It turns out that the Antiplanner is not the only transit observer who thinks that San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority is the nation’s worst-managed transit agency. Tom Rubin, an accountant who has audited many transit agencies and seen them from the inside out, agrees.
In a PowerPoint show (17MB, or try this 2.5MB PDF) given to the Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose last weekend, Rubin shows that VTA ranks among the bottom two or three transit operators by such performance criteria as farebox recovery (the percentae of costs paid by fares), average passenger loads, subsidy per rider, and subsidy per vehicle mile.
