San Jose Discovers Light Rail Is Not Resilient

As of this writing, light-rail service in San Jose remains cancelled more than 24 hours after the mass shooting that left 10 people dead. This was a terrible event, and I join Governor Gavin Newsom in wondering “what the hell is going on in the United States?” Beyond that, I don’t feel qualified to write about gun control, mental illness, or other factors that may have played a role in this tragedy.

However, it does point out one more problem with light rail or any rail transit: such systems require central control that can easily be disrupted by accidents, terrorists, or other criminals. Buses, which the Valley Transportation Authority is using in place of light rail in the aftermath of the shooting, don’t need such central control and are less vulnerable to natural or human-caused disasters.

Light rail has been a thorn in the side of Silicon Valley transportation since the 1980s. San Jose’s bus-only system carried 38.5 million trips in 1984, or 29 trips per resident of the San Jose urbanized area, also known as Silicon Valley.

Then the Santa Clara County Transit District, predecessor to the current Valley Transportation Authority, began building light rail. To help pay for it, the agency cut bus service. Ridership dropped to less than 26 trips per capita.

The first light-rail line opened in late 1987 (which was fiscal 1988), and initially it seemed to be a success, with per capita ridership rising to nearly 35 trips in 1991. However, most of the increase was due to a restoration of bus service, while San Jose’s light-rail trains ran nearly empty, carrying an average of just 15 people (i.e., 15 passenger-miles per vehicle-revenue mile) per 65-seat car in 1991.

Meanwhile, Santa Clara county voters had agreed to a sales tax increase to pay for construction of new freeways. The addition of new roads actually led to a reduction in the region’s congestion. However, in 1995, Santa Clara County gave the newly renamed VTA the authority to manage congestion-relief funds for the county. Over the next few years, VTA shifted funds that voters had originally intended be spent on new roads to the construction of new light-rail lines instead. The result was a boom in light-rail construction while traffic congestion again increased.

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Bus service declined by nearly 20 percent, light-rail service by more than 20 percent, while ridership dropped by more than 30 percent. In the aftermath of the dot-com crash, VTA’s board of directors paid an outside consultant $500,000 to tell it that the light-rail lines it had built were “political solutions” to benefit certain neighborhoods “at the expense of regional congestion management.”

Completely ignoring this report, VTA then decided to pay for the construction of a BART line from Fremont, south of Oakland, to downtown San Jose. This proved that rail construction, not transportation, has become VTA’s raison d’etre.

VTA never really recovered after the dot-com crash. In 2019, total bus and light-rail ridership was less than bus ridership had been before the first light-rail line opened. Bus-and-rail trips per capita fell below 20 and light rail occupancies fell below 14 passengers per car. VTA has spent roughly $3 billion, in today’s dollars, building light rail, and has nothing to show for it except nearly empty railcars clogging up Silicon Valley streets and a large maintenance and control facility where Wednesday’s shooting took place.

Light rail was an obsolete form of travel even before the name was coined as a modern-sounding alternative to streetcars. Since 1927, buses have been able to move more people per hour to more destinations for a lot less money than light rail. Silicon Valley is particularly unsuited to any form of rail transit, as jobs are scattered all over the region. The fact that companies such as Apple and Google have hired their own bus systems to bring their employees to work is a testament to VTA’s complete and utter failure.

Now, the events this week show that light rail lacks resiliency as well. Unfortunately, the transit industry is unable to learn from its mistakes, so no doubt we will see more proposals for light rail in other cities as long as the federal government is willing to fund it.