In 2008, Santa Clara County voters approved a sales tax increase to build a BART line to San Jose. But cost overruns have forced the county’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to go back to the voters for yet another tax increase. To make it more attractive, it says only a quarter of the tax increase will go to BART while the rest will be used for highways, bikeways, and some transit projects.
As described in the San Jose Mercury-News, the list of projects looks balanced: $1.5 billion for BART, $1.2 billion for street repairs, $1.85 billion for highways, $1.0 billion for CalTrains, $500 million for “transit for vulnerable and underserved populations,” and $250 million for pedestrian and bikeway improvements. A closer look at the measure, however, reveals that it is anything but balanced.
The $1.2 billion for “street repairs” is actually going to go for “complete streets” programs, which means taking away street capacity from cars and giving it to transit, bikes, and pedestrians. A significant chunk of the $1.85 billion for highways will actually go to constructing bus-rapid transit lanes, and some may even go for a new light-rail line. Motor vehicle users will be lucky to see any projects that actually relieve traffic congestion.
This problem goes back to 1995, when Santa Clara County designated VTA not only the region’s transit operator but its “congestion management agency,” with authority to decide how to spend transportation dollars to best relieve traffic congestion. This created a clear conflict of interest for the agency: on one hand, it was supposed to do a fair and balanced analyses seeking the most cost-effective tools for relieving congestion. On the other hand, it was primarily a transit agency and was always hungry for more money.
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As the Antiplanner has described elsewhere, in 1984, Santa Clara County voters agreed to increase sales taxes to build new highways. The result was a genuine reduction in traffic congestion over the following decade despite a booming economy. But, after VTA was designated the region’s congestion management agency, it decided to use all of that money to build light-rail lines instead of roads. Not surprisingly, congestion increased again.
In a posting on a Silicon Valley transit user’s Yahoo group, one transit advocate who took a superficial look at VTA’s proposed tax measure wrote that most of the money was going for a mode of travel “that dominates our culture but is unable to keep up with demand.” What a warped view! Ignore the fact that highways can’t keep up with demand because VTA stole all the highway money; the writer is essentially saying it is better to spend transportation dollars on modes that people don’t use rather than on modes that people do use. “Clearly more biking, walking, and transit is needed,” he says. But in the real world, the money should be spent where it will do the most good, not where it will enrich rail transit contractors.
In contrast, a group called the BayRail Alliance, which has a history of being skeptical of the BART to San Jose project, is urging voters to reject VTA’s latest tax increase not because too much money would be spent on highways but because “VTA has failed to keep its promises” that it made for past ballot measures. Instead of expanding service with the money voters approved, “transit service declined 13% and ridership declied 23%.”
The real problem is rail transit’s insatiable demand for money, which forced VTA to cannibalize its bus system. In addition to the sales tax for BART, VTA enjoys a 1/2-cent sales tax voters approved in 2000 for light rail. Yet a relatively insignificant number of San Jose urban area commuters take rail transit to work: about 15,000 out of a total of 858,000 workers in the region, or less than 1.8 percent, according to the 2014 American Community Survey. As in so many other places that have built rail transit, San Jose has spent a lot of money and has little to show for it.
The Antiplanner’s best message is how these “alternative modes of transportation” do not relieve congestion, but rather make it worst. That lie is what gets most of the public to vote against their own interest, somehow believing that millions of their neighbors want to cycle to work but don’t because of the lack of a bike lane.
Why should SCC vote to increase sales taxes YET AGAIN? VTA wants to gut its bus service under its “network 90? plan at the same time that they’re asking voters to approve yet another bump in the sales tax. Santa Clara County residents are already paying three sales taxes to VTA, a permanent 1/2 cent that was approved in 1976, plus the more recent Measures A and B, whose revenues are mostly going down the BART sinkhole. Plus, we’re paying a Vehicle Registration Fee to pay for road repairs on top of that. Yet this is not enough, they want more tax money to flush down the BART toilet while eliminating local routes.
VTA is asking the voters for a fourth sales tax increase yet they refuse to “value engineer” their expensive projects. There is no reason that the BART extension needs to duplicate existing bus and train service between the San Jose and Santa Clara stations. And the proposed Bus Rapid Transit on El Camino could be constructed at lower cost by eliminating the dedicated center lanes and converting the curbside lanes to HOV use during peak hours.
Money saved from cutting the “gold plating” from big capital projects could be spent on supporting the bus system, including saving routes threatened for closure under “Network 90?. Until VTA learns to use its existing resources more efficiently, vote NO on more taxes.
This tax is being pushed by Carl Guardino and the grossly misnamed “Silicon Valley Leadership Group,” whose rich corporate members stand to benefit most from the hugely expensive BART extension. Rather than increasing sales A FOURTH TIME, maybe these rich companies need to step up and pay higher corporate tax.