrak riders are now in California, and
that number and percentage is growing annually. The three state-supported
intercity routes keep nearly 500,000,000 VMTs off of California’s highway,
maybe making them a bit less congested than they would otherwise be.

California’s intercity rail program came from the people of this state.
These trains (and the connecting buses to the more remote parts of our
state) serve the people of this state. I for one believe that in the
future, a greater and greater share of the longer distance travelers in
this state will ride California’s trains, because we have them, and because our
people have a travel choice besides the highway.

Eugene K. Skoropowski
Managing Director
Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority

- Farebox recovery ratios probably declined everywhere, as transit usage fell off during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

- Commute distances probably rose everywhere, as freeways were built and expanded during those decades.

I don’t think BART hastened either trend. It would be interesting to see whether the original BART impact study discussed commute distances. (I haven’t looked at that document in a long time; where I live now there’s no copy closeby.) Probably no one wanted to say too much about farebox recovery, although I do remember reading an account of the unplanned operating expense items (the in-house security force, for example) that prevented BART from achieving its financial targets.

I still say that BART’s ~50% farebox recovery is excellent in today’s public transit market.

Regarding carpool lanes, the elephant in the closet is fuel economy. A typical transit bus achieves 4 miles per gallon (per Altoona, the national bus testing facility). If we keep 15 people on it from the start of the trip to the end (this translates into a somewhat higher number of boardings), we’ve achieved 60 passenger-miles per gallon. A basic Korean or Japanese subcompact car (not a hybrid) achieves 30 miles per gallon. If we keep 2 people in it, we’ve also achieved 60 passenger-miles per gallon.

This is just to say that if fuel consumption, not congestion, is the concern, an effective carpool program can give a weak transit program a run for its money. Unfortunately, much less has been written about passenger train fuel economy. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory publishes some nationwide averages, but it would be interesting to know the fuel economy figure for a typical Capitol Corridor trainset. From that, we could find out how many passengers we’d need on-board to beat the fuel economy of the import car.

The other bad effect of BART was to increase the distance that one was expected to commute. It really does not matter whether the commuters can ride BART or not. The competitive nature for jobs requires that you travel the same radius to work. So more people are traveling farther to get to work, and most of them are driving.

Before BART, the average commute was probably half the distance that it is now. If you double the average distance of the commute, the network that supports it needs to cover four times the area, so it costs four times as much to provide it. However, at best, it brings in only twice as much money from the people who use it. Also, the chances that you will find a carpool rider at work are only 25% of what they were. So there are four times the single drivers, and they are driving farther.

I would like to remind South Bay Resident that there have been substantial improvements made to the highway route between the Bay Area and Sacramento. The costs of widening I-80 over the years, plus replacing bridges, probably dwarfs that spent on the Capitol Corridor. While it can be argued that helped other traffic, so did the upgrades of the rail route.

As for Greyhound, since they are a private operator, they face greater constraints on how much service they can run due to the need to make a profit. Had their service been subsidized or a comparable state run service been created, it could have done a better job much more cheaply. The Baylink buses were a great example of this (when they were running, I lived in Davis and used both Baylink and the Capitols). It’s a shame that the Capitol corridor sucked up all that capital**.

*Actually, I think that the initial BART system was a pretty good investment, however, the extensions have been costly boondoggles

** yes, I know that much of the capital spending was authorized by bond issues and limited to rail, but that doesn’t make it good policy.

By U.S. and California standards, BART and the Capitol Corridor achieve high farebox recovery ratios. BART’s farebox recovery ratio has hovered around 50% for many years (this is systemwide; I am not going to debate the merits of specific BART extensions in this comment). The Capitol Corridor broke 45% last year. These are better-than-average places to invest transit capital and operating dollars. The Capitol Corridor has been particularly sharp with marketing, feeder bus partnerships, and schedule tuning. Gene Skoropowski, David Kutrosky and their team are doing a good job.

South Bay Resident’s criticisms of the Capitol Corridor do not seem fair. I think some legitimate gripes would be that the operating contract is not subject to competitive bidding and that the State of California does not have an ownership interest in a rail line that it has paid to upgrade. (The State does of course own the passenger rolling stock, which represents a significant portion of the State’s investment in the Capitol Corridor.)

Greyhound was never as frequent or as comfortable; it is also not fully accessible to people with disabilities (this prompted an amendment to S.B. 804 for my county, Santa Cruz, which is one of the Capitol Corridor’s feeder bus counties).

The only worthwhile competitor I’ve seen in the ten or so years that I’ve been traveling between the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento was an experimental ferry-to-bus connection. Baylink took advantage of unused capacity on its high-speed ferry from San Francisco to Vallejo (1 hour) by adding luxury coach service from Vallejo to Sacramento (under 2 hours). Thanks to sharp marketing and a pretty frequent schedule, fares were covering the marginal cost of the coach service by the end. The project fell victim to a general shortage of capital within Baylink/Vallejo Transit/City of Vallejo.

BART to Warm Springs is a pretty hard project to justify. $700 million for 7,000 daily riders (according to BART’s usually wildly over optimistic estimates)? That can’t be the best use of 3/4 of a billion dolars. To be justifiable, a project that attracts that kind of ridership should be a factor of 10 or so less expensive.

As for the Capitol Corridor, when I hear mention of that misbegotten rail line, I can only hear a great flushing sound – the sound of cuibc yards of cash being flushed down the metaphorical toilet. To date, CCJPA has spent over 1 Billion dollars on capital improvements the Amtrak Capitols. This is in addition to around $30 million per year in subsidies. They carry under 4000 people per day, many of whom switched from Greyhound’s formerly profitable service along the same corridor. It is spending like this that is keeping us stuck in traffic. Why, oh, why can’t we start rationally evaluating transit projects and funding them accordingly?

It is difficult to make rail projects pencil out in most of the bay area, yet we continue to fund them neglecting many more cost effective alternatives, including better bus service (especially express bus service, which can offer faster trip times than BART at a fraction of the cost), subsidized vanpools and road improvements.

But, what’s really needed basically is an upgrade and expansion to the current Amtrak Capitol corridor trains that operated between San Jose and Oakland and points north.

Adding frequency, improving track speed and building more stations (i.e., Newark, Agnew , etc.) and you could have a first class service every bit as good as Caltrain.

So you ask yourself, what isn’t this happening? It’s simple, there are many transit “advocacy” groups that support conventional rail in the corridor, but all too often unwilling to work together. They have different agendas that are more focused on either opposing BART, or promoting their own idea’s that they are afraid to join with any other group.

The goal seem all to often not to be better transit for the public it seem to be “what’s good for me or the group I represent”

So the advantage will always be to the BART supporters who are united.

Richard Silver, Executive Director
Rail Passenger Association of California