Accurate (Maybe) BART Price in the Merc at Last

San Jose's Mayor Reed and Councilman Liccardo have written a column in the Merc in support of BART. They make the usual arguments for BART and only BART as a solution to San Jose's transit problems, and trot out some familiar suspect figures--that the extension will have almost as many daily passengers as BART's transbay tube, and will have 71% farebox recovery.

But at least in discussing the cost of the project, they mention a realistic pricetag--$6 billion, the figure predicted by the FTA--if only to refute claims that it will be even more. Perhaps now the Merc will stop repeating the $4-billion-ish figure it's been cutting and pasting into BART articles for the last seven years, which is proving to be a foolishly lowball estimate.

For more factually-based analysis of BART-to-SJ, I recommend reading some of the articles in the right margin of vtawatch.blogspot.com.

Here's a snarky little Missive I fired off to the Merc this morning.

I recently visited Switzerland. The Swiss take great pride in their railways, and indeed, they are fast, convenient, and 100% electric. But the poor Swiss are clearly deluding themselves, because they don't have BART. And as San Jose Mayors, self-appointed civic leaders, and the Mercury News have often told us--no train but a BART train is worth riding!